Happy Halloween, Ghouls and Gals....

Tomorrow is Halloween. I love this holiday. It is the one day a year you can be anyone you want to be and not worry about being thought of as kooky or odd. I don't dress up anymore but my kids do. I am allergic to Halloween makeup. It chemically burns my face and both my kids were born with my extra sensitive skin (I am sure they are thrilled about that) leaving us to be more creative when creating costumes.

I may be scared of almost everything but the one thing that does not scare me is haunts. People dressed up in creepy costumes walking around, jumping out at you with props, bad lighting, fog machines and eerie sound effects don't bother me in the least. Give me someone coughing in my direction and I am totally freaked out. Give me some asshat in a clown costume with a chainsaw without the blade making moaning noises at me and I laugh. It seems ridiculous to me. They can't hurt you, the common cold can....

A few years ago my oldest and I were trick or treating when we had to walk up on this guy's porch. It was dark and he had so many decorations in the yard that you had to walk all the way around just to go up the steps. He was sitting in the corner decked out in some monstrous skeletal costume. My oldest was completely freaked out. I elbowed him gently with a fake smile plastered on my face and whispered through my teeth,"just take the candy and let's go". I wasn't scared but the weird slow movements the guy was making as he was going to give my kid the candy made me a tad bit uncomfortable. It was almost as if he was  robotic in movement and he was completely silent. He got his hand about three inches from my kid and my kid bolted. I have never seen him move so fast in his entire life. He jumped off of the porch with so much speed and force he took out half of the creepy guy's yard decorations and almost knocked over some big dude standing there chatting with other trick or treater's parents. I was left there with creepy guy unsure of what to do, so I held out my hand for the candy he still had in his hand and kept the fake smile plastered on my face and mouthed sorry at him. I mean, I am not sure what protocol you are supposed to go through when someone scares your kid so badly they actually end up destroying half of their Halloween display.

Anyway we currently avoid that house, partly out of embarrassment and partly because I prefer my children to not have nightmares every night for the next six years of their lives. When my kids stop trick or treating and they want to stay home to pass out candy to the other kids, maybe I will dress up and we will decorate the yard. I will just make sure not to be too scary for the kids or make odd robotic movements because that shit is super creepy, even to people like me that find all of this "scary" stuff ridiculous.

Hope you all have a safe and happy Halloween! Happy Halloween Ghouls and Gals!

Neurotic Nelly

Happy Halloweeeeeen.....

Happy Halloween everyone! Well it could be more happy if I hadn't slept til one in the afternoon. I have a good reason for this, though. It started when my kids brought home a stomach virus at the end of last week. Thinking after they got better the hubby and I were in the clear we felt safe to go back to our regular routine, never knowing it would be curtains for us. We were doomed before we even got started.

Fast forward to yesterday as my husband was stricken down at work by this vile bug. While taking care of him  with extra blankets, gatoraide, soup and crackers,  he looked at me with a sad regretful warning of great concern and in a soft yet ominous whisper stated,"Your're next."

I did not appreciate that statement. After all,  I am the queen of denial..
Now as someone with OCD I can deny with the best of them. It comes with the territory. I can pretend everything is fine. I can pretend I am completely normal. I can deny and pretend until I cant anymore, so I was all : I am not going down like that. I am not going to get this sickness. I am invincible.

I was sure I would be fine. Sure I would not become a causality of this stomach bug. Sure I was stronger than everyone else, I am after all, Mom.

I am sick. My head feels like a group of miniature angry leprechauns are trying to force their way out of my eye socket with tiny jackhammers. My stomach is making sounds that resemble a boiling tar pit. I have decided food is completely overrated at this point and am avoiding it. I am paler than usual and my joints are so painful I am actually already walking like a zombie. What fresh hell is this?

The hubby has to work til  late tonight so I am responsible for taking the kids trick or treating. We worked really hard on their costumes and I am not letting them down. To top it off it is supposed to thunderstorm really badly during the trick or treating hours. I will not be denied! I will be damned if something as paltry and ghastly as a simple stomach bug or thunder storm is going to ruin the one day a year kids are encouraged to dress like a weirdos and freaks and demand other people's candy with childhood blackmail.  I am not going down like that. I don't care if I have to drag my half dead body across the pavement in the middle of a raging typhoon. My children will not be denied their spoils of Halloween candy! You hear me? There will be spoils to be had in this house!!!!!

So, we are going to go trick or treating. I will try my best to stay away from everyone and not breathe on a single soul, although with the forecasted wind I doubt that will be a problem. I will take it slow and carry an umbrella and try not to "redecorate" anyone's lawn. I should be able to walk them up to a few houses at least and stand on the sidewalk while they go up on the porches and get the candy to make sure they are safe. I love Halloween and this really bites. Oh well, I am determined they will have a great time and then I am going to go home and vegetate in bed with warm tea and a cold compress.

At least I don't have to dress up this year, I already look like something drug out from the sewers. Have a safe and terrific Halloween everybody and in the spirit of ghosts and ghouls and all things creepy I will part this post with my favorite Halloween poem:

Crystal water turns to dark 

Where ere it's presence leaves it's mark 

And boiling currents pound like drums 

When something wicked this way comes... 

