We are supposed to leave for the town of Sleepy Hollow at 10 or 11 but I don't think anyone is awake yet. The last twenty-fours have gone something like this. We went to the suburbs to go to the mall. I got a frosty from a Wendy's. I took pictures of this like I was at the Grand Canyon. The grass is always greener when you are Daniela Scrima, or maybe any human being. When I live in the city I demand to be brought to a farm, when I am stuck in the country I tell everyone that I am so bored that it is very likely that I will just go off and find a river to drown in.
Yesterday at a mall in Queens, I am trying on boots, I am being fitted for a bra, I am relishing in the fact that all of these stores are connected together as a single unit when my friend Debbie says to me "tomorrow we are going to Sleepy Hollow" and I ask"what is Sleepy Hollow?"
Which maybe is what you will ask too. Now I of course know about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as written by Washington Irving, I know somehow, from some television show that Washington Irving is buried in the same cemetery as Elizabeth Arden. I was actually in some zombie like state watching Bravo for hours the other night when a show came on that made no sense. Some man takes a foreign super model across the country and shows her "ironic iconic America" and this is because they are both friends with Tommy Hilfiger. I swear that is what I understood of this program that I was half paying attention to, but at one point, this man is explaining to this super model (because they share a mutual friend, Tommy Hilfiger) that Washington Irving and Elizabeth Arden are buried in the same cemetery and isnt this so ironic because Washington Irving wrote about a man without a head riding around on a horse and Elizabeth Arden got us all to paint our faces?
The Super Model nor myself understood how this connected anything.
Still, geographically, I did not realize that Sleepy Hollow was a place we could randomly travel to on a Sunday. I thought all of that took place in Connecticut, but I get my facts mixed up-- it was just Ichabod Crane that was from Connecticut, and then he comes to the state of New York where he is a school teacher and falls in love with a twelve year old, or whatever. I remember be the legend of Sleepy Hollow scaring me as a child. As everything did. My mother and I would watch every single horror movie and now this is the end result. I am twenty-three years old; I am scared of the dark.
Some people who are scared of the dark or other things like ghosts, serial killers, monsters under the bed, vampires, girls climbing out of their television screens they have enough sense to not absorb themselves in these things. I have friends who will refuse to watch a movie even if it is slightly disturbing. This is not the case with me. There are only two other people in my life who share the same need to be frightened as I do the first being my mother, and the second being one of my best friends Jennifer Klassen. When I was living in Florida I could always count on one of the two of them, or both of them together to go with me to see any awful, terrible scary movie that came out in theatres. We were all ready to drop are six bucks and sit down in a dirty theatre for an hour and a half, there was never any question about it.
It is not just scary movies that I am into, but I also have an obsession of going places where something has happened or something is haunted or there is some story or some abandoned building. When I am in some boring city in the United States, laying on a hotel bed, I always peruse brochures of local attractions &then call the concierge and ask about what ghost tours are offered. I've done this many times in St.Augustine, in London, in New Orleans, in freaking Cleveland and anywhere else that I end up staying, as long as I can convince present company to come along.
But what I prefer is to do self-destructive internet research on haunted and abandoned places in local areas. When I was living in Florida, I convinced friends to go across the whole state. We went to Dunellon, where they filmed Jeepers Creepers and looked for real dead teenagers and a church that we soon found out was straight up burnt down by the townspeople.
I saw Bruce Springsteen live in concert only once, I was 17 years old. The day after this event, Ashley Konrad and I traveled to Savannah, Georgia, on the way up we listened to "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" on books and tape. Sometimes hitting pause to read excerpts from a hard copy that we had stolen from the library. And because when we were in town there was no proper tour offered of Bonaventure cemetery, we broke in.
When any of these things are happening, it is not like I am happy. I am actually regretting all of my decisions. I can never drive a car to any of these places because I will literally freeze up. Once we were driving down some road that was surrounded on both sides with marsh lands, there were absolutely no lights anywhere, and I was driving. I became so paralyzed with fear that one of the passengers had to drive the car because I honest to God could not move and was convinced that I'd be dead shortly.
One of the towns I spent a lot of time in during high school is maybe or maybe not appropriately called "Safety Harbor" at some point we discovered that if you walked all the way down a set of railroad tracks that there was an "abandoned" house with medical equipment, the lights still left on and apparently-- you could see scalpels. I had accidentally come across this house years earlier, when I was fifteen or sixteen and wanted to be felt up properly in the dark. You had to walk so far down the rail road tracks to see this place that everyone insisted that it did not exist. After the local abandoned mental institution was torn down, and we needed another place to torment ourselves, I decided we should make this walk.
In the company of three of my friends, wearing ridiculous shoes, I began the walk down the railroad tracks. And just like on Moog Road where I had to park the car and get out, the railroad tracks got so high that it was just marsh and water and barking dogs on both sides. Plus, you could hear alligators. I am not particularly scared of alligators. I once convinced my best friend Ilana to stop the car outside of an Applebees so that I could try and catch a baby alligator, to no avail. But when you are walking in platform shoes, and it's dark, and you realize that this is exactly how people are murdered and killed or run over-- then I became afraid of alligators. And then, I could not move. My feet were not stuck. This was not Stand by Me or even Fried Green Tomatoes my shoe had not become caught, I just simply realized that this was terrifying and insane and that I could not move because I had no feeling in my body.
But still, I always go back for more. The highlight of the summer before I left for college was an abandoned trailer park that you could get through if you went through Nick Velasquez's neighborhood in Clearwater. This was when I was first getting to know Nick and I just thought he was a really cute, really nice guy. In the years to follow he has of course proved me wrong. Now I get 4 AM phone calls from his abode in Los Angeles, where he is not only yelling at me like he is Spencer Pratt, but he is also sitting in the same room as Spencer Pratt. I realize that is terrifying enough, but back then, I was eighteen, I did not know. I had to go into the trailer park.
This was probably one of the largest trailer parks in Pinelass County. If you don't have a good idea of what Florida trailer parks are like, I'll fill you in. They are really "mobile home" parks and a lot of them are quite nice, often 55 and up, retirement type or winter home kind of communities. There is one down the street from my house called Doral Village, and I would bring my friends there in the 3rd and 4th grade and then act like we were lost even though I knew my way around the area completely. I would not direct us home until whatever poor girl I was best friends with burst into tears, horrified that we would be stuck in "Doral Village" forever.
So I was thrilled to have a real abandoned trailer park. Not just mobile homes. You could tell even before they started tearing this place down that it was low income housing. So we would drive through. I drove through once and it was a horrible mistake, so if you are not following the theme here it is something like I am the instigator it is my idea to bring people back from the dead and then I just can't handle it. I get too scared.
On another occasion, while driving through with two friends who had actually introduced me to Nick, and previously stalked my via livejournal and seeing me reading in Barnes and Noble, we really did get lost. It wasn't a joke, and the two girls in the front seat were laughing. And even though it was my idea to go all I kept thinking is "great I am going to die in a stupid abandoned trailer park, I am going to die in FLORIDA"
With all of these stories, we always made it out alive. In the slave graveyard, the mental institution, the orange groves and abandoned churches, we always made it home safe. But every time these events occur, I cannot fall asleep until the sun comes up. And like a bad lover that I keep going back too, like a bad hang over, I always always say "I am not going to do this anymore-- never again."
But I have the same patterns with my drinks, my lovers, my vices and my thrills, I always, always absolutely cannot help myself. Before it's even over, and if it means I will have a night lite until the day I die, I just keep on going back for more. I just keep on going back for more.
photographs:
ohadhominem.fotki.com
