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Death

When I think of death, many things come to mind but what is strongest in my mind today is the death of Jonathan Larsen.  If you don't know who he is, he wrote the musical "Rent" and he died pretty young.  He was in his early thirties.  There is an irony to this.  Larsen died suddenly and without warning.  His great masterpiece of a musical was going on that night as a dress rehearsal.  The night of his death, his show was an instant hit.  It was just a small workshop in a small theater.  After a while, this show went on Broadway and then toured all around the world, gaining a strong following and numerous Tony awards.  That is not the irony.  The irony is that the play was a modern version of "La Vi Bohem."  It took place in the eighties when the Grenwich Village in New York was a haven for poor struggling artists dying of AIDS.  The musical was about people living their lives to the fullest even though they knew they were going to die.  The irony is that the play was inspired by Larsen's best friend who had HIV.  The irony is that his friend is still alive to this very day but Jonathen Larsen isn't. 

Larsen was afraid for his friend who supposedly, was going to die very soon.  But when I watched the documentary, watching his friend lament about the irony of this was quite compelling.  I think it has been about twenty years or more and this guy is still alive.  So if you think you know when you are going to die, think again.

The other day, I was watching a House episode about a guy who sued the cancer doctor for the silliest reason.  He was told he was going to die.  So he spent the next few months in happiness, doing all of the things he had never done.  Then he found out he wasn't going to die and he got depressed again.  So he was suing the doctor for "taking away his happiness".

The truth of the matter is, I know I'm going to die.  I know you're going to die.  I don't know when.  It could be today, it could be tomorrow.  It could be ninety years from now but I'm going to die.  That is a fact of nature we cannot overcome.  The best we can do is live every day to the fullest 'cause it can happen anytime.  So the question is not, if you found out you were going to die soon, what would you do?  The question is, what you are going to do period.  This is why I don't hesitate to tell my son and my husband that I love them and why I try to uplift the people in my life whenever I have a chance and why I try to give my all to every job I do when I'm doing it and why I take a moment to notice the clouds and the rain and the ocean and the flowers while they are there because nothing is permanent.  I love my sorrow as much as I love joy, my pain, my anger, my lust, my greed, my compassion etc... I enjoy every moment even if that moment is suffering.  Its life and you should enjoy it while it's here.  And if there is something after death, then life is preparing us for it so we should get as much out of it as we can. 

Okay, here's another story I heard from someone who now works in the claims department of a landscaping company.  There was a terrible accident and he found out that the guy who crashed the company vehicle through a fence and off a cliff just woke up and told someone he was committing suicide.  Apparently, he took some pills to make him fall asleep at the wheel, and then ran his truck off a cliff, through a road block, and into the ground below.  The truck was smashed into a small accordion.  The man was unharmed.  Now that he failed in his goal to die, he'll probably have to commit himself or owe the company a lot of money and he'll probably lose his job and how is he going to explain this to his wife?  This reason is why I don’t see death as a way out.  We can’t prolong it anymore than we can make it come faster.  We must take our focus away from things that we have no control over and indulge in the things that we do.


I can't tell you what comes after death.  It isn't something I'm focused on 'cause I'm too busy living.  Wondering about that is like wondering when you're going to die and nature has a way of hitting people over the head when they think they can control these things.  I can say this, we are all one.  This universe functions on energy that never dies.  It only changes form.  So if you die, you are not destroyed.  That would go against the laws of nature.  Perhaps you'll be recycled.  I'm not saying you'll be reincarnated.  I'm just saying that you cannot be completely destroyed according to the laws of energy.  And when our loved ones die, do they really disappear?  Really?  I don't think that is possible.  We are the essence of the universe. 

My Greatest Fear

Growing up with an older brother meant having to endure a good scare. My brother loved to terrorize me, until one day, I decided not to be frightened anymore. He tried jumping out of closets and throwing his limp body on me as if he were a dead corpse and it didn’t faze me at all. There were other things, but I guess I just became desensitized to everything. I love my brothers. We have a great relationship but it is funny how, as children, siblings use each other to experiment on.

Perhaps it was then that I realized that what we fear has power over us. So I guess my point is that I am pretty hard to scare. I’m not afraid of all the things that people tell me freak them out. I’m not freaked out by the idea of death or killer ninjas or werewolves or monsters lurking under my bed. For a while I didn’t think anything could scare me. I was wrong. Recently, I have run into some literature that has managed to tap into my greatest fear, a fear that I didn’t know existed until now.