A presence dark invades the fair 

And gives the horses ample scare 

Chaos rains and panic fills the air 

When something wicked this way comes... 

    

Ill winds mark it's fearsome flight, 

And autumn branches creak with fright. 

The landscape turns to ashen crumbs, 

When something wicked this way comes... 

Flowers bloom as black as night 

Removing color from your sight 

Nightmarish vines block your way 

Thorns reach out to catch their prey 

And by the pricking of your thumbs 

Realize that their poison numbs 

From frightful blooms, rank odors seep 

Bats & beasties fly & creep 

'Cross this evil land, ill winds blow 

Despite the darkness, mushrooms glow 

All will rot & decompose 

For something wicked this way grows...

By Ray Bradbury

Neurotic Nelly

My Two Cents.....

It's coming......Halloween is  coming! I love Halloween and it's Fall weather. I love carving the pumpkins and  having all of the spiced hot beverages and cakes. I love the smell of the air rich and heavy with the scent of apple pies, hot apple cider, and pine needles. The delightful giggles of exited children as they get ready to go trick or treating.  The sound of rustling leaves that fall to the ground. I love the tiny and humorous costumes, I even like the scary ones.

 I was horrified by the " Fancy Mental Patient Costume" that was thankfully, recalled almost as quick as it hit the store shelves. I hated it simply, because it is not accurate of any mental patient ever. Who the hell do they base these ghastly things on? We are not the scary pictures of the past wide eyed and drooling. We are not crazed ax murderers or "leather faces". We are simply regular people, but that is not the image the word mental illness patient conjures in our minds. In our minds we see the past and all of it's scary implications, never fully realizing the truth behind them. That being said, I  have no issue with the Asylum type haunts and before you show up at my door with burning torches, pitchforks, and copious amounts of toilet paper; here is why.

There is no place quite so scary and creepy as an asylum. Not just because the buildings are dark, dilapidated, dank and vast in scale. Not just because they seem haunted by their past but because they are haunted by their past and every horrible thing that was perpetrated in those halls, those rooms, and those offices. There is really few places that contained more evil in them than state run institutions for what they called the "undesirables". People, even to this day, have warped images of the mentally ill, specifically because of the pictures from these times showing scary looking individuals in various states of confusion. It wasn't  that they actually looked like this normally, but rather this is what they looked like after they received treatment there. After they were locked away. After they were imprisoned. After they used as human lab rats.

To understand my opinion we have to go back in time. A small history lesson if you will. In America around 1907 a new fad was starting to take root and sweep through the world and by the 1920's it was all the rage. It was called eugenics. It sounds like a harmless enough word. It doesn't bring up scary or dangerous connotations. It sounds like a medical term, like maybe you fell down a flight of stairs and now you have to use eugenics to heal the broken bone. It sounds like a treatment option. It is not. This seemingly innocuous word should have struck fear in the hearts of millions but it didn't. Instead it was commonly swept under the rug and not discussed openly. You would be worried using the terms we would use today to describe it. It would be called discrimination, prejudice, genocide, and in some circles fascism.

Asylums were first built to embody beauty and cleanliness. They were to treat and help those that suffered. It was the common belief that the environment of those that were ill helped caused their ailments, therefore decent food and a beautiful view could help cure their illness. Asylums were ,strangely enough, supposed to offer security, safety, and hope for it's inhabitants. At some point asylums started to deteriorate. They became overcrowded, and as times changed so did the way people viewed what was mentally ill and what wasn't. It was common to find in their words "feeble minded, epileptic, insane, blind, deaf, inebriate, criminalistic, deformed, and dependent" people in asylums. They took in homeless people, alcoholics, women who suffered from postnatal depression or the loss of a child, the senile, the elderly, people suffering from end stage syphilis, those suffering from extreme poverty, and people they at the time considered to be sexual deviates (aka promiscuous women and homosexuals). Most  of these people would not be deemed insane today.

 In truth, eugenics is simply a belief that all disabilities are a sign of weakness. Natural selection is the holy grail of eugenics so believers held stead fast to the belief that those that were considered unfit should be sterilized. Lest they breed.  Many were open to doing human testing on those they found to be "undesirable" and some even were accepting of genocide. They encouraged doctors to test on patients and in some cases told them to let the patients die by neglect.

 To further prove my point, in 1907 some state run institutions received permission to sterilize (involuntarily and or unknowingly) and castrate some of their patients. The movement swept across state after state. This was some of the first horrors to await those that were institutionalized. Now to be clear this did not happen to just the mentally ill. It happened to anyone deemed by the various states that enacted this sort of "treatment" as undesirable. Their fear was that what they felt was "weakness" would continue to spread by hereditary means or that it was a genetic issue.  They wanted an illness free society. What they deemed to be a perfect normal civilization without any "issues".  They called it survival of the fittest. They took Darwin's idea of natural selection and they wanted to be the ones to inflict it. Therefore, it was becoming common practice to sterilize these "unfortunates" to prevent spread of anything they deemed unworthy. Sterilization also was done in some prisons and other state ran institutions. It did not matter if your only crime was your mother had gone insane from end stage syphilis, you could be involuntarily sterilized if they thought you were also undesirable. In fact, America led the world in it's sterilizations of the mentally ill or otherwise "unfit" between 1907-1939 sterilizing 30,000 people in 29 states.

