Dark Story Discussion 1/10/08: "Hole" by Dr Mabeuse

[dr_mabeuse]

This story presents certain challenges just in presenting it. I don't want to bias the discussion too much, but quite honestly, for me it's a story that failed--an interesting premise that I couldn't quite think of anything to do with--and I'd like to know if anyone has any better ideas. But then I'd also like to know, given the direction I did take it, how does it work for you?

This is a different kind of horror than the two stories, we've had so far: strange horror, horror that picks out the threat in the commonplace--Jim Morrison horror, the kind of horror you develop a sense for from substance abuse. Freud supposedly said that the uncanny is really "the familiar that one cannot bear to recognize" and it's something like that: the familiar one doesn't want to think about. If most horror is hallucinatory, this kind of horror is paranoid. It sees meanings where most of us see none. I love horror like this because it's "real". You just have to squint your mind a little to see it.

Other than asking how else you might treat the initial premise, I'm open to general comments on the story as story.

Anyhow, here's the story. Only 2 pages. Called "Hole"

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=333655

 

[fieryjen]

It scared the crap out of me. The horror was definitely accomplished in this piece.

For the most part, the story does work for me. The ending doesn't, though. I'm still trying to figure out why not.

I will let you know once I have figured it out.

 

[secretme]

Okay, so I reread the story. I think that I'd like to know exactly what your intention was during the writing process. In the e-mail you sent me you said that you were trying to explore the internal side and you mentioned beauty. I'm sorry I don't have the e-mail any longer. But I remember thinking, when I read the e-mail and that comment in particular, that I didn't see any images in this that relate to beauty. You may have had trouble with the ending, flow, and general content of the story because your intent while writing was not meshing with the topic you were writing. I'm guess that there are probably ways of showing beauty in erotic horror. Constrasting possibly the soft and seductive nature of sex with something terrifying and surreal like the images you portrayed so well in this story. But like I said, I guess I really want to know what you were trying to say with it to make a more educated opinion of why some of the images didn't work well.

In terms of the ending it seemed cut off. Like it was just before you reached the point and then suddenly "the end". I'm still not quite sure why I feel like that. I think I'll read it again and see if I can figure it out.

 

[secretme]

Maybe the problem with the ending has to do with the build up it was given. If the heart is the culmination of all the cold and dirty and obscene secrets of people, then anal sex almost seems too tame. Like if you're drawing a parallel between the heart and what they end up doing in the end of the story, it seems that you haven't taken the scene itself far enough.

And one VERY small point that threw me out of the image at the end: "peristaltic" is usually used when referring to intestines or the esophagus, some muscle moving food. Is that what you meant? Were you trying to compare the ooze in the heart to food? I'm not real sure that this is the right word. I don't think I would have mentioned it if it weren't for that scene being the last one the reader is left with as he's finishing the story. I'm not really trying to be that picky. It was just something that I noticed.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Jen, I'm really thrilled that you found the story scary, which is about the highest honor I can imagine for it. And Secretme, I'm really glad to see you here and honored that you've joined the discussion. I'm dying to answer your questions, but let me give some more people time to chime in before I tip my hand on what I was trying to do.

I can say this much, reading it over now, it's very different from what I remember. The typos alone! My apologies. That's what working without an editor gets you. And the ending, which seemed slightly wry at the time, now does indeed seem truncated and much too abrupt, more like a crash landing.

 

[Penelope Street]

Hi Zoot,

This story is like some weird dream that just keeps getting weirder until you wake up and ask yourself, "What was that about?"

I'm curious why this tale begins with the boys, though their scene is entertaining enough to be the highlight of the story. Later, Ray explains to Jill the profound meaning of digging holes, which seems a bit redundant with the opening and made me wonder why the story didn't just start with the adults going to see what had frightened the boys.

Depending on the goal of the story, it all might have worked better had the adults found nothing in the hole. Or maybe something the other kids in the neighborhood buried there as a Halloween prank?

With that unidentified thing in the yard, I was in no mood for intimacy, even if they were. While both characters have some depth, neither came across as someone I really wanted to spend time with. I also found some of the analogies during the sexual moments jarring. Like the harpoon, something a man sticks in a whale to kill it. What's the intended message there? And was there some purpose to the wavering perspective, especially during the explicit moments? There is one moment where she cries out for him not to stop and then the next thing he does is stop. And she doesn't seem to even notice, let alone mind. Was that supposed to be just strange or what?

I kept expecting the couple's noise to wake Billy. Instead of wandering downstairs and getting your story rejected, I thought he'd look out the window and see something in the yard that tied it all together- though I have no clue what that would be! If the idea is just that memories of youth and digging can evoke primitive urges and lead to rough sex, I guess that could work, but this tale is in the horror section, so it's meant to be something other than an elaborate sexy romp, right?

The story does have a few eerie moments. The creepiest is when Ray disappears, leaving a trail to the trees. I was thinking, "Don't stand there and call his name- run!" The whole "I had to wash out my mouth" was something of a let down.

Later, when the couple's back in the house, I began to feel anxious again- all the talk about violating nature and nasty secrets and ugly things buried, I feared Ray might do something ugly to Jill. Though I really didn't want the story to go there, that doesn't mean it shouldn't have. It would have been a natural, if unpleasant, continuation.

So it's kinda spooky here and there, but not even sexy.

With characters and prose both rich to almost a fault, I have to think there's something to it all beyond a couple becoming mysteriously aroused after finding an unknown organism living beneath their backyard, but what?

Excellent story to discuss! Thank you.

Take Care,
Penny

 

[manyeyedhydra]

I loved the prose and setup for this, very rich and atmospheric. There's a nice creepy feeling crawling through the centre of the story.

My main criticism would also be the suddenness of the ending, but I also know I'm biased towards a certain type of story. As Dr M. said this is different type of horror story and I know I'm fairly inept at spotting the subtle nuances of this type of tale, but I'll try my best

I really liked the setup and how you introduced weirdness into an everyday setting. The metaphorical reasoning behind the kids digging the hole was fantastic.

I wasn't sure on Ray and Jill. They didn't seem to act like natural characters to me, Ray in particular. His emotional state seemed to be lurching all over the place. I also thought his dialogue seemed a little forced, like you were putting words into his mouth because they contributed to the atmosphere of the story rather than because they were something he might say.

Of course this might have been the intention as he was exposed to the slime from the vein. I'm fairly blind to these things.

