MEDIUM RARE
As a country that owns the longest Christmas season in the world, it’s only logical, isn’t it, to remember that Halloween and All Saints and All Souls, not to forget Thanksgiving, actually precede the celebration of the brightest and merriest event of the year, every year.
Because our Christmas tree is starting to sprout the red, gold, and silver of December, it was with a pang of guilt that I decided to hang a Jack o’ Lantern on a tree branch outside the main door. There it stays now, day and night, a maliciously grinning pumpkin with black eyes, black nose, black lips, black teeth. Scary, it’s supposed to be, a sinister greeting aimed at creatures that go bump in the night. To welcome, or repel elementals? The myth says it takes a gargoyle to send another gargoyle fleeing in panic.
Noli de Castro featured two weird hobbyists on his show, Kathrin and Torr, who live with ugly characters from their worst nightmares and are happy doing it 365 days a year. Kathrin has a daughter who’s following in her mother’s footsteps to express her out-of-this-world obsession with the dead, almost dead, and undead. Torr is so into it that apart from his collection, he’s now making his own horrible dolls to terrify, shock, and turn away innocents. How does one live in such a ghostly, ghastly world?
Coming soon, Jessica Soho with her own other-worldly stories to tell and show.
Should we be so shocked to be reminded that there are families living permanently in our cemeteries? (Life’s not permanent, only death is.)
More scary was news that policemen had, with neither invitation nor announcement, shown up at the private residences of a few radio-TV journalists during the weekend. The cops were not in uniform and their cars were unmarked, raising suspicions that something was afoot, with neither a Sherlock nor Dr. Watson in the picture. Elementary, to ask how the police knew where the journalists live and that they needed help, so soon after the Percy Lapid assassination. Instead, in their eagerness to show their concern, the policemen cast a dark shadow on the welcoming mat.
Can cops be trained to sense how to approach civilians who are spooked by pulis, pulis?
