Hello Horror, My Old Friend

Where to begin? I suppose at the beginning.

I was born on June 14th 1984 in Cedar City, Utah. My parents were Mormon. My mother was active in the Church. My father was not. They conceived me in their later years. Mom was forty when I was born, and Dad was fifty-one. Mom was a business and accounting teacher and did that for thirty-five years while my father owned a farm that he and the family worked and real estate that he rented out. My parents worked hard for an upper middle income lifestyle, as they both had grown up quite poor.

I was virtually an only child. I was my mother's only child. I had half siblings from my father's previous marriage. On the day of my birth they ranged in ages from 12-18 years of age. By the time I was six my siblings had all moved out and were either married or in college.

I would spend my childhood growing up in a little town called Parowan Utah, located fifteen miles north of Cedar City at the base of a mountain that led to the popular Southern Utah ski resort of Brian Head. Parowan is a Piute Indian term for Evil Water Bad for Man which referred to a salt and alkaline lake several miles outside the city limits. There was a legend of a young Native American woman being pulled down to the depths by a monster that lived in the lake. The truth is, that when the spring thaw comes off from the mountains and settles in Parowan Valley the dry salt becomes a wet sinking death trap, which has over the years claimed the lives of several inhabitants, who were not aware of how suddenly the terrain could change from solid earth to a sloppy pit of sludge that has been known to submerge full vehicles within a few hours after being bogged down. The legend is something that we were taught in elementary school as part of local history. It was my first taste of horror.

As I got older it was apparent I was not like the other kids. Now I think every person has thought that at one time or another, but in this case I physically wasn't like anyone else in this small Mormon town. I was born with severe motor skill impairments and sixty percent of what is considered a normal hamstring muscle. I could not keep up with the other kids who would play basketball for hours, or ride bikes for miles. In fact I could not ride a bike until I was eleven years old. Hence forth, since I couldn't play with the other kids, I entertained myself. First with toy dinosaurs in a sandbox. I knew all of the dinosaurs' names and stats. Eventually I got into action figures. Dad saw how I enjoyed my sandbox and toys as a kid, and therefore ordered a large dump truck load of soft sand to be delivered to the house. They poured it right beside some lilac bushes that curled up creating a gnarled tree cave. The pile of sand was a mountain. I created ditches in the sand. Lakes. I filled them with water from a hose. I created city. A world. Sandland. My mind would create scenarios and characters out of my toys that went beyond their marketing. My toys were people and they reacted to the monsters around them. The lilac bushes were evil gods that demanded human sacrifice and my Alien (yes from the movie Aliens) action figures were their minions who delivered the offering of flesh. I created what I termed "bushwillies" which were twigs with leaves pulled from the lilac bushes. In my mind they were great monsters and the leaves were tentacles. Battles would ensue and my Marvel and Batman action figures were the heroes trying to save the people of Sandland. Less important toys became victims, or captives that the heroes had to save.

We lived on a piece of property that was over an acre in size. The world for my toys grew. There was a patch of crab grass in the middle of the yard that would eat my toys. A different breed of bushwillies in the crab apple tree with swinging red heads. The weeds within the grass were a breed of cannibalistic natives called the Dandelion People who had green skin and blonde hair and owned crocodile dogs that would hunt people down. The weeping willow was where the Intelligent Dinosaurs lived. Dinosaurs that had survived the asteroid and evolved into self aware beings. The massive tree was a butcher shop where my toys would hang like aging hams. Inside the house the toys would be subject to terrible villains like Stick Man who was a giant GI-Joe toy that controlled the K-Nex and made stick men and creatures beyond belief. Demons. Monsters. Killers. Victims. Heroes. I was creating horror stories.

