I just used the treadmill for about twenty-five minutes.

I'm now improbably tired and concerned that I may have no energy left to do anything else the rest of the day.

I don't remember much of what I've done the past couple days, which implies that I have not done much. Lots of intensive sitting around and looking at the computer screen. But I remember my dreams. There were plagues, wolf gods, animal heads made of mud for a festival and then surrounded with dried cornstalks and burned, a huge empty underground tomb which reanimated its dead, and honeysuckle-scented rain falling on a rusted metal scaffold above a dying forest at the edge of a dried-out marsh.

beginning of the lengthy essay I gave up on in favor of the DYSTOPIAN FUTURE CAPSLOCK post

I'm too tired and whiny to ever finish this, I'm just going to post it before I lose the file:

Effective horror narratives and images are predicated on the author/artist and viewer/reader's mutual agreement on what constitutes "safe" spaces and relationships - those which we are primed psychologically to view as nonthreatening, and conducive to comfort and/or intimacy. For a modern person in a first-world country, a safe space might be a small suburban home or a one-bedroom apartment, a school, or a mall; a safe relationship one with a parent, child, spouse, or pet.

These are things which most people in developed nations view as ordinary and safe, either through first-hand experience or through TV/books/etc. reinforcing the normalcy of such environments/relationships. There are other places - old-growth forests, elaborate mansions or castles, Alcatraz - which do not provoke the same reaction.

The undermining of the safety of a safe structure by the introduction of - for example - sounds attributable to nothing obvious, doors that don't open to the right place, and windows outside of which the expected landscape can no longer be seen - provokes a fear reaction more intense than one which might be achieved should these same events occur in an unsafe place. Similarly, the sight of a massive reptilian creature turning around to reveal sharp teeth and no eyes is less disturbing than one of a small child doing the same.

In fact, many folktales are horror stories - but because the locations and individuals depicted in them are alien to us, they do not provoke the same reactions. We assume peddlers on the road making strange offers to be up to no good, because the only context in which we have ever heard of this is in fairy tales in which they are up to no good. A horse rushing past our door at night is not a common sight, and its hoofbeats would not be audible over the sound of the TV.

The passage of time renders the emotional charge of these stories unintelligible to us. We can't picture the sort of stove upon which a person might decide to lie down, so the idea of finding the devil there, rather than the family member that we might expect, is more funny than disturbing.