Archives for 2024

• Never go anywhere by yourself, always tell people where you are going, and stay in large groups.
• Don’t explore creepy or abandoned places, you’re basically asking to be killed.
• Work on your cardio and coordination, so you can run really far and not trip and fall.
• If you’re in a building, don’t unlock the doors or go outside until help arrives.
• Never assume the monster is dead.
• Always ensure proper measures are taken so that the monster won’t come back to life.
• Try not to have sex, horror movie villains tend to strike when people are trying to get it on.
• If you encounter any strange things, events, or artifacts. Turn back, don’t touch anything.

(some of these rules are applicable in life as well, sad to say)

Unfortunately, outside of the reel world, there’s another rule that must be added to Leo Yu’s list:

• Don’t be Black or Brown in White America.

For obvious reasons, the last rule is hard to follow for People of the Excessive Melanin Community, so some unlucky brothers and sisters never make it to the end credits.

In this brutal reality, the monsters are real. Ask me how I know.

I never wanted to deal with the hassle of driving to my job so I took the Blue Line to the airport. I could relax, drink my coffee, read the Boston Globe. Most of the time I would wear a nondescript jacket over my uniform so the other people riding on the train wouldn’t bother me with questions about the airport.

Usually, I got off at Revere Beach and walked home but my standard routine suddenly flew off the rails when a group of white men came out of nowhere and surrounded me. They weren’t friendly either.

Huh? What the fuck is going on?

I was scared, confused, and I realized I was in a lot of trouble.

“OK, buddy,” one of the white men growled at me, “You’re coming with us.” When I saw a badge hanging on a lanyard around his neck, I understood that these white men were plainclothes cops and they thought I was somebody else. I looked around frantically for help, but people just ignored what was going on, minded their business, and kept on walking.

When one of the cops grabbed me, I shook his hand off, which was the worst thing I could have done because I was “resisting arrest”, and legally that meant these white cops now had the authority to handcuff me, put me in a chokehold or shoot me, and get away with it.

But what I did next was the right thing to do. Whether it was dumb luck, instinct, or an angel whispering in my ear, what I did was quickly unzip my jacket, revealing my TSA uniform underneath.

And just like that, it was over. Maybe it was the thought of not wanting to do the extra paperwork, but the cops stopped, turned, and walked away. No apologies, no explanations.

But one of the cops gave me a long hard look before he left.

Behind those pale blue whiteboy eyes, what he was saying was next time, and there’s always a ‘next time,’ because sooner or later, your luck runs out. We’ll make sure of that.

It was a promise. Every black person has felt the oppressive weight of that Cyclops eye. When they say, ‘To Protect and Serve’, they ain’t talking about us. Cops started out as slave catchers.

“I had certainly seen him before that particular afternoon, but he had been just another cop. After that afternoon,he had red hair and blue eyes. He was somewhere in his thirties.

“He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes.

“But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death.

“If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky.

If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing, across the snow.

“The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view. Presently, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all.”

— If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

Discussing the concept of “monsters” in literary fiction, author Jacqueline Lichtenberg theorized that SF is based on trying to understand what the monster is and what it wants, whereas in horror the monster usually “is a menace because it’s a menace.”
And it’s dangerous to give monsters the benefit of the doubt. Whenever I see the blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror, I hold my breath until I see them pass.

“I think the majority of police are really good people and really good at their jobs,” horror film director Jordan Peele said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that with any interaction I have with them, I’m viewed as a potential threat.”

White people invested in “copaganda” will never take James Baldwin’s manifestation of a homicidal policeman seriously, so instead they’ll dismiss it as an implausible literary exaggeration.

Black people know better. Experience is a harsh teacher.

Horror icons such as Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Art the Clown, Sadako, Chucky, the Cenobites, and Jigsaw never leave their Hollywood slaughterhouses.

But Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in public and didn’t care who saw it.

The only reason Chauvin didn’t get away with it was because an expendable scapegoat was needed so white people in denial could pretend that police brutality wasn’t a problem anymore. It’s another fantasy informed by privilege.

Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, catalogs deaths at the hands of police and last year recorded the highest number of killings since its national tracking began in 2013. The data suggests a systemic crisis and a remarkably consistent pattern, with an average of roughly three people killed by officers each day, with slight upticks in recent years.

Here’s the new cops, same as the old cops.

But despite the lies they tell themselves, the white people who ignore killer cops are monsters too. The brutes with guns and badges are just tools these monsters use so they won’t get their hands dirty.

Unlike a horror movie, black and brown people can’t escape the monsters by walking out of the Cineplex or turning off the remote. I got to go home at the end of my encounter with the police, but there’s an awful feeling inside of me that won’t go away: next time.

Senior Airman Roger Fortson found out. Another name added to the never-ending list.