Since it was now accepted to believe that those that dwelled in asylums were less than human, it should be no surprise that scientific experiments were to become many patients fate. First it was so called "treatments" to cure the mentally ill such as restraints, lobotomies, bleeding, purging, isolation, freezing ice baths, sensory deprivation, electroshock at high intervals, and injections of various fluids. Treatments that today would be called what they actually are, torture. Then it was trial testing time. Just to list a few "tests" done on the mentally ill, mentally disabled, and "undesirables": Injections of radium to mentally ill people to see it's affects. Injections of malaria, flu virus, syphilis and other diseases. Freezing them for hours in  locked refrigerated drawers to test how frigid temperatures affect  mentally illness. Trying to erase their memory by drug- electroshock- and then sensory deprivation induced comas for up to three months while playing repetitive sound loops constantly. Feeding mentally disabled children food with extract of fecal matter containing the Hepatitis virus as a condition for admission into an institution.(The parents were told the condition was a vaccine).  Testing how medical procedures work. Secret investigational drug experiments....ect.  These tortures and tests were allowed to go on for 65 years. Sixty five years of the disabled and mentally ill being used as human guinea pigs. Sixty five years living squalid conditions, living with barred windows and locked in filthy rooms, inadequate care, food, and medicines and being mistreated. Often times left alone in soiled clothing, or left nude. Often times abused and beaten. Often times completely neglected. Sometimes left to die alone and scared. This is the cold hard reality. This was asylum life. Yes, there were some asylums that did not operate this way but many of them did. They got paid to participate in these barbaric experiments and they, in fact, willingly did so. After all, these people were no longer seen as human. They no longer were treated as someone's loved one or relative. These people simply ceased to exist as human beings to their caretakers. Some of these experiments were so bad that during the Nuremberg Trials, parts of the Nazi defense was that some of their experiments were further studies done on the American experiments we did on own people. If that doesn't make you physically ill, then I don't know what would.  We ended up helping them develop torture techniques by being equally as cruel to our own people just because they were different. We did it so well, in fact, that some of  the first people during the Holocaust to be mass sterilized and euthanized; shot and gassed were...you guessed it, the mentally ill, mentally challenged, and disabled. Not long after the first gassing of a prison population in 1939 they went on to murder their "undesirables" as well. With these people, the Nazi's developed their procedures which would later be used for the extermination camps and murders of hundreds of thousands of people. And the eugenics followers were so proud of what they had accomplished. They reveled in it. They were honored to be a part of it all:

After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it was spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:


"You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws. In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics." 

_According to Wikapedia_       _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics

So in conclusion I know exactly why people still hold on to long dead and inaccurate ideas of how the mentally ill look or act like. We all have these dark grainy black and white images of mental patients in our heads. They hype up the creepy factor and seem scary. We see them that way because in all honesty that is how they were portrayed when the old pictures were taken. They were viewed as inhuman and unworthy. The pictures show not really what mental illness looks like but how people can be so unbelievably cruel to one another. They were photographed like that to try to falsely prove to the masses that the mentally ill are unstable, dangerous, and scary. A propaganda, if you will, to make a disgusting movement such as eugenics seem plausible. The mentally ill were presented to the camera in way to terrify and condemn simply so they could achieve their end goal, eradication of all things different.  They, my friends were the first to promote stigma and it worked. It worked. It worked because still today in 2013, people conjure those black and white photographs in their minds.They believe the hype. The believe the stigma and all it entails. They keep making these ridiculous and insulting costumes. They still make horror movies about mentally ill patients on murderous rampages. The news papers and media jump at every chance to explain every horrible occurrence away on any mental illness they can use as an excuse. And yes, some may believe that crazy murderous villains ran loose in the asylums. They would be right, but it wasn't the patients that were the murderers. It wasn't the inhabitants that had blood on their hands or axes or scalpels, it was the doctors and staff. So I actually believe that asylums should be thing nightmares are made of. Because they were. I believe they should be Halloween fodder and haunts. I believe that anything associated with asylums should be vile, scary, and drudge up every horrid terrifying disgusting feeling one could ever remotely muster because that is exactly what living in one was like. That is exactly how the "inmates" felt. I believe that we should always look at asylums with wary glances and knots in our throats so that we NEVER sit idly by and let those horrors happen again. I am all for asylums being a bloody, gory,  haunt because they truly are haunted. Haunted with the pain and misery hammered down on people that had no way to defend themselves. Our past is haunting and despicable and we need to be reminded of it constantly so that we do not repeat past mistakes and past cruelties. We should all be forced to remember. We should truly know the place where stigma first gave birth. Leave the asylum haunts up, leave the scares and blood and fear, but change the character portrayal. Make the rampaging murderous ax wielders and "leather faces" wear white coats and stethoscopes instead. It would make it far more terrifying and way more accurate.

Just my two cents,
Neurotic Nelly