While I love the metaphorical nature of the hole and digging in the dirt (the peter gabriel track just came to mind for some reason) there was a point in the second half of the story where I felt I was being beaten over the head with it, might have been this paragraph:

"God, I don't know! Remembering that hole, the digging, the darkness. It was perverted, Jill. I was only seven or eight but it was perverted somehow, it was shameful. There's some part of me that wants to go back out there again to that hole, that remembers that, that need to dig and get deep in the earth, get below the surface where there's no light and where nothing lives, to push myself in there, Jill, to get down into that darkness. God, I hardly understand it myself, but I want to dig, I want to dig deep. That hole, baby, that hole...

I like the initial premise. I think it needs a longer tale. Maybe something along the lines of seeing a small town slowly disintegrate as whatever is in the ground brings their primal natures to the fore.

I suspect this is me being too obvious. I'm probably not squinting hard enough

Thanks for sharing the tale though. I loved the atmosphere in this.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Okay, let me tell you the story behind this story.

I had this great horrific vision for a Halloween story—two kids digging a hole in their backyard and uncovering a giant artery in the ground. I saw them standing there in the cold October dusk with the leaves blowing around them facing this dirty organic thing roiling around in a sexual kind of way as some sludge flowed through it and suddenly realizing that the earth was on some way alive and that people infested it like maggots on a peach and this vision creeped me out deeply and haunted me. "Why is this so scary?" I asked myself. "Why is it so disgusting? What can I do with this image?"

My stories often start with an image like this, and usually by playing with them and shaking them around a story will fall out, but with this one I couldn't find the story.

I remembered that when I was a kid of about 11 or so—just before puberty—me and my friends went through a phase of obsessive hole-digging. My own son did too at about that age, and thinking back upon it it occurred to me that it had been in some way sexual, a kind of rite of passage. It was a way of proving our manhoods by undertaking a kind of primitive construction project, but there was also something sexual in it in the way we were looking for something or penetrating the ground. Something secret and shameful about it too, this very primal form of male sexuality, almost tribal and magical. Once I realized that, I really became obsessed with this story. It became some sort of archetype for me, a very powerful symbol, but I still had no story to go with the symbol.

So I started writing hoping the story would reveal itself. I wrote the part with the boys, and that seemed okay, and then the mother and her boyfriend coming to investigate, and I thought that part was lovely. The weather was lovely. (I don’t like to brag, but I always do weather well—atmosphere. I always give it a lot of attention.) I added a heart to the vein because it seemed right and it was frightening, and so I had a nice creepy start to a story. And then I was just stuck. Terribly, frustratingly stuck. I had this rich, symbolic image loaded with sexual overtones--scary too--and I had no story to go with it. Would should happen next?

I knew they had to have sex. The symbolism between digging a hole and sex was just too apparent to ignore. Even the "peristaltic" movement of the artery and the beating of the heart were blatantly sexual; the way the trees tossed in the wind--that whole scene was reeking of sex.

Originally I had Ray touch the goo in the hole and then run off into the trees and come back turned into a monster, a satyr—a regular goat man, a creature of the earth—and then rape Jill right then and there, but that didn't seem to work or go anywhere so I decided to have them go back to the house and have sex and have his "infection" show more gradually. I pictures them sitting in the house and tension building as he sort of disintegrated. Maybe more veins would start popping up around the house as he confessed to Jill the sins of being a man. Maybe this would be the night that the earth became saturated with evil and had a heart attack, something like that. I'd play it by ear.

I cut the satyr part and instead had him come back from the stream wiping his mouth and complaining about puking—that part Penny picked out as being so unsatisfying—and I had him lamely telling Jill he didn't know what that thing was.

Anyhow… They go in the house and I still don’t have a damned story. What I do have by this time is a powerful image of digging a hole in Mother Earth and all the symbolic associations Id come up with after about a week of thinking about what that image might mean psychologically—how people bury evil underground, how fucking is like digging, looking for a woman's true nature, how a vagina's like a hole, how a woman is like a hole, how death is like a hole (there's a lot of things that are like a hole, believe me), and all these ideas started pouring out onto the paper as Ray just starts blathering and the story gets totally away from me. When you don't have a plot, it's amazing the amount of exposition you can come up with to fill space.

In the end I'm reduced to using the analogy of the anus as hole and they have anal sex. The scene becomes surreal and space translocates and I'm no longer consciously aware of what my story means. I'm simply doing what feels right to me, and I was aiming at a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect where fucking Jill becomes the same as falling into the hole becomes the same as sexual surrender becomes the same as ceasing to exist becomes the same as a kind of narrative black hole. What was supposed to be a kind of witty Rod Serling-esque Twilight Zone ending now appears abrupt and unexpected and wholly unsatisfying.

So what you've got here is—quite literally—a writer who doesn't know what he's doing. I knew what was happening up to the point where Ray comes back from the stream, and from then on I was making it up as I went along, hoping a plot would reveal itself to me, and it never did. I had doubts about even posting it, but you never know what people will like…

I had some ideas. Originally I was thinking that the vein in the earth contained pure wickedness, the combined evil of mankind. This is a kind of trite idea for me (the idea of "evil" as something concrete is something I have a hard time accepting. I think it's a very Christian idea and I'm not Christian.), but I was willing to go with it to save the story. Then Ray would have become evil and chased Jill around a la Stephen King. But as I say, I'm not big on morality plays. Horror for me is beyond morality. It's the strange, the heart in the earth, the a-moral, bigger than God.

My other idea was to take the sex-as-digging thing to its logical extreme and have Ray flip out and want to fuck Jill through in a hole in her heart. This sounds like a variation on the Stephen King theme above, but I would have handled it differently. He would have been more like a force of nature than a crazed killer, and she might have even agreed to let him. Who's not been so moved by passion that they haven't talked or teased about fucking or being fucked "all over"? The story does crescendo in emotional tone towards the end and the emotion is lust, and this is one of the emotions I was trying to get to, the male phallic possessive frenzy that parallels the way Ray uses his cock and the way the boys use their pick and shovel. Ray's getting excited by his "dirty" talk and we're waiting for something hugely obscene to happen, but it never does.

Having read the comments on Scold's Bridle and Succubus for Xmas, I've been rethinking the story now and thinking that maybe I should focus more on Jill and Ray. They weren't meant to be especially likeable. I'd pictured them as trailer trash, more or less—a woman who gives Nyquil to her kid to knock him out and a guy who swills rum and coke as a mouth freshener after brushing his teeth after vomiting—but still, picturing something happening between them back at the house could give some shape or context to what's found in the ground. I think I was instinctively poking at this when I brought up her affair with the cop but I didn't follow it up. The thing in the ground wants to be a symbol of their discord.

