You've seen Mystery Science Theater? That was us, not seated by anyone, making jokes about most every scene. I've not laughed so hard at a movie in ages (and it's not a comedy). When the werewolves appeared in wolf form, their lips moving and talking in English, I couldn't help but mimic Duke (probably a bit too loud) from the Bush Baked Beans commercial "roll that beautiful bean footage".
And it went downhill from there.
I am not sure what was more silly, vampires with abs, or werewolves with pecs (all of whom Chuck Norris's Mom could take). Also, if your clothes are destroyed when you instantly transform into a wolf, how is it you are still in your pants and T-shirt when you reappear as human? (I asked a similar question about pants and the Incredible Hulk to my Mom and she just said "they, uh, they were stretchy) It was easy to tell the vampires and werewolves apart. The vampires were all overly groomed metrosexuals and society women with occassional upper crust voice inflections living in giant glassed houses (you know, since vampires like sunlight so much). The werewolves were of Native Indian descent, living in extremely modest homes of the working class.
There were quite a few tears in the audience as the epic love story (snort) played out across the screen. We had tears on our faces as well, but from laughing so hard. We found it humorous, not just due to bored looking stars who had the range of emotion of an Irish Setter, the storyline that moved in knots and the bad dialogue, but the whole romantic concept of life and death that is so unlike reality as to forever skew in some 13 year old's mind what they will expect from love and life among mere mortals.
At the base of one tree, was the trunk of another, felled during a storm, where I could stop to sit and think. I've spent more than one day or night out on the ground. As kids we'd sleep in the yard on starry nights, dragging out the little pup tent and setting it up under the canopy of the apple tree. We'd lie on our backs in our sleeping bags, tracking satellites through the air and speculating on the nature of the heavens and why the plain Hershey bar was just better than the one with nuts in it. We were kids, and there were no worries, about elections or taxes or bears or the future. We'd wake, ground cold and soggy with dew, and hike back those 10 yards to the house, bleary eyed from lack of sleep yet energized with the joy of believing that we would live forever.
But we grow up, and our concept of what is lasting changes forever, I think, my shadow small against the mighty form of the tree. There is comfort in my smallness, for I am stricken by the thought of the tremendous history of this tree, mighty roots as old as this land, knitting themselves to the earth, embracing the soil with firm resolution not to be parted from it without great force.I'm not the first person to pass here, in the ruins of an old farmhouse, the remains of a chimney, choked by plants that search out implicit ghosts. People were born here, people likely died here, only a chimney remaining, no house to warm.
Then, a few yards away from the farm house, the bones of a small animal, a raccoon it looked like. How long had it lay here? Long enough for the bones to bleach to soft white, the flesh now part of the earth, the eyes, silent spheres of history. The shape was benign as if the creature simply stopped quietly and ceased to breathe, unlike other bones one finds in the wild, the animals of the tar pits, trapped in the primordial ooze in the posture of shock. Other animals dropped while running, the bones scattered by predators til the remaining pieces are simply laid out in a question mark.
It only takes a few days for an animal to decompose during the summer months, likely when this creature took its last breath. Only a few days to return to bone, to the simplest components of life, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur. Only bones left, pressing into the soft welcoming earth, the soil a rich bed of late summer.Sometimes all I find are bones, laid bare to the elements, or burned clean. With the right temperature all things will burn, yet bone itself stubbornly resists all but the hottest of fires. Even when all the carbon is burned from it, bone will still retain it's shape. An insubstantial ghost of itself, it crumbles easily, the last bastion of the person's being transformed into ash. Yet in that ash remain large pieces, calcined and with the consistency of pumice, yet when held in the hand, almost seeming to posses a trace of warmth from within their core.
Life is not some paranormal landscape where the men are mysterious, live forever and would rather watch you sleep than watch sports or Mythbusters. Real women aren't physically perfect and the ones to admire don't give up their life and their self to be with a guy just because he's "hot". That's a premise for an insecure person's fantasy. We're born, we die. In between we live and we'll love as hard as we can, until the day comes when our bones, as well, become part of the rough skin of the planet, as time settles into itself, as we're remembered like the smell of woodsmoke, sprinkling ash upon the cradle in which we will all sleep.As a young woman, I read books that would be considered fantasy when compared to my life, but the heroes were the explorers of space and time and science was the only poetry, forming order out of chaos. It was a world I could only dream of at that age, but it was a world I could actually witness and one in which I would spend my life to pursue.
I pick up one of the bones from the ground , and my mind goes into it's usual thought process. For even if they have no voice, sometimes what they say proffers a clue. Who was this divined creature? In what manner of violence was their end? It's a world few wish to visit, yet it drives me, the mystery, the puzzle, perhaps because I realize that the final mystery is ourselves.
The use of physical evidence to build a theoretical model of crime or accident involves a number of sciences, the chemistry of death, and the engineering of the body. Out of habit, I stop and survey the scene, making mental notes in my head. How long had it been laying here? Bones, especially ones that have burned, do not give up a time of death. For that you need to trace the extent of decomposition in volatile fatty acids, in muscle proteins and amino acids, all which are normally destroyed in a hot fire. Even today my brain sifts through ideas, time lines and theory based on simple white bone. I pry a bone from the soil, the blade's cold, sharp whisper drawing out that which may be hidden but is not afraid to speak.For it can tell me a story.
I do not live in some romantic fantasy of mortality, for I walk among the dead, treading carefully on the small broken artifacts of life, part pathology, part engineering, going beyond either. For after the mechanics of motion have stopped, after human physiology has broken down, and what once was animated life, a heart that loved, a soul that dreamed, is reduced to flesh or ash, decay or dried bone, the dead will still bear witness. As sanguine angels in cold marble muse, so will I, long after that which is of the earth is returned to it.
The bones tell me no stories today that I do not know, branches above moving above like a priests hands over the cup, moving with that defining gesture of nature's absolution. What's formed of earth returns to it, amidst the dying brass, lying softly vanquished, there in the juncture of faith and death.Leaning against the trees, drops of rain splashing off mighty stone and wood, the secret whisper of wind invisible to me and silent. Truly, would most of us wish to live on this earth immortal? Would we find the beauty in anything if we lived forever? Would the gems of thoughts and feelings and desire be so precious if we knew they would always be upon our shelf? Or would they fall to the earth, trickling through our hands like water, evaporating on the cold ground, because we thought our hold on them was eternal.
So I'll pass on the whole paranormal romance think, preferring to hold onto that which may not be immortal, but which is so real and so rare, to be held close and savored in the time that remains.
