What Mask Do You Wear?

This video has some of the blog plus me just going on and on and on.... ;)

Today is Devil’s Night or Hell’s Night. It is attributed mostly to Detroit in the 70s through the 90s where there was an escalation of arson and crime, but it goes back to the 30s. Isn’t it crazy to celebrate crime? It was pretty cool how Detroit got together in a neighborhood watch and cut the crime in half. Apparently up in Saginaw though, there has been an increase. One year 42 houses were set ablaze.

I will probably curl up with the Crow tonight. There’s someone who cut down the crime rate. (of course, lots of casualties along the way…lol) It has the best Devil’s Night scene in it. If you guys are going to watch the Crow, may I suggest watching the 4 part James O’Barr interview before hand? Knowing the author’s background gives a brand new dimension to an already classic film. I’ve heard people say it’s a violent film which induces violence, but to me it’s a love story. If you simply think it’s about being a vigilante who is hell-bent on revenge, it’s so much more than that and I am sure the O’Barr interview will give the insight.

I am not going anywhere this weekend. Los Angeles as I have mentioned has a very high rate of drunk drivers on the road. Because the city is so spread out, it takes people a long time to get somewhere. They either can’t get a cab or they can’t afford the cab fare. Well, then, plan to drink at home if you must, or crash a spare bedroom at a party…whatever you gotta do. It’s just so important you don’t get behind the wheel of a car tonight. YOU ARE WAY MORE INTOXICATED THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE! I PROMISE YOU!

I do love Halloween though. I love that people can dress up and become someone else for the weekend. I do like dressing up, although I don’t have kids come to my apartment, so I don’t see the point this year.

What I do love though, this is a weekend where nobody has me doing work for them and phones don’t ring. YAY! I like when Los Angeles just shuts down over Christmas too. It means we all have an excuse to not work!

Halloween tends to add some color to a colorless world. Everyone works very hard and so it’s cool to play dress-up. We did it as kids too. If you are a child just playing or an adult having fun, it’s all good.

The phrase, ‘What mask do you wear?’ popped in my mind today. I was thinking about the people we pretend to be on a daily basis. The character we choose who gets us through the grind. Sometimes the mask is a subservient wife, a silent child or a robot husband.

I think being a zombie is a popular costume. Being a zombie is the state of numb. You simply move ahead in life finding food, working, driving… I see zombies every single day. (That’s not like ‘I see dead people’, but close perhaps)

Behind the mask of the wife, child and husband are usually more masks. The subservient wife has another mask which is the zombie. She goes from the washer to the dryer to the kitchen to the bedroom to the store, back home showing little or no emotion. The silent child has a zombie’s mask on too underneath. He stays in his bedroom, listens to music and watches movies saying nothing to nobody. The robot husband jumps in the shower, goes to work, comes home and cracks a beer and has no clue what happened in his day.

These masks are covering up bigger monsters. Some monsters lurk underneath for many years, lying dormant, gaining strength and waiting to explode. Something may set them off and they go into massive destructive mode flattening everything around them. Nobody sees them coming because they are hidden well or they hide it well.

I had to peel off the layers one at a time. I had so much anger and frustration building and didn’t want to show anyone. Had I just ripped them all off at once, it would have exposed one ugly, sleeping giant.

Halloween should be the only time we pretend to be someone else (unless we are just playing or acting) yet, every day we are pretending to be something that doesn’t make for a fun costume. These masks are hiding our true spirit, not enhancing it.

How many masks do you wear and do you plan on removing them? Are you concerned it’s going to be too ugly underneath? What is silencing you? What has stolen your spirit?

How can we get it back?

For me, I had to deal with one layer on each mask at any one time. I also had to give myself permission to do that. I would celebrate the baby steps of digging down to the roots.

Setting fire to my own masks… not the neighborhood,

Karen :)

“Is that gasoline I smell?’ ~Eric Draven from The Crow