We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Stephen King
Halloween 2020. The year we learned that the real monsters don’t wear masks. They’re invisible, airborne, and they don’t give a shit about your plans. So here’s some beautiful lunatic in Santa Cruz, climbing up on a bronze surfer, making their own horror show because the actual horror show? That one’s getting old. Exhausting, really.
Santa Cruz has always been a refuge for the weird, the unwashed, the gloriously unhinged. It’s a town that understands that sometimes you just need to dress up like a ghoul and desecrate public art to feel alive. There’s something pure about it. Honest. While the rest of us were baking sourdough and pretending we weren’t slowly losing our minds, someone said “fuck it” and became a Halloween decoration themselves.
The Stephen King quote nails it: we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. Because fabricated fear? That’s manageable. That’s got rules. Real fear, the kind that shut down the world, that’s the stuff that breaks you.
So yeah, climb that statue.
Be ridiculous.
Be defiant.
Be human.