A while ago, I was reading an anthology about various and off beat versions of the vampire. This was a great read but I returned it to the library a few months ago and can’t recall the name of the book. If anyone knows the title, let me know because I’d like to give it credit. The book had stories from some of the greatest horror writers that ever lived such as Clive Barker and Brian Lumley. The vampires in the book were not your typical type. They fed off of things like your looks, your youth, your identity etc. Though the stories gave me the chills, I had no problem falling asleep afterwards. However, there was this one story that was written in a dreamlike way, describing a man who is at a computer convention in New Orleans. He’s at a bar and meets a beautiful woman. The story recounts his night, all of a sudden, the man wakes up and he’s in a different time. It takes a while for him to figure this out but he’s actually in the past, the day before and he needs to catch up to the future. That might not be right as it’s been a while since I read the story. It could be the other way around.  He stalks this woman out and right before he can get to her, he finds himself in the bar again, continuing the night with this lady that he’s falling for, and then he’s back at the other time. It goes back and forth and he’s chasing this woman and is trying to catch up to her.

I hadn’t finished the story yet and found that I couldn’t sleep. Something bothered me about this idea of time. Is it that I can’t control time? Is that what bothered me? Does it have to do with the fact that I have dreamed the future a few times and have seen it come true? I honestly don’t know. In my youth, I used to memorize or write down my dreams, which made it easy for me to notice when they actually come true in what appear to be dejavus, yet if I go back and read my dream journal, I find that it was a recount of a dream I had years before. This was always a freak thing with me that I never gave much thought. The reason for this is because I don’t ever know if my dreams will come true or not and the future is so foreign to me that dreams of the future show no significance so it’s not like I have super psychic powers or a gift. It’s just something about me that gives me no advantage over anyone, just a curiosity really.

Over the past ten years, I periodically suffer from sleep paralysis. I wake up unable to move due to the fact that my body has not completely woken up and the hormone that keeps me in bed so I don’t sleep walk is still in my system, making me unable to move. I try to wake up, but the more I try the worse the paralysis gets. I find that if I go back to sleep, I wake up just fine but I have experimented with this a few times and have managed to astral project and I learned that there is a very scary and hallucinatory fine line between dreams and reality. This was once a very scary experience that has turned into a curiosity, something I have gotten used to. Still, there is still something frightening about it when I stop and think about it. I am, by all accounts, extremely healthy yet I’ve had this sleeping disorder on and off for the past ten years. I still remember the first time it happened. Why didn’t I get it before and why hasn’t it completely gone away?

I started writing this blog a few days ago and now I’m back after watching most of the movie, “Inception.” Before watching the movie, I told my husband that it would frighten me. I just knew because it had to do with dreams and reality. I saw most of the movie, and then fell asleep. I woke up to see the very very end. Suddenly, I felt paralyzed in fear. My heart was beating fast and my husband couldn’t get an answer out of me. I tell the man everything but I suddenly felt distrustful of him. All I could say was, “I told you this movie would frighten me.”

So I will confess right now, what truly frightened me about this movie. It suddenly occurred to me that every memory I have could be planted. Perhaps I was once a part of a secret undercover operation and all evidence of that that has been erased and replaced with the memories of the amazing life I have led. Then an even more frightening thought occurred to me. What if this isn’t real? What if I am some crazy lunatic getting high off of this idea that I live in the perfect world with the perfect husband and this beautiful boy? What if I pinch myself one day, wake up, and realize that I’m back in my very imperfect past, a past I had been trying to break away from for years. This was a very scary thought at the time and the movie really brought that home for me. Now, I’m fine. Now, I laugh at the thought. I have no choice but to trust myself and all the government agents around me who call themselves my friends and family, but there is this very disturbing idea that it all could be fake. I could be living in the matrix and I chose this life of illusion. I could be jumping from one parallel universe to another and one day, I might find myself trapped in some other time or dimension.

What about you? What is your greatest fear?

Who is this Lacey Reah and what is she like?

To help break the ice, I found some personality interview questions and answered them. If you'd like to know more about me, ask me anything.