This story is an example of what I call "Observational Horror". The horror comes not from what people do, but from a shift in perspective about how things are. Ray Bradbury and Robert Beaumont used to be masters of this kind of horror. I think it was Bradbury who wrote a story about a man who became morbidly obsessed with the idea of having a skeleton inside of himself as if it were a separate entity and so one night he finally flipped and set about trying to crush it and cut it our of his own flesh. The story was written so that you could clearly feel his discomfort and at the end you were uneasy about your own skeleton as well.

This story too is supposed to make you a little uneasy about the things that are under the earth, out of sight. The problem is, how do I translate that unease into a story?

Anyway. This is what I know so far.

--Zoot

 

[Black Tulip]

As usual, I will post my comments before reading the rest of the thread.
So, please forgive any redundancy.

This story is not so much horror for me. I'd place it firmly in the dark corner.
It's poking the scary dark things inside of us (although the weird thing in the back yard seems like something evil from a classic horror).

I wasn't scared, but fascinated. Maybe that says more about me, than about the story though.
The first paragraph was very good. In fact, it immediately brought to mind that one time my son tore up the entire sandpit to the outrage of all mothers in the neighborhood. Said he was trying to reach China, yup.

Since I don't know what you aimed for, Doc, I'll happily fill in the blanks.

...the limits of her, the thing that would stop him from plunging into the darkness and falling all the way through her and through the very world into the dark space of nothingness...

To me, that's a fascinating statement. But it left me wanting more ... more story, more information, more understanding ... I don't know. It didn't feel right to end it there.

Exploring comes to mind.
Digging into the forbidden.
Uncovering secrets.
Going too deep.
Fear of losing oneself into ... darkness/evil/sickness of mind.

If that is what you were aiming for I think you rushed it. There could have been more tension by suggesting the behavior of the adults was orchestrated by "the hole", and the fear/repulsion in the boys could have been expanded on.
Or, you could have ended with a suggestion of the evil spreading, maybe something from the boy upstairs or from outside. The wildly swaying trees and the wind you used could give you the connection.

...There was a gusty, insistent wind and the trees were tossing as if in fitful dreams. The clouds were sliding like razors across the moon, and everything seemed to be fleeing, fleeing... and autumn seemed to have the world by the throat.

I really liked this a lot. Your choice of words gave me an image of a stormy night where evil things might be lurking.

All in all, I liked the story but not as a sexually arousing one. Well, only slightly. The sex was done ok, but more as part of the whole. Does that make any sense?
Like I said, it was more fascinating, where is he going with this, what IS that thing, what will happen next. You could have the start for a really scary story here. Evil taking over the entire town. LOL

Going through the story in a nitpicky way, I found the following:

Somewhere in the beginning you have a whole paragraph that consists of one sentence.
It also has this: Billy's Dad's pick. I had trouble reading that, but that could be me.

And their instincts were right. There instincts were right

It's the only error I found.

"Holy shit!" Jason said, because they talked like that when they were alone,

Nice little addition.

and Jason swore more because his father was dead.

Now it gets confusing because later on it says:

Since his father had left his mother for his karate instructor, Jason had given a lot of thought to monsters and was terrified of them...

You had me going back to figure out which boy was which and I think it should have been Billy because you said his dad had left them.
Moreover, it gave me a slight headache to find out who's mother came looking at the hole. LOL

Jason ran for home as fast as he could, and try as he might, he couldn't stop the horrible sound that came from his mouth, like the a wounded animal might make.

Hm, this came as a total surprise to me. Maybe I missed something, but for me this came out of the blue.

Jesus, Ray! What is that?"

Something went wrong here because in the story you can see the [ ].

Maybe the earth is growing a set of kidneys or something. I'm just not messing with it!"

I think it's better to chose a different organ, perhaps a boil to emphasize the sickness?

I liked the way you made the transition from the cold/dead to the hot/living.

Well, that's all for now. I'm off to read the other comments.

 

[secretme]

I've never seen anything wrong with letting a story write itself. Sometimes that's the only way for it to happen. I think that it hasn't totally gotten out of hand in this case. Maybe you just stopped too soon.

I'm not going to add any more to the conversation about the middle except to say that I agree with the previous comments. There have been some very insightful things said.

The story starting with the boys makes me feel like the story should end with them. Then again the parts with the adults I thought gave the same kind of information but in a better way. Maybe the types of incites you related through the boys at the beginning would have been better dealt with as reminiscence through Ray, if you want to keep the beginning. But I've often found that the beginning of my stories is just me getting the idea started and then I usually drop the redundant setup and find myself thinking that several pages was a better beginning.

I find myself asking what you wanted me left with after it was over and thinking that would be a good place to keep going. Like was the heart just a Halloween thing or will it still be there when they wake up? You have the setting so realistic, I was waiting for a more realistic explanation of the the thing or for you to take it farther. Will they call for help and have everyone think they're crazy or will the entire town be turned upside down? Will the thing continue to be a monster of unknown origins or turn out to be some kind of science experiment?

I think you could still get across the metaphoric meaning you're trying to do and also give it an ending that would satisfy the general reader. As it sits I can see your point as to why you would have thought the ending covered what you wanted. But it definitely needs to go a bit farther. You let it write itself thus far. Perhaps you should sit down and see what else comes out?

 

[manyeyedhydra]

But it definitely needs to go a bit farther. You let it write itself thus far. Perhaps you should sit down and see what else comes out?

I'll echo that. The image and the starting scene is really strong.

When I was thinking of possible directions I got this image of a staid small-town church descending into a frantic orgy while something dark grows and pulses through the soil beneath them.

 

[fieryjen]

I'm glad you're thrilled that I'm scared, but I do have to tell you that I can't even watch the x-files without getting nightmares.

Towards the end of the story I pretty much assumed that it was some sort of evil they had dug up, and that it was spreading slowly - and it appears that was your intent, at least partially. But I was expecting you to do a bit more with it, especially since, as already mentioned, the ending is too abrupt.

The endings I find the most haunting are those that suggest everything is basically alright again, and the evil is gone - and there are just some very subtle clues that this is not the case. It doesn't end with a feeling of shock, but with a creeping doubt, maybe something you can't even quite put your finger on, but that keeps haunting you. That's the sort of ending I might have liked to find in a story like this (or maybe not... it freaked me out enough as it is ).

 

[Penelope Street]

I had this great horrific vision for a Halloween story—two kids digging a hole in their backyard and uncovering a giant artery in the ground. I saw them standing there in the cold October dusk with the leaves blowing around them facing this dirty organic thing roiling around in a sexual kind of way as some sludge flowed through it and suddenly realizing that the earth was on some way alive and that people infested it like maggots on a peach and this vision creeped me out deeply and haunted me.

