And fear, they say,
is the price of imagination. It paints with darkest colours, creating a
sprawling network of horrible lines from one random dot on a canvas.
Which happened, I
guess, in those young & innocent days of watching the X-Files and thinking to death about that final scene where a man is
buried alive. The very last shot was him twenty feet underground, knocking
against the hopelessly shut lid of the casket. The gravest idea of all. The
fear of all fears.
Two 15-year old girls
in the schoolyard, smoking. Looking so incredibly cool, we were all doing our
best to impress them. Smoking, swearing, dressing up. But nothing ever worked,
until one day I started telling them about Edgar Allen Poe’s story called
“Premature Burial”. And their eyes glowed.
They were horrified
and amazed in equal measure. And that’s when I knew I got them. And then I had
that smoke.
