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10/6/16

Free Write

I have a phobia of clowns.  This fear comes from a number of different sources, one being the movie “It,” one being a terrifying experience I had when I was a child, one being the recent exposure of people dressed up in terrifying clown costumes with the intention of scaring people.

I used to watch the movie “It” all the time as a child, in my parents’ bedroom.  The second television in the house that I grew up in was in their room.  My parents’ bedroom was fairly small; it consisted of a queen/king sized bed, a dresser with a mirror in front of the bed, and a dresser without a mirror to the right of the bed, and a television on a small stand to the other side of the bed.  There was a television channel, I think it was “The U,” or channel fifty, that used to play terrifying both “It” and “It 2” back to back, fairly often.  The first “It,” if I remember correctly, revolves around the experiences a group of friends of a small town, when they were young, and “It 2” has a plot where the friends find the source of the terror and destroy it.  I remember being amazed/enraptured/intrigued by the tone of the movie; it was the type where I could completely lose myself in it, lying on my parents’ bed, alone, such as on days during the summer where I wouldn’t have anything to do but eat gram crackers and relax.  Only every so often would anyone intrude on my experience, my alone time that I found when I could truly be alone in thought.  Sometimes my mom would pop in and fold laundry on the bed, sometimes my dad would come in and pat me on the back to tell me that dinner was ready.  I watched the movie again a few weeks ago, and I am able to tell how I have changed, just because of my attitude towards the movie.  Before I could lose myself in the evil nature of the movie; some scenes I remember as being amazing were the ones where the boy that stutter’s brother is shown, in the photo on the bedroom, and in the cave.  I watched the movie recently, after buying it from Amazon, and I was upset to find that the whole movie wasn’t on the disc, so I couldn’t watch the scene where blood oozed from the photograph of the main character’s brother, but I did watch the part where he was in the cave in his yellow rain coat.  I was watching the movie alone in the dark, and the scene was one of the scariest things I had seen in a movie.  If I had been able to draw the scene in an abstract manner, I would draw the boy with silver lines protruding from all around him, because I could sense the evil oozing from his body, in the way that he seemed to glow with terror.  I have never had a brother, but if that was my brother, as it was the main character’s, I would walk right up to that humongous spider and tell him to devour me so that I wouldn’t have to go through the experience of seeing something so terrifying, something that would make me doubt all that I know is good in the world.  The clown is dressed up in a traditional clown costume, but what scared me most of all about his appearance was the look in his eyes.  The movie gave such a scary vibe that if I had been watching it in a dream I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the clown’s eyes bulge from the screen.  That clown is one scary thing, not man, not woman, but pure evil. 

Another reason I have a phobia of clowns is that as a child my aunt played a trick on my sister and I, where we experienced terror to the point where we were both standing on the back porch screaming at the top of our lungs.  It was around Halloween, and my sister and I were sitting on the couch of the living room.  I was a child, probably a preteen or younger, and my sister was four or five years younger than me.  We were watching television, silently, in peace, before I knew that someone was standing on the front porch.  I forgot exactly what happened, but I remember knowing before my sister did that it was someone in a mask on the front porch.  Maybe the front door was open, maybe I could see the person in the mask because I was taller and standing farther back in the room than my sister was, so I could see the person through the window of the front door, but I remember feeling guilty later because I knew that the mask that the person was wearing would terrify my sister, but I let her open the door to be face to face with someone wearing a petrifying mask anyway.  After my sister opened the door, or did whatever it took to come face to face with the mask, she started screaming.  As soon as we realized we were face to face with terror, we ran through the house to the back porch, trying to find our parents.  When we got to the back porch we stood there and screamed until my parents, my mom, dad, or both, (can’t remember completely clearly) walked up to us and told us to calm down.  Then we walked back to the front room, where my Aunt Maureen was still standing on the front porch, with her mask off of her face.  It was something that I’ll always remember, as a joke of my childhood, something my aunts laughed about for a long time.  It was one of those times where I was so scared that the only reason it didn’t affect me later in life is because I was a child when it happened so that I didn’t have that tight of a grip of reality, where I could have realized that, for real, I could have been in trouble.  But it was just someone behind a mask. 

The third thing that I acknowledge as advocating my phobia of clowns is the recent presence of people dressed up in clown outfits, with the intention of trying to scare people, like bullies that live for the recognition of power that comes from scaring someone half to death.  Sometimes, lately, I will see a posting on Facebook where someone actually is dressed up in a clown costume, so that the clown seems something out of a scary movie, as opposed to part of the everyday.  Such a thing is so scary, to me.  I wonder how long it takes for a person to get decked out in a clown outfit, putting face paint on his/her face, tying the shoelaces of his big clown shoes up in double knots.  Such a person shouldn’t have the right to walk the streets, during the day or at night.  One of my biggest fears would be to see one of these clowns in person, and this is why I avoid haunted houses.  The last time I went trick-or-treating, I was a freshman in high school, and I was dressed up as a pajama girl.  The most danger that ever occurred during this last Halloween celebration of mine was when an adult almost got in a fight with someone my age.  I scored big time on candy that night, but at the end I didn’t want to go home; maybe because in the back of my head I didn’t want to help my parents out handing out candy, just so that I wouldn’t have to face the possibility that I would confront someone with such a scary mask as my aunt’s again.

Haunted houses are fun, but it’s even more fun to acknowledge the fact that there are real haunted houses, the kind where you could sense the evil oozing out of the windows, the kind where you know that someone is in the house even without seeing someone, through the glass of windows, or standing in the front hallway.  I have had many dreams where I had to deal with the reality that such a thing exists.  One time it was one where I knew that a man sitting on a couch was in the house, another time it was a house where I knew a baby was in it, in a crib, although in that dream I was inside of the house, and I could feel the evil that usually penetrates to the outside, on the inside of the house.  I wasn’t able to see the face of the man in the first dream.  I wasn’t allowed to see the baby in the other.  But I knew something was up; I know, looking back, that my subconscious was trying to manifest something, my thoughts, things that were happening in my life.  That’s why whenever I see such a thing, such a house, such a scenario, I want to stop time, to take a picture of it, to write about it, to realize that such a thing actually exists, even though it shouldn’t, even though it doesn’t belong, kind of like clowns, kind of like me. 

One of the neighborhoods where I have seen such a house is in the neighborhood of my dentist’s, called E-town.  I call it so because my favorite dog’s name was Emmet, and the neighborhood has so much green grass that he would have loved, so I named it after him.  On a corner close to my dentist’s office, there is a house that fits this description.  I knew it was evil from the swelling presence of evilness from the large front windows.  After my dentist appointment, one day, I was feeling intrigued, so I went a bit out of my way and walked past the house again, just to see a woman looking out the window at me, with a look of minor contempt on her face, a facial expression that I associate with such evil, such danger, that I will never fully understand, and that is why I find it intriguing.  This was my first time of seeing an actual person in the windows of such a house, my first recognition of there being a person in one of these houses at all, in reality, not in my dreams.  Yup, it was as scary as being face to face with a clown.  Maybe I’ll never understand any of this, but it’s nice to get it down, just to know that it is really happening, that it really exists, with all that already does.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.