I don't have any problem believing two kids could dig up something unusual and imagine it to be a giant artery and then maybe leap to the conclusion that the earth was a living entity. But I'm not a kid and I know how many holes we've dug in this planet, so I'm not willing to believe two children are going dig a few feet down in their backyard and discover something so, well, earth-shattering.

They weren't meant to be especially likeable. I'd pictured them as trailer trash, more or less—a woman who gives Nyquil to her kid to knock him out and a guy who swills rum and coke as a mouth freshener after brushing his teeth after vomiting—

In that case, great job!

I knew they had to have sex. The symbolism between digging a hole and sex was just too apparent to ignore. Even the "peristaltic" movement of the artery and the beating of the heart were blatantly sexual; the way the trees tossed in the wind--that whole scene was reeking of sex.

I don't find anything sexual about digging in the dirt, except maybe getting all hot and sweaty while doing it.

If the earth was a living entity and decided to get rid of the maggots, that could make for a horror story, but I don't think there's anything sexual about it.

Originally I had Ray touch the goo in the hole and then run off into the trees and come back turned into a monster, a satyr—a regular goat man, a creature of the earth—and then rape Jill right then and there, but that didn't seem to work or go anywhere

Why doesn't that work? And why does the story need to go anywhere else after that? If digging in the earth is like sex, then it's like rape too because the earth doesn't give her consent.

 

[Verdad]

Doc, my dear friend,

I wish I had something substantial to add to what I told you about this story when you first published it, but I'm afraid I'm still just as stuck.

As you know, I thought the opening scene excellent and its brand of horror haunting, much like other posters.

Again like others, though, I noticed some glitches, and above all, I noticed what you're aware of yourself: you didn't fully figure this one out.

The glitches—some redundancies and an occasional awkward line of dialogue—could be settled in a half an hour's time, but what you really need here is an idea, and the best I can do is to think a loud a little and see if it helps someone else.

As has been said a number of times since we've been discussing dark stories and/or stories with supernatural elements, no matter how many monsters one puts in a piece, the story is ultimately about people. You're therefore right in saying that more should transpire between the two adult characters in your story, but the question remains, what?

In trying to backtrack to the hole and figure it out from there, the first question I have to ask is, do you want the vein in the hole to be a 'real' supernatural entity with effective supernatural properties or would you rather it stayed metaphoric?

The moment the vein squirted on Ray, I sensed a turn toward a literal interpretation, and I have to say a lot of horror was lost for me right then. To cross over entirely into the literal and push the vein's 'magical' capabilities further, granting it a power to affect people beyond that of an omen or a passive catalyst, strikes me as naïve and potentially farcical.

Supposing that you feel the same—that you want the vein to stay primarily metaphoric, in a magical realism sort of way—we're back to figuring out its possible meanings and the way they could be mirrored in the rest of the story.

I should point out that you kept looking at the meaning of the hole, but neglected to think as much of the vein, and it seems to me it's really the vein that should be deciphered.

The hole-digging activity of the boys, for all the delicious significance you found in it, remains a perfectly quotidian pastime, and it's only the discovery of the vein that's out of the ordinary and thus in need of interpretation.

The vein is a truly creepy image/symbol, though, pulsating with this unspeakable biologic horror that makes me want to avert my eyes rather than examine it, and maybe you backtracked from it too. The associations it's giving me are something bursting, someone dying, time bomb, apoplectic stroke; the more I think about them, the more creeped out I am and the further I'm going away from anything erotic.

Still, there must be a way to connect the concepts, and perhaps it starts with straightening out the premises and asking the right questions.

I like to think of whatever the boys find in the hole as a reflection of their psyche, or more precisely, of the psyche of the boy whose mom we later follow. That makes the vein an image from this boy's dream, really, and the question we're left with is, why should this boy 'dream' of a pulsating vein?

Again, the uncomfortable first answer I'm coming up with is that the boy is worried for someone's health, worried that one of his parents, or a sibling if he has one, or even himself, might die. I don't know how much further I want to pursue this one for the purposes of a Lit story, but maybe someone else can, or maybe someone else has an alternative idea.

To get back to more sexual matters, maybe there's something Oedipal in the boy's disgust with the vein, maybe he's recently had to confront his mom's sexuality, her biological nature, and has trouble coming to terms with it. I don't know how much possibilities this one offers either, especially as it might lead to some dancing around the Lit rules.

Whatever this boy's preoccupation, though, it should be reflected in his mom's activities, and maybe it could be a good idea too to have the boy revisit the hole the next day and find the vein either gone or grown, depending on the outcomes of the previous night.

I think it could be a good idea too not to have the grown ups visit the hole at all, but rather do whatever they'd planned to do that night. That way you'd start uncovering the parallel level of the story immediately, instead of covering the same terrain twice.

In any case, these are just some random thoughts I'm typing out as they come. Perhaps someone else could run away with them, or share their own.

Best to you, as always,

Verdad

 

[secretme]

I agree with the metaphorical aspect being a better turn as well. If the adults had gone out to look, found nothing, and then you continued the use of the image through Ray's imagination and then what he eventually does to Jill... I think that may have continued the creepy feeling that the beginning brought about better. It's one thing for a couple kids to dig something up and let their imaginations run away with them. It's something entirely different for an adult to do the same. It's just not working here. It's kinda like the stephen king problem I always have. The story is great until he gives a solid, tangible, real image of the bad guy and then it all falls apart and isn't scary any more.

You do such a good job with imagery. If the adults went out to the hole and nothing was there, but strange things continued to happen, I think you would have had a better effect on the reader...

 

[jomar]

Hi Doc,

Nice story. I haven't read your post on the background so I'll make a couple of comments, read it then see.

For me, the weakest part was Ray (an asshole?) telling us about boys digging holes and what it all means. I found that too insightful and it seemed the conversation was used simply to tell us what you'd already told us in the third paragraph and last full paragraph. Ray's comments about people taking their sins to the earth, while good stuff, wouldn't come from a jerk like him. Maybe the old farmer who used to own the land and who has seen things back in the day, but not Ray.