When I was seven years old I experienced a scrotal infection. I had gotten kicked in the testicles at school. I didn't tell anyone about it, as I was embarrassed. Eventually there was blood and infection coming out of my urine, and the pain got so bad I could barely walk. Internal bleeding had caused the infection. I was a very scared boy growing up. Scared to tell an adult there was a problem. Scared to try anything risky. Scared to try anything new for fear I might fail or get hurt. Mom instilled this in me as a young boy as she was afraid to lose the only child she could ever have. I was not allowed to go on a slide, play football, or participate in the youth rodeo held every year at the county fair, as there was a risk of me being injured. My mother is a brilliant woman who doesn't think highly enough of herself and was afraid I might get injured or die at any moment. Nothing up to that point was as frightening, however, than when the hospital tried to connect me to an I.V. of antibiotics. It took them an hour and a half to connect me to the I.V, because my obesity hid the veins deep within my flesh. I experienced true fear as they poked and prodded and failed and attempted again and dug around in my arm. I stared at that needle as it tried to find a vein, digging around in my arm, my mother and father comforting me, telling me it would be okay, but that I couldn't move. I sobbed and screamed and stared at the nurses trying to perform the phlebotomy. It was terrifying and yet when the ordeal was done I felt a deep relaxing calm as my body's endorphins did their job. Although the experience was disturbing the after effects were soothing, and I remember falling into a relaxed deep sleep. This is the wonderful feeling of euphoria that you experience after fear.

I had vicious nightmares as a child: horrific dreams about a magic yellow rock with black eyes that sucked the souls out of people, couches and furniture that grew arms and legs and mouths and would eat me, a father telling me that I was not his real son after I turned into some inhuman thing, floating around in aimless mist, lost, without any arms or legs, or wandering around in my grandmother's basement where an elongated version of myself pulled me into a cast iron tub filled with water, where I disappeared and was replaced by the clone everyone loved more than me. Horror haunted my dreams, but I found that writing the horrific events down and then ripping up the paper shards and throwing them away was an action that made the monsters in my dreams dissipate. Not ignoring them, but facing them head on and destroying them. That is how I finally got the best of my dreams.

My first real love and obsession with horror movies came from Monstervision on TNT with host Joe Bob Briggs, which I watched religiously every weekend (Night of the Lepus, Them!, The Fly, Alien 3, Steel Dawn, Star Trek II the Wraith of Kahn, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Beastmaster, were some of my favorites) and old Ray Harryhausen films (Clash of the Titans, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts and The Valley of Gwangi) on cable. I devoured these films and would watch them every chance I could get.

My mother was an awful cook with a child's palate and a sensitive gag reflex to any food that wasn't texturally appealing. To this day she interprets most complex flavors as spicy and struggles with anything that's not plain, citrus, or chocolate. I remember her telling me when I was young that vegetables were yucky. So I considered them as such until my teenage years and more appropriately adulthood. Hostess was often the chef when breakfast time came and dinners were often overcooked pieces of meat, T.V. dinners, or something out of a can or box. Now Dad, he grew up poor and hungry. He was the second youngest of eight children, whose own father was a rough man. There were times when my dad was young where he did not eat at night and went to bed with an empty stomach because had had not been tough enough to get a sufficient portion before his siblings had. It was always important that I ate food, so that I never felt hunger as he knew it. My half brother, who was an athletic cowboy that rode bulls in rodeos, had no weight issues and Dad would often say things such as "Mark would eat three pork chops when he was your age. Don't you want to grow up and be a strong cowboy like he is?" I would eat another pork chop. I also had the Decker poor metabolism from Mom's side. My mother is a short stocky woman who eats around 1300 calories a day, can still speed walk several miles at seventy-six years of age, and yet she is overweight. It's partially a thyroid issue combined with genetics. I must say, however, after teaching middle school for eight years, working with troubled youth for two years previous before that, seeing the struggles some kids go through, I feel like I got off pretty easy with the parents I got. I always felt loved. The worst my parents did was feed me too well and keep me too safe. This combined with my difficulty with physical activity due to my hamstrings was the perfect storm for becoming obese. Not only that, I was very sensitive growing up. My mother called it having a tender heart. I cried a lot. I walked funny. I held a pencil like Micheal Myers wielding a butcher knife. I ate junk food from a Scooby-Doo lunch box. I sat by myself under a tree at recess. I was unable to run and extremely penguin toed. Of course I was bullied, savagely.

