The Cemetery

When I first started this web site I had no real idea what I was doing. To be honest, I started this site cause "everybody else had a web site". I didn't even have a computer at the time.

But I knew from day one that I was going to have an area I called "The Cemetery". I had no clue what I was going to do with it, but dammit I had to have one. My original plan was to write myself out to be the the Grim Reaper and lead you through some miriad of disturbing images of skulls, bones and gravestones proving nothing more than that I have a death fetish. Kinda like the way I originally set up the Dungeon exept I didn't plan to gross you out here.

So what am I going to do here?

Well, this will be the first of a "Bare Bones" style of presentations (excuse the pun). I'm not prtending to be anyone else. Here's a glimpse of my real life and things that influence me.

Death influences me.

I wouldn't even have wanted to put a cemetery in Dasaga if it didn't. I remember being in sixth grade and basing my opinion on weather or not a movie was good by how many people died in it. If nobody died, it was "for babies". We had yet to discover the wonders of pornography.

I remember having contests to see who could draw the most violent dude. Our influences at the time were Bruce Lee, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Chuck Norris, Freedy Krueger, Mike Myers, Jason Vorhees or whoever showed off the most testosterone at the time (although we had no idea what testosterone was then, but since when does not understanding something stop a sixth grader's judgement of what's cool?). I'm sure that, although I care nothing for DragonBall Z now, we would have been all over that if it had been around in 1985.

The rules of our contest were simple: Draw the biggest, meanest ugliest guy with the biggest, nastiest guns, knives, muscles or whatever and try to out ugly, out nasty, out big, out bad, out gun, out knife, and out muscle the other one. Being a better artist really had little to do with our opinion of the picture.

Looking back on it, the message I see from all that is "We only see power as the ability to kill. The ability to bring death is the only power worth reckoning with. This character I made can kick you character's ass, therefore I can kick your ass!"

Why we never just threw down our pencils and just beat each others asses I will never know. Oh...yeah!...We were chicken shit.

(I have no idea where that statement came from, but it's not entirly true.)

As you get older, your tastes become more refined. And your respect and understanding of death mature. Death isn't something that's only done to other people in a display of power. It's not your tool, like the guns and knives. It comes from just living. I think that my world became more real to me (although not completly real) when, in 1988, I had this sudden realization of my own mortality.

To this day I don't know what triggered it. I had just flunked out of 8th grade. I was working as a stock boy at a local convenient store. That particular night I had reunited with an old friend I hadn't seen since third grade. It hit me when I got home, not just my mortality but the mortality of everyone...my mom, my dad, what few friends I had...everyone.

I now know that I have an obsession problem. My brain pics up on certain subjects and won't let them go for weeks, even months. It's like getting a song stuck in your head, but certain scenes from movies, certain parts of songs, particular features of somebody's face I get stuck on. It's just odd, The motality kick only lasted for about a month, but it along with my decision to quit school bought me a trip to the nuthouse anyway.