1. When are you most alert morning or night? Depends on when I eat the most chocolate. ;)

2. If you were a tree (or animal) what kind of tree (animal) would you be? I would be a hawk. Hawks are sharp, strong, fierce and have foresight and perspective.

3. If you were a Star Trek® [or Star Wars®] character, which one would it be? Nothing like a geek question to verify a person’s geek status. I would definitely be Mr. Spock. I really identify with him, being half Vulcan and half human myself. Let me explain: My father rebelled against his strict religious upbringing and is a hard core atheist who believes strongly in “logic” and science. In fact, I recall him many times in my childhood criticizing me for not being “logical”. I did very well in my philosophy of logic class despite my classmates complaints that it made no sense to them so I often see things differently as most humans, noting that they don’t see the “logic” in things. However, my mother is a very spiritual and intuitive woman so like Spock, I also have a human side. I’ve learned to use both intuition and logic when dealing with my problems.

4. If you could trade places with any other person for a week, famous or not famous, living or dead, real or fictional. With whom would it be? My son

5. If you could be any character in fiction, who would you be? I would be Princess Naussica from the Studio Ghibli film, “Naussica and the Valley of the Wind.” She lives in the toxic future, where plants have become poisonous to breathe and though everyone is afraid of mother earth, she still finds it beautiful and learns how to reverse the toxins. However, she isn’t able to convince the politicians to save the earth because of their own preoccupation with war and destruction. She is fearless and follows her heart. Because of this, she finds answers that other people are too blinded by fear to see.

6. Would you consider yourself as a quiet, calm person or an active person? I’m like a puppy. One moment I’m frisky and running around in circles, and the next moment I’m calm and just lying around

7. If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be? Super psychic powers of telepathy and telekinesis.

8. If you had only six months left to live, what would you do with the time? Tell everyone I ever knew how I felt about them and spend most of my time with my love ones, savoring every moment with them.

9. If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be? A supreme pizza.

10. Do you have any interesting habits? If so please list them (Examples might be suck on a finger, twirl hair, roll tongue, double jointed) I have monkey feet and pick things up with my toes when I don’t feel like bending over. I eat a lot, bad habit. I tend to twiddle my toes when I’m anxious. I bend back my fingers and make weird sculptures out of them. I can spin things really fast in many different ways. I kick in my sleep.

Philosophical Quotes from "Fireflies"

Below are some of my favorite philosophical quotes from the novella, “Fireflies.”  Although the story contains some explicit erotic scenes, it does raise many questions about the meaning of life.

Pierre is a dreamer and is satisfied with keeping his fantasies nothing but that. My dreams become goals and I learn to make them real... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

She doesn’t snarl. She smiles instead, but it is a half smile. She is hiding something, an imperfection. There is something about her teeth, the sides of them that she doesn’t want me to see. I am fascinated by this unseen flaw. I want to know what she is hiding. Perhaps this is what is missing from my life, some mysterious flaw that I won’t want to correct... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

How can I not go back? Was it not just the other day that I was musing to myself how perfect my life is? How perfect it was? And even then I wasn’t satisfied until I did something to perfect it even more... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

Memories frequent my mind of a time when making love was not so rushed, when I was the one being seduced, before it became so important for me to finish the kill. For so long, the need for food and the isolation from mankind has left me indifferent to such thoughts. But lately, I find them plaguing me more and more. Then I meet her... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

After all, I start to think, when we look back, and I mean, really look back on our lives unconditionally, isn’t it the beautiful moments in time we remember? We might analyze the stories. We might question the feelings of the past, but our true, most accented memories are the brief moments that meant nothing at all, except that they were beautiful in one way or another. I might ask myself many times whether or not I loved this girl. But I’ll never question the fact that we stood on a bed of moss, surrounded by fireflies... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

She was stronger, but I managed to outmaneuver her. She needs to believe I’m far more powerful. It’s the only way. After all, being nice doesn’t seem to be working... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

What was it about us? What do we have in us that allowed us to cheat death and change into something new?  I suppose the two of us were already a bit wild. Maybe it doesn’t take as much of a transformation as I think it does. Perhaps we were already halfway to becoming beasts. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

“No, I should go. You’ve been much too kind.”

“Don’t lose yourself out there, my dear. This city can eat you right up if you let it.”

“I won’t,” I respond reassuringly.