I like this paragraph:

It was dark and hard to see, but the trees were all in a frenzy now, tossing and dancing wildly before the wind, and as he faced the spot where the hole was, he could feel something grip his heart, some dark force taking control of him on this Halloween, something that knew he was a creature of the earth too, and that what flowed through his veins ultimately flowed underground as well, that the secrets he carried could never be concealed beneath the rocks and dirt, the emotions he felt could never be consigned to the cold of deep, chthonic ground. Between the pebbles and the dirt and the blank tiny pockets of air, out of reach of the sucking root and the gnawing grub, in perfect darkness and absence of light, the sins of the world incubated. The offal and cast-off remnants of a harried world returned to soil and turned to atoms, bathed in microbes and fungi, and here grew the heart that had emerged in Jill's backyard. Here had appeared the vein that pulsed with such a thick and odious sludge.

So maybe you just need to have them talk about fucking and being hornier than ever and they become animals rutting while the wind howls and all and trust the imagery and the reader to get the message.

Ray looked down and he saw the place where secrets were buried, a place where you went to dig, never knowing what you'd find. He knew that the earth was filled with veins and arteries and that people were too, that their lives were secrets even to themselves, that ended up buried in the earth; that no matter how deep you dug, you'd never get to the truth, but that you had no choice but to dig and keep on digging; that that was your life as a man.

And I don't think Ray is smart enough to know this stuff. Maybe senses something driving him that he can't get away from or something.

The ending seemed too abrupt, or at least seemed to need something more. The last sentence felt awkward after the desperate sex.

You wrote some really strong images and had some very tense moments. I really like the wind rising along with their fear and passion. But overall, while there are scary and tense scenes/images, which you wrote very, very well, the whole thing is not really horror, or at least the hole hasn't done it's horrific work yet. As it ends, all the hole did was unleash passions and inhibitions. which isn't a bad thing at all.

Okay, off to read the background to your story.

 

[Black Tulip]

Ok, I had some time to think it over.

Considering your own clarification, here's my thoughts.

The substance from the vein seems to be contaminating in some way.
If that's the case the boys could be defenseless because of their age.
Ray as an adult, on the other hand, could try to exorcize it or ward it off by outrageous sexual behavior. Since it seems to be growing, revealing a heart of some sorts, that could be logical.

Doesn't matter to me much if the vein is real or not. Seeing that the hole brings Ray back to his own digging... perhaps looking deeper into his reasons for backing off then. The fear of loosing himself in the black nothingness? This could just as well result in him indeed losing 'it'. Thus spreading the evil on the surface by whatever act you may come up with.

Either way, I think Penelope hit the nail on the head with her remark about rape. You may not like it, but the story seems to be heading towards violence, not neccessarily sexual in the usual sense but that is up to you.

The trailer trash hint was good enough for me. I did think: huh? sedating the kid?

To me your most important question is:
do you dare to unearth more?
or
do you want to cover the evil up as fast as you can?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Reply Part I

Thank you all so much for replying. I was nervous about this one. I thought it might be too nebulous or weird to attract much response, but you guys didn't let me down. I'll try to respond in as much detail as I can.

As I say elsewhere, although I think the story is 85% failure, I think its goal is something to be proud of and I intend to pursue it further, so your analyses and input is much appreciated. This could be a little gem of a piece if I could only get the sucker right, or at least get it better than it is. If I could do that--get it to match the vision I have in my head--this would be a fine piece of erotic surreal horror. I think it could be an important story and it's certainly worth working on further, which is why I'm watching this discussion carefully and will respond ad nauseum. I appreciate all the attention you've given it.

I really liked the setup and how you introduced weirdness into an everyday setting..

Good. That's just what I was trying to do. That was my primary goal, to make reality scary again.

I like the initial premise. I think it needs a longer tale. Maybe something along the lines of seeing a small town slowly disintegrate as whatever is in the ground brings their primal natures to the fore.

Mmmm. I know what you mean about the disintegration of the small town (standing for the whole world), but I think we're talking novella then, many characters. I think I want this horror to be personal. But the "catastrophe" theme does seem to be one direction this could take.

For some reason though, I see this story as going the opposite way, contracting instead of expanding; drawing closer and tighter around the characters--from the outdoors to the house, from the house to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the bed, to penetration, to disappearance. Almost like a black hole.

I can see what you mean though, and I toyed with the idea of having veins start popping up all around the house. I was under some time constraint though. I actually wrote this as an afterthought, a second story for the Halloween contest. I'd been thinking about it for weeks but I wrote it in a matter of days.

All in all, I liked the story but not as a sexually arousing one. Well, only slightly. The sex was done ok, but more as part of the whole. Does that make any sense?
Like I said, it was more fascinating, where is he going with this, what IS that thing, what will happen next. You could have the start for a really scary story here. Evil taking over the entire town. LOL

Another vote for evil taking over the town! Interesting. Well, you wrote that before you saw my comments, but that's exactly the problem I had and why I brought the story here: What should happen next?

As for sexually arousing, I pretty much gave that up, I think. With having Ray spouting off like a broaching whale, I put all my eggs in the horror basket and didn't pay much attention to the sex. I don;t know how sexy you can be when you have an air of menace hanging over everything, when your male lead's losing his mind.

Maybe you just stopped too soon.

*L* In terms of a graceful ending, I definitely did. But in terms of plot, how would you have extended it? That's what I'm asking for. Did it need a murder? A transformation of Ray into a monster? The kid to wake up? Something to emerge from the hole?

I find myself asking what you wanted me left with after it was over and thinking that would be a good place to keep going. Like was the heart just a Halloween thing or will it still be there when they wake up? You have the setting so realistic, I was waiting for a more realistic explanation of the the thing or for you to take it farther. Will they call for help and have everyone think they're crazy or will the entire town be turned upside down? Will the thing continue to be a monster of unknown origins or turn out to be some kind of science experiment?

That's a clever way of looking at it: to think of what I want the reader left with and start from there. But what I'm looking for is a kind of vague, unsettled feeling. *L* Heartburn, maybe.

No, as I was saying up top, while I'm very unhappy with the execution of this story, I'm very proud of its goal, which is to link this kind of ineffable psychological horror of the underground with its dirt and darkness to sexual love. We're all aware of this link. We all talk about sex being "dirty" and we get off on it. Sex is beautiful, of course, but it also has its coarse and vulgar side, its shameful, abject side that scares and attracts us, and I think I came close to mining it in a pretty pure form here. Well, maybe not close, but I made a start. So this is more than a Halloween story to me. This is a story I'd keep and work on, This one's important. There's something about digging a hole that makes people stop and look, even today in big cities. It’s primal, archetypal, and (in my opinion) it's sexual, at least on a subconscious level, so this story matters to me and it bothers me a lot that I can't get it right. It wants to be said. It haunts me.

