It’s All Over But the Crying, The Sequel
Halloween is on the periphery and so the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer is playing on the movie channel. The main premise, from what I could gather, is that a bunch of teens who have really nice lives are about to have something really shitty happen to them. This is the main setup for most horror movies, but it’s also the standard plotline for classic literature as well. There’s usually some problem that occurs, some conundrum which has to be overcome. And depending on the mental landscape of the author, the novel will end either good or bad. This is how it happens in the aforementioned movie: it opens at a beauty pageant, and the portrayal of high hopes and dreams, all of which come to a halt when these totally unlikable people hit and run a fisherman walking down the road in the middle of the night (and then, in a total oversight by the people who wrote this sad act of subversion, decide inexplicably not to report it although the driver was not drinking and it was an accident, opting instead for discarding the body in the sea). From here on out, or for the next 20 minutes that I decide to watch this movie out of pure inertia, things get really bad as the main characters are haunted by the person they have hit. And you find yourself cheering for the destruction of these people and their nice lives. I never really do find out how it ends, but probably not without a whole bunch of bloodshed and at least one or two characters who survive, which has the built-in capability of a sequel and more bloodshed. They will rejoin, and things will be more or less OK as before, but not without the hint that something bad may happen again.

The main exception to the demonstrated plotline happens to be if you’re reading existential literature, which almost always begins and ends bad. If you’re reading Kafka or Dostoevsky or something like that, you can pretty much rest assured that it’s going to depress you in some all-encompassing way. Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins with the protagonist waking up one day as an oversized bug and then experiencing the ensuing torture and alienation from his family, who throw apples at him and taunt him before he dies a lonely and abject death. And it’s hard, in the end, to figure out which plotline is more honest and true to life. While the good, bad, good plotline seems most rewarding to read, it might be less true than the bad/ bad plotline. But it may also be a matter of perception, and require something of more of the reader. If you have an upbeat outlook you might be more prone to think that things end awesomely, in the end. And if you’re the proverbial half-empty kind of person, you might be more prone to reading the Existentialists. I’m not really sure.

It was in the spirit of horror that we went to a Halloween party last night. I looked futily for a costume before deciding on the following mantra that I told to anyone who asked: fuck Halloween. I really just cannot be bothered with all of this costume wearing. Although, the truth is, I really just cannot be bothered with much. And it was in this spirit, probably, that I found myself sitting alone in a corner, not costumed or having too much fun, which seems to be a fairly consistent with how I normally situate myself in a room with others. When people ask me where my costume is I tell them that I’m a raging alcoholic before swigging from a bottle of whiskey. I am, in truth, not the best houseguest. And it’s not too long before I realize, amongst the revelers, that this party may just be the preseason warm up to the high school reunion that’s coming. Most of these people look vaguely familiar from somewhere, but it’s disorienting because everybody’s in costume. And I probably wouldn’t recognize anyone anyway. The only person I really recognize is AL, but he’s not in costume anyway while continuously petitioning for the best costume award.

It’s hard to say what my deal is exactly. I continue to romanticize my life as though it’s taking place within a movie. And it’s always the epiphanic moment of realization, the static moment of crappiness which reveals itself to me. All I want to do is get the hell out of here—go back into my attic lair and get away from here. I am ruminating over a faux-headstone when some girl dressed as a vampire comes over and starts talking to me. We went to the same high school, although we have no apparent recollection of one another. She works for the state and takes the bus to work everyday, she ends up telling me. We talk a while before settling on nothing more to say. “Say,” she says before walking off, “you’re one of those loner-types, aren’t you? One of those guys who just hangs out by himself a lot. That’s the way you seem to me.” I have no idea of how to respond to this inquiry. Is it that transparent, showing right through my veneer of attempted civility? “—Uh, yeah, I guess,” I chortle, not knowing what to say, “—I guess I kind of am.” I check my watch once more before realizing, much to my horror, that the clocks get set back an hour tonight, and that this night is never going to end. Most of the revelers will interpret this as an extra hour of partying, but to me it has come as a sign from above that I have done horrible things in a prior life, as I have to give said revelers a ride home tonight.

The plotline of your own life, it turns out, is easily discernable in hindsight. It’s easy, in the here and now, to look and see, peeling back the curtain and taking a look, to know exactly where you have come from, and how things add up. And maybe it’s the future that’s not uncertain, usually indicative of the past. A random look at my bookshelf might reveal all kinds of things about me, but I haven’t really read anything in a while, opting instead for b-grade horror movies. I end up telling a friend what I did today, that I watched part of I Know What You Did Last Summer on TV. “Oh, that’s a pretty good one,” he says to me. “Did you know they made a sequel?—I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or I Will Never Forget What You Did Last Summer?” He thinks it over a second. “No, wait: I think it was called I Will Never Ever Forget What You Did Last Summer.” I cannot believe. It seems inconceivably bad, but I guess it could be true. Happy Halloween, motherfuckers.