37 days to halloween

even the smidgen, the faintest notion, the smudged ideas of satan and hell are to some of us scary as shit. i grew up nominally catholic. we rarely went to church and i was the only one of my siblings that was baptised because i am the first born and by the time my brothers arrived on the scene my father was already developing an agnosticism that bled dry the dead flesh of ceremony and belief.

at any rate, even with all that skepticism of the existence of god in the house as i was growing up catholicism was like gravity to a satellite. one can't help but be pulled in, no matter how faint. perhaps that's just me, but being catholic is a hard thing to shake. so movies about demonic possession are still to this day horrifying. it is the unseen that can't be controlled. guilt, catholic guilt, is another matter but which somehow factors into this equation. being guilty of being human, a being that lusts, loves, desires and hungers even. possession is all about that.

so is going to hell. i recall a couple of years ago anna and i were watching one of those programs on tv where the subjects were being interviewed about their near-death experiences. only that these near-death experiences exposed them to hell. the fire-and-brimstone place, complete with reenactments. i nearly had a panic attack watching this program. H E DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS is still a real taboo. there has not been a scary movie about demonic possession in ages but the subject is a rich vein to tap.

but what about hell. can one actually go there? again, that depends on your belief systems and whether you think there is a place where sinners suffer horribly for all eternity. is there proof of hell being a real place? for sure. according to the lore some years ago a drilling team in siberia was going deep and stuck a microphone down the hole. what they recorded is. . .well, judge for yourself. the guy doing the intro is art bell, the original host of the paranormal, and wildly popular, radio show coast to coast. this recording might bore the shit out of you. or it could scare the yell out of you. what it certainly will do is have you say, in that old looney tunes way, now i've heard everything.

you are warned.



happy halloween!