I don’t really think there's an explanation for the thing in the earth. Or maybe the explanation's that under certain circumstances, the earth grows veins and organs and becomes a living, sensing being and our digging hurts it like sex hurts and that's something we have to live with. The boys found a vein and the knowledge of that fact stirs up these deep emotional memories in Ray and changes his perceptions of sex and drives him mad. My goal as an author was to change my readers' perceptions of sex just enough to put that image in their mind—to plant that association between fucking and digging, the wildness of an October windstorm and the feelings of sexual desire, the slide into ecstasy and the fall into the dark, cold hole; orgasm and extinction. I'm linking the experience of digging a hole to the experience of sex and creating a metaphoric bridge, expanding the vocabulary of sensation. To me, that's one of the most important things that writers do: give us new ways of describing and therefore experiencing life itself. Making the reader's world bigger. It's like the most important thing another human being can do for you.

I understand your desire to have the problem resolved, to have the mystery solved and things returned to normal, to have our view of the world affirmed. "It was a hallucinogenic root and it made them high!" "It was a buried nerve gas canister and it was leaking! They're lucky they weren't killed!" But I prefer an insane world where veins really do grow in the earth. It's just the way I like things.

Perhaps you should sit down and see what else comes out?

I'd be willing, but I really need to pointed in some direction as I have no idea which way to go.

Not exactly true. I have some ideas. I'll talk about them after the comments.

I don't have any problem believing two kids could dig up something unusual and imagine it to be a giant artery and then maybe leap to the conclusion that the earth was a living entity. But I'm not a kid and I know how many holes we've dug in this planet, so I'm not willing to believe two children are going dig a few feet down in their backyard and discover something so, well, earth-shattering.

What can I say? Penny, you're such a romantic! Then I guess you just have to reject the entire premise of the story. But don't you also have to reject things like Poltergeist and ET too? I think both flicks influenced the choice of scene for the story, although I set it out in the rural Ohio trailer-trash sticks instead of middle-class suburbs because I wanted it to be deserted and I wanted a scraggly woods.

Why doesn't that [i.e. the version of the story where Ray, having touched the goo in the vein, runs down to the stream and emerges as a monstrous satyr and attacks and rapes Jill—dr.M.]work? And why does the story need to go anywhere else after that? If digging in the earth is like sex, then it's like rape too because the earth doesn't give her consent.

It worked on that level, on the man-into-monster level. But it seemed to have no point. It still didn’t answer what the vein was all about, and worse, it didn't explore the analogies between digging and exposing and sex.

No, when I had those boys dig that hole, I think I exposed something in my own imagination that really struck me and won't let me go. Maybe what I'm asking you for is impossible, because maybe only I feel so struck by this image and the urge to explain it. I have a feeling, for example, that this entire hole business is a male thing. Girls don’t go through this hole-digging phase in their life. They make mudpies or something. Boys dig. They're looking for something and they don't know what.

*L* I guess I'm still looking.

My comments will be continued below. Thanks again to the people above for your invaluable contribution.

 

[Jet Black]

Wow... Creepy. But amazing.

I'm seriously like.... I don't know. The last time I felt like this was was making out with a girl in a haunted house <_<'

Jesus. >_>'

 

[jomar]

Zoot, you asked where should it go from here. It'll come to you in the middle of the night or on a Tuesday afternoon at a stoplight.

In the meantime... You've already gave us a premise that people bury their secrets and lies in the earth. Or that the ground absorbs it as it occurs, maybe. The kids dig this hole and tear the vein by accident. So now it's off-gassing and releasing humanity's concentrated badness. It contaminates those who are exposed to it and brings out the evil that lies within us all.

They shy away from telling anybody about it because it gives them something and they don't want to share it. Those exposed get a sense of power, heightened passion, grandiosity, the world is brighter, they feel smarter and whatever. But they become callous, and mean and petty. Maybe even break a few of the 10 commandments.

So then you get to decide if it becomes a story of redemption and overcoming the 'id' or whether their morals and humanity decay so much that they get absorbed by the vein and become part of the muck.

Or something like that.

ETA: What if exposure somehow compelled Ray to resume digging holes? Searching for what he believes is be a pleasure vein. If there's this gross, scary vein then surely there's a one that leads to bliss. Could that provide a way to link between digging and exposing and sex?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Reply Part II

For fairness's sake, I should say that Verdad read the story before it was published and I asked her for help on this very issue: whether she could offer any ideas on where the story should go. Fat lot of good she was! No, I appreciated her help, but she was stuck too. That being said, I find these comments rather amazing, because we'd never discussed anything like this.

To get back to more sexual matters, maybe there's something Oedipal in the boy's disgust with the vein, maybe he's recently had to confront his mom's sexuality, her biological nature, and has trouble coming to terms with it. I don't know how much possibilities this one offers either, especially as it might lead to some dancing around the Lit rules.

Now that you mention it, you remind me of how important it was to me that both boys come from splintered families, one with a dead father, the other divorced. I didn’t consciously think why at the time, but I knew they had to be unbalanced families and I knew that Billy's (the boy whose house the vein would be found at) mom would be having sex that night with an unsavory boyfriend. There was definitely something Oedipal going through my mind.

Whatever this boy's preoccupation, though, it should be reflected in his mom's activities, and maybe it could be a good idea too to have the boy revisit the hole the next day and find the vein either gone or grown, depending on the outcomes of the previous night.

My God! Yes! This was my original idea! *L* I'd totally forgotten! I was going to have two boys and their little sister find the vein and keep it a secret and the vein would be a symbol of their dismay over their mother's sexual affair with her cop boyfriend! She'd be having a wild one-night affair, and after they somehow lived through their ordeal of her making piggish love to the cop, they'd come back to find the vein gone! Amazing how I'd forgotten all about this!

I'd rejected the idea because of Lit rules and because I'd noticed all these delicious hole-sex parallels I wanted to get into the story. But originally it had been a coming-of-age story, and the dirtyness and disgust over the heart and vein in the earth was tied subconsciously in my mind with Oedipal or subtly incestual impulses. Incredible!

But the dye is cast now. I want to keep it the way it is, somehow.

You're entirely right though. The boys uncovering the vein is a metaphor for children discovering sex—something slimy and disgusting pulsing and writhing right where they play. It's jarring to suddenly have grown-ups intrude and take over.

For me, the weakest part was Ray (an asshole?) telling us about boys digging holes and what it all means. I found that too insightful and it seemed the conversation was used simply to tell us what you'd already told us in the third paragraph and last full paragraph. Ray's comments about people taking their sins to the earth, while good stuff, wouldn't come from a jerk like him. Maybe the old farmer who used to own the land and who has seen things back in the day, but not Ray.