The worst bully was my half nephew, Michael Carballo, who was my oldest half sister, Carla's eldest son. He was nearly two years older than me and resented the fact that I had been born as he was seeking a father figure within my own father. His mother encouraged this behavior and the boy was taught to resent me. He was relentless, bigger than me, (and remember I was always a big kid) and one of the worst people I've ever met. He would take my possessions and threaten to break my arm, shoot me, kill me, bury me in my sand pile (which he mockingly called the Kiddie Pile) where no one would find me if I told. If I said something about his behavior it would cause drama with his mother who was an attention seeking sociopath. My other half sister Shauna's first memory of Carla was of her being thrown down the stairs to the basement and while Shauna's arm swung limply from being broken, Carla stood at the top of of the stairs laughing. Carla is six years older than Shauna. Carla is a cruel person, with a sickeningly sweet cackle who enjoys inflicting pain and trauma. Wherever she goes it's as if an emotional tornado has just whipped through a courtyard. If I said anything about Michael it would end up being worse for me as Michael had nothing, and I had everything, and how could I deprive him of something we can just purchase again, when he has so little? Carla knew to to wield pity as a knife and twist it with a sadism that is unparalleled. I learned to just accept what Michael did, what he took. He was a ruthless person that I was afraid of for a very long time.

When a young boy is eight years old in the Mormon faith he becomes baptized. I knew my father was not going to do this. Before baptism can happen you are interviewed in private by your ward bishop. He asks you certain questions like, "Do you believe that Joseph Smith is a true prophet, do you believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, etc." A question I will never forget is when he asked me if I knew my father had a demon inside of him? The question shocked me. I didn't answer. I didn't know how to answer. The bishop said the same demon lay within me. He said that we were going to get the demon out through baptism, and I was going to be cleansed of any sin I'd done up to that point. As an adult I realize the man was speaking metaphorically, as a child I literally thought a demon was living inside of me. I don't consider my former bishop to be a bad man. He's human and humans sometimes make mistakes. He is rather staunch and right wing, but he's not a crazy fanatic. This was simply his way of saying "You don't want to end up like your father do you?" What he didn't seem to understand was that I idolized my father, and nothing would've made me more happy at eight years old than following in his footsteps.

My father had a reputation around town for being a tough roughneck who was quite wild in his youth. He was immensely powerful, boasting several weightlifting records at the local college. I'd seen him perform several feats of strength as a boy, such as lifting hundred and fifty pound hay bales over his head and throwing them like a professional wrestler giving a body slam and witnessing a cow ramming him up against a truck only for him to grab the cow by the horns and twist it to the ground. In Parowan he was known as someone you didn't want to provoke to anger and there was a local story of him getting into a fight with several local policemen during the Iron County Fair where the three trying to arrest him were subdued and unable to complete the task. The report included statements of my father using "superhuman strength" during the altercation. Now, I knew him in his twilight years when he had mellowed out and didn't have the same fire within him. Still these stories culminated around in my mind and not being athletic I worked on my imagination constantly. My experiences were evolving into themes often used in horror movies.

In third grade we were given the assignment of writing a story with pictures. Although most kids wrote about camping, sports, or if they got sentimental perhaps a grandparent or pet passing away. I wrote about "Sandland." It was ten pages long. My teacher shared the entire story with the class. He didn't know the effort that went into that story. How I had to force my hands to painstakingly make each letter because of my struggle with motor skills. The writing was sloppy, but he could read it. It was legible. The whole class was in awe of what I'd written. It was the first time I remember feeling joy at school.

