Gratitude Journal #3
From A Cracked Rearview Mirror
Gratitude to the masters of horror
This week pays tribute to the writers who influenced my palate for thrillers and supernatural.
Growing up in Southeast Asia, the concept of otherworldliness is nothing unusual. What was unusual with my upbringing was perhaps having a grandmother who had a gift for the ethereal, mythical and abstruse. It is a blessing and an honor to have such incredible lineage that consists of healers and spiritually gifted. We would all have been burned at the stake back in Salem in colonial Massachusetts. Then again, you’d be burned back then even for having birthmarks and moles.
“Delilah” was based on actual events that occurred a few doors down my dorm room. Using the stylistics of French author Guy de Maupassant, I wanted to try a different way of storytelling using textual reductionism and testing out psychological horror. Written line by line like in stanzas, Delilah leaves you with many questions and unease than when you started. What is real? What is imagined? What happened? What is the deal with Delilah?
The Jeffrey Dahmer story became an inspiration for my piece “From The Interrogation Room”. It’s not just based on the Netflix 2022 drama release. It goes deeper into the analysis of serial killers as individuals with mental diseases. Again, my intention is to make readers ask more questions as they make their way to the other side of the story. I also want to inject the pain, guilt and sins of society as a whole. Much like the failure of traditional prisons to reform criminals, people like Dahmer are also a failure of our social and legal systems including parental neglect, immaturity and insensitivity.
“I ain’t never crossed a man that didn’t deserve it
Me be treated like a punk, you know that’s unheard of
You better watch how you’re talkin’, and where you’re walkin’
Or you and your homies might be lined in chalk”
-Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio
From The Interrogation Room
Stories about the monster within us, and the monsters we create
medium.com
“Things that go bump in the night” is another piece based on true personal accounts. A composite of events that after I pen to paper, realized I’ve been surrounded by incredible paranormal encounters I should address them more in future stories. Often, we discount certain memories thinking they’re silly, a sliver of a story, a dot on a piece of paper. We don’t realize its potential to be a Broadway musical of its own.
For those who continue to read my work, I thank you. As for Medium tanking the stats, I’m not sure what’s going on and neither do I want to give two fucks about it. You guys do your thing.
There are horrors far greater out there than statistical deviation such as shitty content. I practically have to play Moses and part the red sea of reads every day, percolate, sift and comb through like teasing fleas from the back of a monkey to find substantial articles to read.
My top recommendation this week are from UX Collection and Stanford d.school
Quality reading isn’t easy but its lifelong gain is worth every morsel of its endeavor. I wrote about this in “The Resistant Reader” as how it is taught and can be applied.
They say your friends influences your future. Same with the writers you read. I grew up hardly reading anything about romance but was shaped by the romantic flairs embedded in the grooves of narratives by Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Shelley. Supporting these writers presented a foot in the works by people like Anton LaVey, Alejo Carpentier, Leo Tolstoy, Janet Frame, Chinua Achebe and Rainer Maria Rilke.
If there is one reason why I cannot afford the patience for mainstream trends like TikTok and Instagram is because there is hardly enough time to bury oneself in the works of such prodigious thought-shapers.
I truly believe the way to combat the dumbing down of intellectual thought and language brought upon by the temerity of social media is to revisit the classics and to suspend oneself in these work - and to stay there for as long as we can.
I end this week’s gratitude journal entry with a tribute to Coolio who sadly passed yesterday. Coolio finally got the answer to his verse in “Gangsta’s Paradise”.
“Death ain’t nothin’ but a heartbeat away
I’m livin’ life, do or die, what can I say
I’m 23 now, but will I live to see 24?
The way things is going, I don’t know”
Rest in Peace.
Salud and Namaste.
