Scary ghost stories and stuff (1)

Taken Between The Jaws

There in that very epicenter of the wild, Samuel Fletcher found what he had been looking for. The fact that he hadn’t been looking for anything to begin with made the discovery that much more amazing. He likened it to eating when you don’t feel hunger in your stomach: you are finally able to get that fulfillment which you hadn’t even known you needed. The body is hungry without knowing. And some unconscious signal informs you that it’s time to eat, and you contradict the will (or lack thereof) of your stomach, so you go to get some grub—and you find that that was the very cure you had been, without even knowing it, long searching for. This reservoir of hunger is The Metaphor, and to fill the subconscious needs of The Metaphor was exactly what Samuel Fletcher had been looking for.

The idea to come out to the woods hadn’t been the original plan of the day. Samuel’s idea of fun was more characteristic in the grasp of civilization than in the malleability of nature. He would have preferred to get a coffee with a few friends at the local coffeeshop. Would rather have a nice satisfying meal amongst companions. He would much rather have watched, for the umpteenth time, a repeat of some classic film on ABC Family, than to step out alone into the catastrophic potential of The Outer World. The indoors were so calm, controlled, contained, familiar. Going outside, seeing what the outdoors had to offer, was tantamount to plunging oneself deep into the chaos of The Unknown, of discomfort, and it was just so warm where he sat, so warm and so cozy.

But he wasn’t happy. And he knew he wasn’t happy.

The longer he followed that paradigm—of watching the same movies on repeat amongst friends, of attending hazy social gatherings which began to all just blend into a single Life it was so routine—the more it became like The Metaphor. Hunger without hunger. The body craving food without an understanding that it craves food. To delve deep into the heart of the Earth, soil and all. To act on impulse, stray from routine: this was his newfound goal. In order to connect with himself he first needed to connect with the nature around him.

If there was anything Samuel learned on his hike, it was that there is no instant gratification in the wild. The gratification of nature comes in its positive essence of reality. It is where we come from and where we still belong. Man feeds on meat; man drinks water: man uses what he is given to his own benefit. There are structural patterns. The parallels are far beyond the differences. The clothing, the acquisition of taste, the symbols, the speech, the usage of thought, handiwork, are but the only differences. These are the defining factors of the Homo “sapiens,” and these are all the works of excess. The gratification of nature stems from the stability of its beauty, the regulated chaos of its structure. There is no need for 3D glasses, for objects will approach you and you them, all in reality. The sun will teach you when to have energy and the moon will teach you to be tired. The definition is as “hi-” as it gets. The color depth is extreme; the frames per second: off the charts. You haven’t heard production quality until you’ve listened to the river and the trees.

Most of all, Samuel learned that nature is cruel. Yet it is not nature that is the foremost danger to nature. But rather something closer, something more familiar….

The day’s events

Samuel Fletcher awoke with a flurry of bedsprings. It was 5:20 A.M. on a Saturday. He had been having troubles sleeping. In the comfort of his room there had always been the desire to stay awake. To sleep, as he understood it, was to reveal an essence of weakness. The night before had been like the others: full of the company of others: loud, tyrannical, hectic: unhappy. The insincerity of the smiles never impacted him while he was out with friends because his own insincerity was the same, if not greater, and he knew it, and he knew they knew it. Hanging out at his friends’ house was habitual, part of him. When he returned home, even following the influx of smiles and positivity, he still felt malnourished.