“But there’s always something,” he continues. “Something keeps us going when everyone else has left. Even if it’s a small thing, something is bound to fuel our will to go on—even if it is just a beautiful lady, who is open enough to let me help her.”  He smiles faintly... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

The fireflies, though scarce, hover in the darkness, watching me. What do they want? How are we connected? —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

Questions are something I thought would never bother me again. They only bother human women, women who are bogged down with the demands of civilization. Yet they bother me now. I thought I had changed... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

I no longer see fireflies glowing in the surrounding bushes and grasses. I do not see their patterns of flashing light blessing the vast landscape of the great park. There are a few still lingering and they stay close to me. Why are they here in the summer and gone in the spring? Just like Natasha, their lives are transient. What was her fascination with them? Why are they fascinated with us? Vampires live forever. We read about them in strange books. I know the fireflies do not. They are here and gone within the span of a season. In the stories, there are rules. There are answers. People learn quite easily how to kill a werewolf or a vampire. In stories, people find answers to their dilemmas. In stories, people are handed the answers through the advice of a doctor or mystic. I read somewhere that you can make yourself human again if you kill the first vampire in the legacy. I wonder if Jesse believes such crap. Maybe she is just trying everything, hoping that she will find an answer eventually. What will that crazy girl try next? —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

We’re diseased, is what we are. We aren’t some new species of animal. We’re human and those who don’t die by our hands catch what we have. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

You compare your life to that of a firefly but it is never that simple or fantastic... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

“We aren’t social creatures,” Natasha once said to me. I believed her. Then why do I feel so alone? I realize now that I was a fool to believe her. What could she have known? I know nothing as does Jesse. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

When Writing about Sex Vampires is "Writing What You Know"

I had been writing plays for so long, but after having a family and moving away from NY, I lost interest in workshopping plays and spending hours working with actors and creating something for an audience.  I had written a play that might have been too big for a non musical stage and decided to turn it into a novel.  That novel turned into a life's work of trying to perfect a very complicated theme and story.

I realized that I hadn't written prose in a long time.  I had grown accustomed to writing nothing but dialogue.  In playwriting, unlike screenwriting, we are asked to use as little stage direction as possible.  I needed to hone my skills in descriptive writing.  Someone told me to write what I know.  I'm very uncomfortable writing about real life but he meant to draw things from within.  I am a fitness instructor and personal trainer so I should know a lot about the human body.  I used to be an actress so I should be able to describe a look or an emotion well.  I was also getting burned out from writing something with so much meaning and spiritual significance.  I needed a break.  I did some research and learned that most publishers do not want a ton of meaning.  They aren't looking for what impressed our English teachers.  They just want to publish something entertaining.

So I set out to write something entertaining, something descriptive, something with very little dialogue as an exercise to become a better writer.  I read a blog where a woman talked about her "button" and it started a thread on how women can multiply orgasm.  Men wrote in and confessed that their orgasms are quick and that not much happens afterward.  Intent on writing what I know, I drew on my martial arts and yoga training.  In studying Chi Kung, I learned that the practitioners believed in Chi, or energy control.  Jieng Chi was described as something you are born with.  It is also your most powerful energy.  It is your sexual energy, what came from what your parents created.  It is creation itself.  You can't get anymore powerful than that.  I decided to write a short story about a species of vampire that feed off of this powerful sexual energy.  Of course, they hardly waste their time on men because their orgasms are so short.  What could be more entertaining than lesbian sex vampires?

It is written in present tense because, for a long time, I didn't know what would happen next.  I made it up as I went along.  I discovered a lot about myself as I practiced my ability to describe the human body.  I did make the story entertaining and entertained myself with the idea of these women being controlled by creatures that had the ability to suck orgasm and orgasm out of them until all of their jieng energy had been released.  There is an awful lot of sex, gore and violence.  But on top of that, my protagonist struggles with issues such as free will, her humanity and her animal instinct.  She also struggles with her identity and her feelings towards other characters in the story.  It's a love story on top of the graphic sex.  My friends who have read the story have said it is so much more than a smut story and they were the ones who encouraged me to actually do something with it. You can be the judge.  

It's now available everywhere books are sold.  You can check it out here:

http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Lacey-Reah/dp/145028163X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367443389&sr=8-1&keywords=lacey+reah