I had fantasies about embarrassing the bullies who tormented me, beating them up, sometimes violently, even killing them. Without great parents I think there's a good possibility I could've become a school shooter or some crazy incel psychopath, luckily my parents were good people, and I was born in a time just before social media had become mainstream where I could escape from the torment I felt at school the moment the final bell rang.

Sometimes I would even tell my father that I had beat up the bullies, because I wanted him to be proud of me. "Someone picked on me, and I beat them up." It never happened. I merely wanted my dad to think that I was a man. I would attempt to lift weights with him and though my upper body was quite strong I could not squat due to my legs and my dead-lift was all back and arms. My dad wanted me to be strong and was disappointed that I was not.

Dad told the story about my birth. Mom's pregnancy was not easy due to age and a very low chance of her being able to to conceive, but when I was born and reached toward the sky, wailing, he said I looked like, "Conan the Barbarian, pledging to the gods above, with powerful arms reaching for the sun." That image was what Dad orated as someone to strive to become. Conan of the Cimmeria, or another was Genghis Khan. Before his passing he painted the image of riding away with "Genghis Khan and the Boys" into heaven. I don't know who "the Boys" were but I assume that they were Dad and men like him. Dad was an avid reader and was especially fond of Robert E. Howard, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and Sidney Sheldon. He loved the melodrama of Sheldon, the sword and sorcery genre of Howard, the science of Crichton and the straight forward thriller of Koontz. He complained that Stephen King was too slow and talked to much. Not enough action.

Even with his disgust for King, Dad loved horror movies. He liked schlock like "Wolfen," "Species," and "The Relic." The "Halloween" franchise. Classics like "Jaws" and "Alien." "Event Horizon" was one he liked near the end of his life (he often liked a little sci-fi in his horror). And anything with a werewolf in it. I would watch these movies with him. He didn't care for the slashers as he would say something like "if I were there I'd take that goddamn knife away from him and slit his throat." He definitely didn't like it when slashers got supernatural. He never thought Freddy Kruger was scary. And Jason was laughable to him. "Halloween" was the exception to that rule as he seemed to think that Michael Myers was someone who was tough. He was shot six times and got up because he was a tough guy not because lightning had struck a corpse and turned him into a zombie creature. He disliked the Friday the 13th franchise for that very reason. But somehow being psychologically connected to your family was believable to him.

Dad told a story of his own mother screaming in Parowan when he was in Vegas and had won some money. He claimed to have heard his mother's scream and didn't go into the hotel room where a man had been waiting to mug him. Some of his stories seemed very far fetched, but he always claimed they were true and nobody proved them to be otherwise. These stories about his youth always seemed just barely within the realm of reality.

Dad would tell me other stories, fictitious bedtime stories, During summer days and weekends at the farm we would talk about what would make a good story while we dug dikes in the alfalfa fields and fed animals. His often had themes of sci-fi gone crazy, or a great business endeavor ending in a wind-fall, or preferably both, especially if it involved genetic manipulation. His personal philosophies involved superior genetics, libertarian ideals, natural selection and survival of the fittest ideology. He loved the world of science and genetics and used this knowledge when breeding cattle that would end up half again bigger than anyone else's in the valley. No he wasn't Frankenstein. He just cross-bred different breeds and did his homework when purchasing a bull for the herd. One day I asked him why he didn't write these stories down. He said he had, and his dad had burned them. We didn't discuss the matter further.

There's some male toxicity here. Dad wasn't perfect. His father certainly wasn't perfect either. No parent is. Still, like I said, my parents loved me. I do wish he had stayed alive a bit longer so that we could talk about these issues now that I'm an adult, but he passed away when I was eighteen years old from non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

I learned to love horror more and more as time went forward. I got heavily into Goosebumps written by R.L. Stine. I used to try to draw the covers, slowly taking my time as it was still difficult for me to hold a pencil, but my motor skills were improving. I was drawing good enough that I frightened my fifth grade art teacher with a picture of skulls buried in the earth and sprouting alfalfa plants above. I'd just watched Poltergeist for the first time and had been inspired.

