A Dark Day for Local Lore

Goin home, late last night

Suddenly I got a fright

Yeah I looked through the window

and surprised what I saw

Fairy boots were dancing with a dwarf...

ALL RIGHT NOW!

"Buffalo Ridge, a winding road in Miami Township, once had a crematorium or maybe an observatory rumored to now be a church for devil worshipers, where little kitties and little kiddies were sacrificed on an altar to firelight. The ghosts of those whose remains were burned there haunted the hillside. "

It goes without saying that, for those of us on the West West Side of Cincinnati, this was the destination of many a Friday night for those of use with an interest in both the macabre and the chemical. Black Sabbath, of course, when taken with cough syrup and the occult imagings of a "fevered" teenage brain (hey, how many Fridays were you getting laid between the ages of 15-18?), not to mention, Cop-fear (thus, the soundtrack for these adventures) led to, well, strange goings on. The danger was palpable: I'm out at night, listening to satanic rock music, fucked up, seeing shit, feeling shit-it was all freedom to be evil, all fuck you mom and dad.

On those dark fall nights, blasting the Mighty Sabb, the dash lights and the anticipation, anything was possible, nothing true. It could really be that goddamded elves dwarves brownies gnome kobalds and goblins, GOBLINS, really exist. A Black Magician could be conducting weird rites, and we could see it. Why not: Things certainly looked like the cover of Paranoid...

I'm a little sad, because this is another piece of Old Weird America that will be unavailable to the next generation, a piece of lore lost. I'm not one to generally get all misty about things like this, but I can't help but feel this way, especially when the kind of weird mysteries like this, myths constructed, have to give way for the half lives of chicken mcnuggets and pampers. The glories of human imaginations manifested in its ability to imbue the mundane with the bizarre, the commonplace with the sinister, a local Stonehenge lost to utility and ostentatious consumption. A magic land turned landfill. Where will the next generation of young seekers go?

I mean, really, any asshole can smoke a jay at the mall. But it take the heroically weird to drink cough syrup at the Gates of Hell?

YEAH!!!