I Heart Fear
I took Rosie to a haunted House in Taylor tonight. The Scream Machine. We both were really hoping for a good scare.
We started off walking into a pitch dark room with the door slammed behind us. Rosie squeezing my one hand for dear life I felt along the wall for the way out with the other. I was systematic, rational, not this wall, not this corner, was that a footstep? there’s probably someone in here, they’re going to scare us, okay, not this wall, not this corner, and then my searching hand palmed a cheek. Holy shit! And the room started pitching and yawing and banging. A light went on and there was a dead girl standing in the corner. The light went out. The light came on and she was inches from Rosie’s face. The light went out and came back on and she was inches from mine. The light went out and she was in another corner. Creepy good.
It was quality scary but I was still in control. We walked the labyrinth, black lights, a vortex tunnel (like a cement mixer you walk through, lit black, painted walls, and a bridge in the middle for you to walk on — totally disorienting, makes you want to lean off in the direction of the spin), and creepy guys popped out and screamed at us, but you quickly adapt to that. Then 3/4 through, a grisly room with bloody walls and body parts everywhere, and the strobe light started and two scary things started chasing us and the walls started bending (strobe light) and we couldn’t find the way out then, THEN! my brain started coming loose a little.
That there is my second favorite feeling in the world, when my senses start to fail, when I can’t trust what I’m seeing or feeling, when I know I’m safe but I’m not at all sure what is real, when my environment becomes so startlingly disorientingly confusing that it is all I can do to shuffle slowly forward my eyes peeled a mile wide my hands outstretched waiting for whatever it is next to happen to me. That is total receptivity, that is wideopenness, that is god on the edge right there in a converted retail space in a sad forgotten strip mall next to the Gibraltar Trade Center on Eureka rd. in Taylor, MI. for $15 admission per person.
Short lived as a walk through a haunted house may be, it is probably way better for your brain than LSD. And way legaler.