Horror movies gave me a catharsis. Sure, kids twisted my nipples and slapped my belly hard enough to leave prints but at least I wasn't eaten by a giant shark. Yes, someone threw a soggy rotten apple at me that had fallen from a tree and had been left on the ground to rot, but at least I wasn't sacrificed to the Kraken. Of course, my nephew wanted me dead but he didn't stab me with a butcher knife at the Bates Motel. I lived through these movies. Each one giving me a badge of honor. I watched "It," "Scream" "I know what you did Last Summer" "Candy Man." Each time feeling more brave than the last. I had survived.

Often I related to what academia refers to as "the other." I wondered what it would be like to be the character of Jason and get even with my bullies. These are the darkest of thoughts that victims have. The kind of thoughts that censors and moralists warn us about. "The movies made me do it!" response. But I didn't act on these impulses, and honestly movies would not have taken me to that edge, bullying and trauma would have done it. If anything the movies I was watching gave me a safe outlet to experience my fantasies vicariously through a storytelling medium. To suggest that movies are the single cause for a horrific shooting or the creation of a devious serial killer is outrageous. No, slashers became a metaphor. It gave me hope that someday I would have a rewarding fruitful life, and the popular kids would be unprepared for the obstacles that lay on their path through life's journey. I never wanted to become a "Camp Crystal Lake Killer." What I wanted was to win at something and for the world to have some balance where the bullies lost sometimes. At that point in my life I needed some confidence. Each gory horror film that frightened me, and I survived, helped give me that.

Of course as an adult I know that bullies are a product of their environment, and as a teacher I see that often those that bully have it worse off than those of their victims, still my heart goes out to those that experience the trauma of being bullied, as I've been on that specific journey.

Bullying came to a head my eighth grade year. This time it involved a teacher and some middle school football players. The teacher thought I needed to toughen up so he promised some choice eighth graders a spot on the varsity team the following year if they provoked me enough to fight back. Parowan has a 7-12 high school. Small towns sometimes have them as they don't have the numbers for a separate middle school to justify the funds. I wish I could say I fought back. The most I did was a push that I felt guilty about. It got bad enough that I finally told my parents what had been happening. I wish I could also say the teacher got fired, but he just got shuffled around to another school in the district. Ironically to the same school my mother taught at, which created an awkward situation for that teacher on several occasions.

I don't know exactly what was said in a principal's office, but I know my dad could be a threatening presence and my bullying issues ceased. The following year I joined the wrestling team and although I wasn't very skilled, I was tenacious, as I had a lot of pent up rage inside of me, and I pinned my my bullying nephew who was also on the team and wrestled the same weight class I did. It created drama at home so I let him win after that, but that event showed him I was no longer afraid of him, and I could defend myself. In the world of high school, kids begin the journey of figuring out who they are and are busy with extra-curricular activities, sports, and such, especially in a small town like Parowan where you could just show up and be on a team or part of a group. There just simply wasn't any time to bully someone. Small towns are great like that.

My grandparents both died my Sophomore year. They were two people with health problems that my mother and her siblings had taken care of for a decade. I remember watching them die so slowly. Grandma died of a grapefruit sized bedsore that got infected and grandpa died due to calcium deposits in his lungs as a symptom of his horrific arthritis. That same year Dad got sick with cancer and for a fifteen year old kid there was a lot of death and sickness in my life. Stories were an escape for me in high school, whether I was reading Stephen King, Dead Koontz, Michael Crichton, Terry Brooks, Joseph Heller or watching horror movies or writing my own stories, or even being a part of other people's stories. I was president the drama club, (where all outcasts go) editor of our creative writing journal, reporter for the FFA, and I started writing darker and darker stories as well as delving into darker films of the era. Films like Se7en, Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, Jeepers Creepers, Joy Ride and Fight Club. I liked dark things, twisty endings, escaping from the horror of slow, relentless terminal cancer. I remember saying to myself "sure Dad has cancer, but at least I didn't step into a teleportation pod and get turned into a Brundle Fly like Jeff Goldblum."

