Slasher Franchises were what we had for folklore in the 1980's along with semi-true stories of heavy metal dudes doing crazy shit and the attendant older brother or cousin who not only listened to heavy metal but also might have drank beer/smoked weed/worshipped satan in the woods or people that that dude knew or told u about the shady older kids who hung out in the woods with satan which in stories is what u do u go into the woods u get high u meet satan u chill and u return home and when ur mom is like 'have u been hanging out in the woods getting high with satan and all of your other loser friends who listen to music about getting high in the woods with satan which is not as all as cool as it sounds apparently? but it sounds rad as hell wait so stories like that were the ground from which all other stories would come the decayed leaf matter and fiberglass cigarette filters and cellophane and burnt aluminum foil and beer cans playing cards never intact the ace of spades the black widow a skull with a snake going in and out of its not-empty eye-sockets but like the snake is coming toward you like its gonna attack you with its mouth open and its fangs bared its a uh copperhead or a um cottonmouth thats a snake right? and every iteration every retelling of one of these stories which was basically one of those books that u have as a kid that is spiral plastic bound and has its visual field divided into three sections each with the same number of flaps so that u can mix and match outfits our stories were like that but instead of oh the peach and gray striped polo tucked into the mom jeans that are the other color of peach that doesn't match at all or is that salmon? the light in here is bad or the transfer is bad i can't tell if some of the mom jeans are bleached fashion or just bleached because u got high and poured a lot of bleach directly on yr jeans in the washer and forgot about them for a long time because you JUST FOUND OUT yr new sweatshirt MATCHES EXACTLY your favorite blue eyeshadow and u r totally gonna tell ur bf about it but he is getting high while taking a dump which totally interrupted your plans to get high with him that loser so u will also get high by yourself until your bf never comes back and is it because he no longer wants to be ur boyfriend? is it because satanists grabbed him and thew him in their satan-van like the one down the block that has the goat of mendes over the extra tire thing on the rear door and that batwing snake-lady with fangs and no pupils or top on all over the sides like what if they got him or what if he is just getting high with the satanists and totally forgot to get high with me that fucker i will show him i will get so high i forget wtf i am even doing and then when he comes back i will just stare at him and laugh and laugh until i forget why i am laughing and go back to knitting or watching a slasher franchise movie for the billionth time one that is like the dumbest one but also the scariest bc the other ones follow some sort of narrative or atmospheric or geographic logic kinda? or are you just telling yourself that but wait no this one breaks down into absurdity on a narrative level just atomically like not even molecules the whole thing dissolves like u can explain WHAT is happening but not WHY or most of the other journalism W's that don't stand for Wins or get your Wings or What about the 43rd president or the 40th us president for that matter and so u just give up and accept that these poor people's last day or what is most of their last days is spent doing things that if they happened to you you would say this is so dumb it would never be in a movie and then you would die of something far less stupid and much more directed than almost anything in your brief and random life whose backstory was probably not considered much beyond works and lives at train station themed convenience store drinks jack daniels on toilet or their comeback electro punk 45 failing to chart after their release from prison the band turns to the open road in preparation for the postapocalypse or kids who met at a performing arts summer camp for troubled youth maintain an unlikely friendship until the threshold of adulthood, etc jason voorhees is that which brings their lives to the end that their lives served to be sacrificed by jason voorhees to the goddess that dwells within these woods within every tree under every rock on the floor of every lakebed even now she is calling my name on the winds jason jason jason if i turn my head just so i can hear her voice so clearly my beloved mother who never cared that i was ugly beloved mother who never cared if i was unable to be as the other children who could not go amongst them except as a monster u loved me as a monster beloved mother all of these woods all of these lakes all of this cloudless sky on a new moon at midnight i hail to thee and i try to sing your song with you mother but it comes out a choked rasp because i am crying in awe of your beauty in the envelope of your wonder i cannot believe that something so beautiful bore me from her and looked me in the eyes and called me by my name and loved me even so and her love increased by the day as i frolicked and gamboled in the fields with the children of the deer who would emerge first skittishly and then more confident over time as they grew less afraid they were what i knew of friends the human children were scornful at best in their mockery and derision at worst cuts and bruises broken bones probable concussions jason fell down again so uncoordinated their very presence an agony a distraction a violation of my peace when u look like me u can never not be aware of the gaze of others even if your theory of mind is sketchy u know when someone crossing the parking lot is failing to stifle laughter on purpose so that u hear so that u know they hate u that they find u disgusting that if u were dying in front of them they would do nothing not like u mother u who love all of your children the same living or dying all the same folding back into you like negative degradation like jeans left to sit in bleach splotchy and cloudlike a dream unevenly dreamed in places spiky like u almost died the man almost killed u and so u come back with ur friends to get high and chill and process the assault but ur old bf keeps pressuring u into sex at the worst times and won't listen about the processing trauma and he's all like 'what about MY trauma?' by which he means he hasn't had sex (with you) in months or weeks or something ugh why can't he just LISTEN for once and then the man the bad man comes back and assaults u again in the place that u used to feel safe until the assault and now even if u live thru it even if u appear in the opening credits of the next movie being whisked to relative safety with your barretted side part still perfectly in place despite slasherizing a slasher and worse! and the kids in town will hear about this and about what happened to everybody here and they will tell each other and their friends and family will tell each other and the story will get weirder and more indistinct each time it gets told until people think maybe it never happened or it gets mixed up with other similar stories from other towns or other people people that u know kind of know also? or they heard it and tell it back to you and this rather than making something less real makes it more real the more distinct versions there are of something the more presence the more variance it is allowed in this world the greater its possibilities in manifestation each with their own outfit or set of really cool outfits that you can mix-and-match and swap in and out until you get tired of doing that and something u want to watch comes on or it is time for dinner and you forget about what you were doing for now and it just gets left there until someone else who is maybe you picks it back up and you have to remember what happened last time even though it never matters what happened last time because the same thing is going to happen this time but different