This I Know To Be True…

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

1. Life is tough, so grab a helmet, you’ll need it.

2. Love is an abstract concept until you have children – then you truly understand what your values are, what you actually care about, what you’d kill and die for.

3. Everywhere you look, there is something to be seen. You can find wisdom in the most unlikely of situations and people, even the things and people you don’t like – hell, you might learn even more from them than those within your preferred circles.

4. Nothing is predetermined. You can break the wheel of outrageous fortune and the predestiny of your genetics through hard work, soul-searching, reflection and self-awareness. You can overcome the destiny something or someone else laid out for you. The barriers begin, and end, with you.

5. Culture is stupid. (Well, mostly.) It will make you blindly follow rules, traditions, religious practices, often without the ability to tell you the source of the practice or the why. This is the path to danger, to ignorance; it is the thief of autonomy and intelligent assessment. Beware any that tell you to follow or obey without question, or do things just because “it’s the way it’s always been done.” (This is why my little family does Mexican and margaritas for Christmas lunch these days – because fuck roast chicken/turkey and boiled veggies on a scorching hot Australian summer’s day! We challenged tradition with a middle finger!)

6. There is always a bigger, better, badder dog than you out there, so be humble (and vigilant).

7. It’s in our natures to chase safety, yet safety and comfort seem to be antithetical to human growth. So, what I know to be true is: get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’ll challenge you to your best potential and make metal of your bones and soul.

8. Every song ever, regardless of the genre from which it spawned, sounds better as a metal/pop punk cover. End of discussion.

9. All writers are assuredly bigger masochists than even the Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Not even a flensing knife can get under a writer’s skin (in the best and worst ways) quite the way writing can! (Nyarrrr, this is the life we chose!)

10. Horror is the most literary genre of all fiction genres. (Well, for books – jury’s still out on whether all horror films qualify in the same way.) The simple reason is it always has something to say, even if the creator didn’t intend it. More than any genre, it captures the zeitgeist so perfectly to put into spotlight all of a particular era’s social anxieties and fears – and of course, those of the author themselves.  The use of monsters/violence/nightmarish imagery etc, often the most criticised elements by  horror naysayers, are usually symbolic, metaphoric, or simple a vehicle driving the “B Story“, the meaning, the sum of the themes. (Okay, fine, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; a Hostel-esque torture porn is sometimes just torture porn for the ghoulish sake of it and doesn’t mean anything – fine, fight me.)

Nine times out of ten, however, whether intentional or not, horror always means something below the surface story. It’s also the only genre with enough chutzpah to go into the dark, uncomfortable places we fear to tread, and by participating, we see ourselves as we are without the comfort of self-delusion or the masks we wear for everyone else. It’s ugly, it’s dirty, it’s our sordid secret heart, it’s… almost a form of shadow work, if you let it be!