I watched "The Exorcist" for the first time around this period in my life. I was bound with suspense as Father Karras screamed at the demon possessing Reagan to take him instead. "Take me! Take me!" he had screamed. I thought if I could just touch my father's arm and have the cancer come inside of me instead, that then I would sacrifice myself for the greater good. My father was a powerful, superhuman man who had built himself from nothing and become a millionaire through force and shrewd business dealings. I was a fat boy with messed up legs who liked to write creepy stories. I was not important.

My father passed away during my first semester of college. I chose to go to the local university in Cedar City to be close during his final days. I then learned about betrayal. Family members whom I loved told me that their compassion was all an act to keep up appearances because Dad expected it and a twelve year litigation battle would commence over real estate and inheritance. These are often the basis for what is true horror, something pretending to be something it's not.

I escaped back into stories. I was a theater major and during my second semester I was in a total of six plays. I wrote like mad. I loved the theater department, was obsessed with the theater department. I dove in head first, ignoring anything else but the art of storytelling. Professors called me brilliant, classmates respected me, and for the first time in my life women found me desirable. I had found my niche and replaced my family with a group of surrogate performers. I chose to distance myself from my mother, because I selfishly did not want to deal with the drama that my father's death had created. She didn't exist in my mind at this moment in my life.

In between plays and classes I shared creepy movies and found other people sharing gems with me. Not all were horror but many were. "Event Horizon" was the masterpiece that got passed around the college dorms as a movie to watch if you wanted your date to grab onto you and beg you to stay the night. "Requiem of a Dream" was shared to give us a nihilistic feeling about the inevitable doom of mankind and made us feel like tortured souls. "A Clockwork Orange" was one that got passed around as well. "The Matrix." "Halloween." "Hellraiser." "Phantasm." While some theater majors were giggling with glee over "Moulin Rouge" the rest of us were talking about "Saw." and driving forty five miles to St. George Utah see "Saw II" as it was not shown in Cedar City.

I developed a love for zombies as well. At our college we had a zombie expert named Kyle Bishop who taught in the English Department. Today you can hear him on the Horror Movie Podcast. He's the author of American Zombie Gothic, and a brilliant person. He recently won the Silver Bolo Award on #TheLastDriveIn with Joe Bob Briggs. It showed me one can be intelligent and still love horror. That it wasn't just a genre for the dimwitted. I became obsessed with Romero and the resurgence of the genre at the time. 28 Days Later and Night of the Living Dead became staples for me.

I thrived as a theater director in college. My stuff was dark, foreboding, nihilistic and my classmates respected me for it. I was the one to ask if horror was involved in the question. "What the best scary movie?" "Do you like Japanese horror?" "Where did you come up with that sick idea?" I got respect from my peers, and had passionate relations with female students who thought I was mysterious and intense. The high point of my college career was directing a very dark version of "Waiting for Godot" starring an African American as Lucky. It was shocking, controversial and my professors touted it as the best student show done at SUU in years. College was a whirlwind of creativity and I loved it.

As I graduated and tried to make it as a thespian, I was able to find stable work that paid the bills in children's theater in Tucson Arizona. While there I frequented an art house called The Loft, where I saw more underground work like: "Teeth" "Midnight Meat Train" "Human Centipede" and experienced "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" live. Horror was still my escape when the stress and creatively stifling nature of children's theater got to be too much.