Yes, I agree. Ray's a mess of a character, all over the place. The first, most obvious repair I would make to this story would be to go clean up his speeches somehow. Well, first I'd have to pin him down and find out just who the hell he is. I think that's extremely important too, because I obviously have no idea and it really shows.

I like this paragraph:

It was dark and hard to see, but the trees were all in a frenzy now, tossing and dancing wildly before the wind, and as he faced the spot where the hole was, he could feel something grip his heart, some dark force taking control of him on this Halloween, something that knew he was a creature of the earth too, and that what flowed through his veins ultimately flowed underground as well, that the secrets he carried could never be concealed beneath the rocks and dirt, the emotions he felt could never be consigned to the cold of deep, chthonic ground. Between the pebbles and the dirt and the blank tiny pockets of air, out of reach of the sucking root and the gnawing grub, in perfect darkness and absence of light, the sins of the world incubated. The offal and cast-off remnants of a harried world returned to soil and turned to atoms, bathed in microbes and fungi, and here grew the heart that had emerged in Jill's backyard. Here had appeared the vein that pulsed with such a thick and odious sludge.

You do? LOL with joy! Bless you, sir. Bless you! Basically, that clumsy, ill-written piece of prose probably is the story, right there. That's the whole ball of wax. (Or clump of dirt.)

Unfortunately, reading it now, the paragraph seems very vague and unclear to me. I feel what I was trying to say, but damned if I understand it. I'm trying to erase the line between organic, thinking matter (people) and unfeeling, inorganic dirt. I didn't do it well. I will say I did a lot of brave writing in here, just winging it. Unfortunately, a lot of it just didn't work, like this particular paragraph, which almost says something, but doesn't.

But meanwhile, I agree with you that Ray—who and what he is—could be the key to the entire story. I was reading some of his speeches where he's spouting off so grandly about sin and burial and trying to remember how I was able to allow myself to let him say these things, and I remembered that I'd thought of him as a much more intelligent man who was basically lazy, and that's not the way he presents himself earlier in the story. There are several points in this piece where I just basically slammed it into reverse and headed off in a new direction and never really stopped to fix things, and it shows. Ray's got tire tracks all over him. Everytime I thought of a new symbolic meaning for digging, I just had him blurt it out. It's terrible.

ETA: What if exposure somehow compelled Ray to resume digging holes? Searching for what he believes is be a pleasure vein. If there's this gross, scary vein then surely there's a one that leads to bliss. Could that provide a way to link between digging and exposing and sex?

Wow! This I think is a seriously cool idea. It's not the story I wanted to write, but it's a seriously cool idea, maybe even a series. There could be the possibility too—and I was touching on this is the original idea where he turned into a Satyr—that the goo in the hole brings out your true nature. In fact, that was in an early draft. (I don’t want to go back and check right now) I don’t know if I heard this or made it up, but there was something about burying things and seeing if they stayed buried as a way of testing them for authenticity. The idea was that Ray had a shady past—maybe killed someone, a crime of passion—and now his guilty conscience was rising up and haunting him. He was compelled to act out the crime again. I think pieces of that are left over in this version too.

Either way, I think Penelope hit the nail on the head with her remark about rape. You may not like it, but the story seems to be heading towards violence, not necessarily sexual in the usual sense but that is up to you.

Oh, I know, I know. I think it's pretty rapish as it now stands. And I even think rape is the mild end of things. I'm thinking it could turn to murder and mutilation, live burial, skinning someone alive, God knows what. The juxtaposition of the organic heart with the inorganic dirt means that all bets are off. We're in a land without mercy or pity. Ray's gone inorganic.

The substance from the vein seems to be contaminating in some way.
If that's the case the boys could be defenseless because of their age.
Ray as an adult, on the other hand, could try to exorcize it or ward it off by outrageous sexual behavior.

I actually agree with Verdad here. I didn't like the part where he touched the goo. Originally I needed that because I needed a reason to explain the fact that Ray changed and Jill didn't, but I wasn't happy with getting material and "scientific" about it. I would have been happier with the vein casting its spell from afar, without actual touching

Honestly, it's so fascinating and so beautiful the way we all go about the process of writing or composing a story, the way even our concept of what a "story" is differs. For me, that paragraph Jomar quoted is the story. I'm desperately looking for a way to translate that imagery into the dramatic action of a story—things two or three people could do on paper that would create that feeling or arouse that thought in a reader. How do you represent a thought dramatically? Usually it happens without the writer being aware of it. It seems like most of the time, once you become aware of your own symbolism, you're doomed.

It had been a long time since I read this story before I posted it here for this review, and honestly, it's worse than I remembered. I think Ray's speeches especially are all over the place. He's trying way too hard to save my ass and bringing in everything but the kitchen sink.

In honest appraisal, I think the story has good atmospherics and a promising premise. It has some interesting ideas in what Ray says, but they just don't translate into any kind of dramatic story, and a philosophical idea is not a story.

Some Ideas

I'm thinking now of some ideas:

Through it all, I intend for this to be a small, local drama involving the immediate family. I don’t want to turn this into a disaster movie. It's really a psychological story.

(A) Concentrating on Ray and Jill. The discovery of the vein is definitely a harbinger of some change between Ray and Jill that will affect Billy. I think I have to make Ray a man with a past which the discovery of the vein stirs up. It might be some really weird past Ray may not even be human. Ray might have known about the vein out there all along. (I like that. Maybe he even needs Jill to feed her to it.)

No. More likely he just has some secret buried in his past. Plenty of possibilities here. (An image of him sitting slumped on the sofa as Jill pulls his pants down to blow him. His cock is a withered root, his fingers are branches…)

(B) This would be the easiest, Clean up Ray's part so he's not talking out of character. Ray and Jill are in the bedroom in a fever of lust, Ray about to take her ass. From the way it's written, you can't tell if they're inside or out by the hole. The wind is blowing, the grass waving. Billy wakes up, sees something out by the hole, hard to see with the clouds passing before the moon. Walks down the stairs, goes to his mom's room, hears weird sounds coming from inside. Opens the door, and where the bed should be, there's a hole, moonlight streaming in.

If you want a symbolic explanation, the hole and the vein are the horror of adult sex, and rather than deal with the reality of his mother screwing Ray, Billy sees this hallucination of the hole and the vein.

How Ray and Jill see these things isn't explained.

(C) The old standby: They all die in the quicksand. (I have that printed on a rubber stamp hung above my computer where it's easy to grab.)

