The clown dream

I had a dream last night. I stood at the window overlooking the park. I could see the haunted house, silent and still, encased in a thin film of early morning dew. The clownface was ripped from its housing and was nowhere to be seen. I saw a grey figure with a frilled white shirt and what seemed a blue scarf at the far end of the park moving rapidly between the bushes. As the figure reached the last hedgerow my heart began to race. In the dull, straining light, the tall emaciated body sped across the field and revealed itself with a deafening hysterical laughter it made sure only I could hear. Somehow it had torn free from its prison, its jaundiced hatred no longer the generator of fear for the children's unsuspecting delight as it watched for the right moment to make its escape from whichever twisted showman had tried to trap this concentrated evil. The maniacal funhouse horrorshow that was the clown bound towards the house, fast faster until the screech threatened to shatter the windows, the hollowed out eyes widening more deranged with every spindly closing gallop, its fiery crimson hair drawn back with the terrifying velocity of its approach, the teeth sharply pointed, brilliant white between the bloody lipstick grimace and the cracked menace of its jutting cheekbones and balding death-pallour shrieking shrill and insane, and the only thing loud enough to blot out its demon bleet was the sound of my own scream to wake me from this nightmare.

Facing the fair

A rabble of drinkers congregated around the dreary Montpellier bars in the usual manner for a Friday night, but the hocus pocus of the fun fair across the street drew some of the more heavily dowsed revellers away from their tables. It was a solemn sight. As I made my way back from the corner shop I was compelled to venture inward and lose myself to the whirling mass of psychedelia and somehow capture its true essence.
I entered the park through a kink in the hedgerow only to step into a dark maze of giant trucks parked haphazardly across the field behind the pavilion. Eventually I emerged from a corridor of vehicles to bear witness to a platform of breathing angular apparatus. Dry ice gushed from the base of a large pneumatic arm that slowly leavened a wheel of shackled carnival-goers toward the surrounding canopy of sycamore leaves. The whole scene was suffused with a whooping and shrieking and grating grinding steel - a crackling energy of audible machines and hidden flesh like the living creation of a thunder god. Human faces journeyed upwards panic-stricken in the phospherence as the wheel gained speed, their minds suddenly entertaining the possibility of being set free from a frayed harness and a turgid plastic life and sent careening through the treetops to a better existence.

I moved on to the haunted house and immediately my interest lay not in its dismal facade but the rear wall and the face. I snuck behind to confront the protruding head, only to be surprised by its relative tameness. Was I missing something? Was this the wrong clown? Definitely not, as I could see the window I had peered out of the previous night simply by turning and looking beyond the park limits. An intoxicated tramp stumbled into the clown's immediate line of sight and for a brief lunatic moment I was palpably concerned for his safety.
'It's all a bit too much for a Friday,' he grumbled.
'Isn't it just,' I replied, wondering to myself how his Fridays could be so different to his Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and for that matter, his Thursdays, each of them an invariably perfect reprise of the previous night, dragging his homeless drunken carcass from one park to the next, scrounging for the next premium four-pack to ail the bleak canals of his withered intestines.
'Isn't it weird,' I said pointing to the clown, but also referring to the situation generally.
He grunted in delirious assent. 'Nothing I haven't seen before...Got any spare change?'

Once the drunk had slunk between two hulking juggernauts I moved to where he had stood to better assess this neutral response. True, the perspective was different, but my reaction was the same. The pervasive horror of the painted face was completely absent and the slow cycle of colours from the gondolas on the ferris wheel presented the image to me in a multitude of innocent refractions as if to mock my now tenuous conviction that something malignant remained hidden beneath its ridiculous glee-smile. Pondered sufficiently, I returned to the flat. But when I stared out the window for one last time that night the view confounded me moreso because the wretched grimace of the clown had returned and the focus of its intent appeared to swerve across the empty field and direct itself squarely on my presence, hunched cold and alone in the darkness behind the dissolving obscurant veneer of a dusty curtain net.

Carnival

A cavalcade of juggernauts rolled into the park in front of my flat to construct a fun fair today. I watched from the window the boiler-suited men unload an assortment of garrish structures and light-bulb encrusted totems from their mobile containers, initiatory rites that would ensnare the coming children, soon to coax them into the hallucinatory world of riotous illuminations. Three hours later revolving carousels emblazoned with flourescent paint lit up the fields and the dry echo of toy shooting galleries resonated through the trees. Sticky streaks of candy floss would daub every hypnotic coin-op machine as parents exposed their wallets to the whim-inducing pantomime of colours. Later my eyes located the rear wall of a haunted house portraying the hideous clownface snarl that would confront me for countless nights ahead. Yellow-blue shafts of light strobed across the pavillion as I retired to a forced sleep.

Release

Welcome to my blog. This is a personal experiment that I am to undertake over the next few weeks. It is an attempt to find meaning where there is no clear meaning, to discover a point in pointlessness, to mine purpose in a purposeless enterprise that is the pattern of modulating thought. Take a seat and enjoy this strange adventure into the annals of Blog.