Eventually I found my true calling after working with troubled youth. I found that I could relate to them in a way that others could not. I could be both their mentor and someone who could empathize. I was someone who had an anchor in the same darkness they were swimming in. I knew what it was like to want to delve into the bizarre themes of the mind. I knew what it was like to be different. An outcast. I knew what it was like to have the desire to cut yourself, to write dangerous poems about death and misery, to want to end your life. I remember those feelings as a kid and have even suffered with them as an adult. I found a purpose in helping these troubled kids find meaning in their own lives. Not all of them rose above their situations, but some of them did, and I was happy to be a part of that. I came back to Utah to get my teaching license and became a middle school fine arts teacher.

Five and a half years ago, during my third year of teaching I was diagnosed with type I Bi-Polar Disorder and experienced another true life horror story. I was experiencing manic psychosis that caused me to have delusions, hallucinations, followed by depressive lows that sucked my energy and will to live. One of these delusions involved my dead father speaking to me through a twenty dollar Ouija Board. I asked him questions such as: "are you disappointed in me? Should I end my life? Am I worthless?" I was convinced that he was not proud of me and his ideology of superior genetics seeped into my irrationality. I knew that I was inferior and that society was keeping a worm like me alive due to natural selection being broken by liberal socialism. I knew I had to relinquish my own life for the good of mankind. In a hotel room in Mesquite Nevada I took a bottle of Ibuprofen and followed it with some Jack Daniels. I immediately threw up and called the suicide hotline where two of the best men I've ever met (police officers) took me to a hospital where I was stabilized. I was then sent to a mental health facility and was informed I had experienced a psychotic episode. Mania had plagued me since around the time my dad got sick. I was involved in an array of after school clubs and extra-curricular activities when I was in high school and pushed myself to go! go! go! and then I would crash barely able to wake up in the morning and sleep the weekend away. In college I thought it was normal to stay awake for days when you were writing stories, directing plays, that crashing after that was normal, that my intensity in college where everything, every minute thing was important, and my art deserved to be perfect the feelings of others' be damned. It was all okay because I was a genius and had professors who called me brilliant, women who found me intriguing, a community who found me engaging, and my narcissistic mania that developed in college loved it.

Luckily my mother supported me during this. Even though I abandoned her for a time when the prodigal son came home from Tucson she welcomed me back into her life as if I'd never left. Maybe to her I hadn't, but in my heart I had.

Our relationship is good now and we see each other most weeks and if not we speak on the phone every few days or so.

Also very lucky, my medication journey was easier than most and not the norm. The first pill worked and it worked in that dosage. I've had to have it adjusted once since then and the side-effects have been minimal: I crave salt, I struggle with fatigue, I occasionally have brain-fog. I've combated these symptoms with natural supplements, good life skills and therapy. I'm still obese, but I've recently lost over fifty pounds and I'm on my way to a healthy lifestyle I've never known.

I no longer think of myself as brilliant. I'm aware that much of my praise in college and high school came from a combination of being different in a very conservative Mormon locale combined with bursts of mania. I used to be able to focus on ten things at once, and plowed through life like a tornado. Now it's often difficult to put a few sentences together because of the brain fog I sometimes experience. This doesn't mean I pity myself, nor do I look down on myself. I'm just more real. I still direct plays, write on occasion and most of all......

I still watch horror movies. I took a short break from my obsession over them, but then Joe Bob Briggs came back on #Shudder and I remembered him as my friend who would show me horror movies and weird cult favorites on TNT Monstervision. His drive-in totals were a piece of cheesy nostalgia, and it was nice to be reconnected with a pleasant memory I'd nearly forgotten. He now has a brand new progressive and woke mail girl named Darcy and the show pops more than it ever has. During this Pandemic I got back into horror like I was when I was young. Tweeting. Watching live shows with new online friends. I've found a community with the #Mutant_Fam, #Shudder, #TheLastDriveIn.

I'm ready to dissect and dive into the deepest areas of horror, its ideas, its sensationalism, its impact on culture, more than that......

I'm ready to be my most authentic self.

My name is Jeffrey Carlos Robinson.

Welcome to my Lair.