October, hello! Welcome back, welcome. You kitschweird diamond, you! Withoutadoubt, the most surrealist of all our months. Smileyface. And we love it too, we really do. That special spectral time-of-year, October—when the ol’ veil-between-worlds is at her honeycomb’ed thinest. (& getting thinner each year, too…!) I speak of that bluest of veils, that one between the reality, and the dream, of course. Of course! My, my. If one happened to be a stuffy, mathematically minded little fellow, and suddenly pedantically decided to sit down on stone, and to map out the entire path of Andre Breton’s two supreme points onto a collapsing plane of schoolboy graphing paper—then undoubtably those expanding twin blacklines would be seen to finally meet to touch to procreate (subeternally and neverevermore) RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW. Right here, in the center of October’s shivering, wormspun, pumpkinface belly. Believe it!

And Haunted House, what of old October’s Haunted House? Why, she’s only October’s Most Sacred Site, and the principle location of her widening splintershifts! So track one down then, search one out, make it a pilgrimage. But what’s this? Suddenly afraid of a little lowbrow trash then, are ya? Too embarrassed to be seen on the out-n-about, drifting amongst the giggling teens, the wideeye’d normals? Don’t be, don’t be, O reader. For if Filth can be a gateway to the marvelous, then why not Kitsch too? Why not? Convinced ya now eh, haven’t I, you neurotic little bunny! I’m not surprised…But wait! Just wait a second there, fuck! Hasty reader, please listen to me first, and listen well. Initiation requires a certain period of preparation on the part of the initiate, you can’t just “jump right in”. And Haunted House, she is of Purest Initiation. The “Eleusinian Mysteries”? Why, that was merely clumsy first birth in our linear time of that impish mirage that we now call Haunted House. And (very much like a newborn human child) the Eleusinian Haunted House Experience stumbled around rather awkwardly, being unable to fully speak to the World, unable to fully interface with it. Her glow-worm eyes—back in that ancient time—were closed up tight. Just two mysterious slits, holding a waiting promise… But with each passing century the Haunted House egregore perfects herself further. She masters newer and newer tricks. Yes, with each passing century, the eyes widen. The slits fall away. The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme? Why of course, how could I forget! She learned quite a lot there, our dear Haunted House—most notably, she learned how to incorporate convulsive-ivity within her movements, and also how best to embrace her own and other’s cataclysmforms. More to learn? More to explore? Always, always.

Look! And Listen. Before descending into the godbody of Haunted House, before becoming as one with her, and with all her dollfaced devilry, the BodyMind of a true seeker must first pass successfully the three derangement metamorphoses.Truly, If one wishes to approach at the Altar of Haunted House, one must first be:

A) Sharp-Soft
B) Focused-Unfocused
C) Stony-Pliant

So down a box of last year’s candycorn, my little initiate friend, and force down that nauseating shot (or two!) of that raspberry-flavored vodka. In order to approach her, the old Humpty Dumpty must fall. Don’t deny it! Yes, that pesky old Egoself must first be first skinned and devoured and at the end of all that—defecated. But you don’t care at all for my raspberry vodka, you say? And my stale candy corn, that just isn’t your thing? Well, just go and meditate then, asshole, or listen to some new age biurnal beats while snorting a pixie stick, or (why not?) get real deep into the ear candling subculture for a year. Or maybe (just maybe) you could stab yourself 7×7 times in the left leg with a broken garden pail, while inwardly masturbating your belly button to the muted sound of Klaus Nomi’s Valentine’s Day? Don’t care, really don’t. Look, it’s the perceptual destination that matters here, not your chosen mode of transport. Pick your poison…

You wish to hear the story of my first Initiation? And why not, eh? No one forgets their first time here, no one. Of some details I am sworn to secrecy, but there others of which I am able to share quite freely. And so, share them I will. Mid-October it was, just a few years back. At a place called Netherworld. A sense of excitement at the threshold. In the crowd, and in me too. A sense that dream and reality had merged into each other, that anything could happen. That old “autumnal delirium”! As I stepped inside, and walked through that first shifting starportal, I knew immediately that I had crossed all boundaries. A mirror above me caved itself in, dropped down, and almost touched the tip of my nose. In her cracked reflection I saw what I now was—a vibration of the Crystalline Insect. The word Becoming had a thousand meanings, here in this fiendish place. In deepest dark the animatronic banshees jumped out from walls, mixing together with authentic costumed humans. Soon I could no longer tell the one from the other. I had fallen into the looking-glass of Freud’s Uncanny. But fear for me seemed not the chief motivator at all. The unseen mastermind(s) behind this sideways surland seemed to me to have created this universe solely for a “long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” The ground beneath me shivered as I walked. The walls rippled, and laughed. Invisible fountains of cool compressed air caressed my face, and many strange smells drifted. A distant scream could often be heard, melting abruptly into a voluptuous sigh. Sight, that overindulged sense, had here tonight been robbed of his crown, because in the shadows, our touch, smell, and hearing will always gain dominion. And then!—that traumatic mythic meeting. That meeting with Pure Crimson. An eerie velvet fabric surrounded me on all sides in one room. I was able to see almost nothing. I pushed myself through it, the opening becoming much smaller as I walked. Contracting quickly, so quickly. Extreme disorientation inside, a feeling of panic. With effort I managed to push myself through a tiny little hole at the end of the hallway, and breathed deeply. A second birth, that had been. Unforgettable. But one final trial still remained. I entered a new section of the Haunted House—A futuristic science lab, plagued by mutant dinosaurs. By the by, a strange white room was entered by me, a room which was so thickened with white fog that I could not even see my hands in front of my face. I felt quite suddenly that I was dead. Exquisitely, irreversibly dead. A lost spirit, a drifting Nothing. When finally I reached the end of this transcendent room of white blindness, I felt utterly transformed. I felt giddy, and I was grinning like madman. I had been born tonight in this Haunted House, and I had died, and I had been reborn, too. I had passed through a secret initiation—an initiation via kitsch.

“It’s the most fun in the park, when laughing in the dark…”