But thank you again for a most enlightening and helpful discussion. You've given me a lot of grist for the mill and I sincerely appreciate it. Any more ideas and I'd appreciate those as well.

But right now I'm tired. I'm taking a break. There's a hole out in my back yard and I'm going to investigate…

--Zoot

 

[Penelope Street]

What can I say? Penny, you're such a romantic!

Didn't you counsel me once to not be so romantic?

I have a feeling, for example, that this entire hole business is a male thing. Girls don’t go through this hole-digging phase in their life. They make mudpies or something. Boys dig. They're looking for something and they don't know what.

I agree it's probably a male thing, but I'd still like to understand it. So this digging phase is basically driven by a need to explore?

My other idea was to take the sex-as-digging thing to its logical extreme and have Ray flip out and want to fuck Jill through in a hole in her heart. This sounds like a variation on the Stephen King theme above, but I would have handled it differently. He would have been more like a force of nature than a crazed killer, and she might have even agreed to let him.

Ok, that's just gross no matter how you handle it.

Whatever this boy's preoccupation, though, it should be reflected in his mom's activities, and maybe it could be a good idea too to have the boy revisit the hole the next day and find the vein either gone or grown, depending on the outcomes of the previous night.

I think it could be a good idea too not to have the grown ups visit the hole at all, but rather do whatever they'd planned to do that night. That way you'd start uncovering the parallel level of the story immediately, instead of covering the same terrain twice.

This is such an amazing idea.

If that's the case the boys could be defenseless because of their age.

I kinda like it if the boys are immune because of their innocence.

(A) Concentrating on Ray and Jill. The discovery of the vein is definitely a harbinger of some change between Ray and Jill that will affect Billy. I think I have to make Ray a man with a past which the discovery of the vein stirs up. It might be some really weird past Ray may not even be human. Ray might have known about the vein out there all along. (I like that. Maybe he even needs Jill to feed her to it.)

No. More likely he just has some secret buried in his past. Plenty of possibilities here. (An image of him sitting slumped on the sofa as Jill pulls his pants down to blow him. His cock is a withered root, his fingers are branches…)

(B) This would be the easiest, Clean up Ray's part so he's not talking out of character. Ray and Jill are in the bedroom in a fever of lust, Ray about to take her ass. From the way it's written, you can't tell if they're inside or out by the hole. The wind is blowing, the grass waving. Billy wakes up, sees something out by the hole, hard to see with the clouds passing before the moon. Walks down the stairs, goes to his mom's room, hears weird sounds coming from inside. Opens the door, and where the bed should be, there's a hole, moonlight streaming in.

If you want a symbolic explanation, the hole and the vein are the horror of adult sex, and rather than deal with the reality of his mother screwing Ray, Billy sees this hallucination of the hole and the vein.

How Ray and Jill see these things isn't explained.

Either of these could work too. The bit about feeding Jill to the monster reminded me of your "boy and his homunculus" comment regarding Shang's story.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I agree it's probably a male thing, but I'd still like to understand it. So this digging phase is basically driven by a need to explore?

Be interesting to ask some other guys about this. A few public comments left on the story indicated that at least some men remembered this phase in their life. To me, it was a modern rite of passage, though we weren't aware of it as such. It had all the trappings. Girls weren't allowed there; when they came by, we stopped digging and even sometimes covered up the hole. In fact, now that I think of it, the hole was quite clearly a vaginal symbol! My God! We even stuffed it full of prairie grass and lit fires in it and jumped through it! I mean, how much more symbolic can you get? We were regular little savages! Trying to comes to terms with femininity.

But the way the hole started was as a sense of our own strength as males, a sudden sense of our own power. We suddenly "realized" we were as good as men: "Hey! I've got a shovel! I can dig! What's stopping me? Let's see how far we can go!" And the thought is that we'd at least get down deep enough to need a ladder and maybe find some bones or gold, something grown-ups would have to acknowledge.

So the ritual started out as "I am a man!" and ends up as "I can conquer the Great Vagina!" It was pretty potent stuff for an 11 year-old.

I wanted Ray to relive the same ritual in adult form.

But anyhow, what you start finding in reality when you did is grubs and worms cut in half by the shovel and all sorts of disgusting stuff. You start having to tear and rip your way through roots and it becomes violent and rapacious and it's not fun like in the pirate movies and you get frustrated and angry but you won't give up because your manhood's at stake and you end up feeling kind of disgusted with yourself, which is not unlike the feeling a man often gets after sex is he's forced himself on the woman.

So it is rape. What the boys do to the earth is rape and what Ray does to Jill is rape. The vein and the heart are symbols saying, "Don't do this to me, I'm alive." The goo in the vein is a red herring and shouldn't be there, probably. But I'm afraid the story is saying that life is rape, and that's not what I wanted to say.

 

[jomar]

I'm trying to remember if my friends and I dug holes. I just don't recall that though I'm sure I did at some point. What I remember most is building stuff. Getting cast off wood from a nearby apartment construction site and building forts in our back yard, go carts we rode down hilly streets, planes we rode down hilly streets (hey, we were kids), rafts we floated on the creek. I remember pouring all sorts of household chemicals into a bag to make a 'bomb' that we threw on a bulldozer and it did nothing. I remember fishing, catching eels and tadpoles and frogs, frying ants with a magnifying glass. I remember exploring and climbing stuff and building fires and having crabapple fights, but digging holes escapes me directly. Huh. I'll mull it over more and see if a memory burbles up.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I'm trying to remember if my friends and I dug holes. I just don't recall that though I'm sure I did at some point. What I remember most is building stuff. Getting cast off wood from a nearby apartment construction site and building forts in our back yard, go carts we rode down hilly streets, planes we rode down hilly streets (hey, we were kids), rafts we floated on the creek. I remember pouring all sorts of household chemicals into a bag to make a 'bomb' that we threw on a bulldozer and it did nothing. I remember fishing, catching eels and tadpoles and frogs, frying ants with a magnifying glass. I remember exploring and climbing stuff and building fires and having crabapple fights, but digging holes escapes me directly. Huh. I'll mull it over more and see if a memory burbles up.

One of the interesting things, jomar, is that you might have had a rich enough enovironment where you didn't have to resort to the Z-axis in your quest for freedom. If you had woods and trees and streams then you had it made.

I grew up in the city, and our hole-digging actually took place in vacant lots or on construction sites where there was like nothing else to do. But there's always the ground, and there's always down. You can always dig a hole. Wherever you go, the ground is always right there. We were like literally trying to dig our way to some kind of freedom.