The Devil's Rose's blog

2006-10-21 12:50 a.m.

'Santa Carla' Midnight

Noms de plume are invaluable in their way. Just as I've chosen to be "Rose" in this journal, so my new hometown of Santa Cruz has managed to become famous under a different name: "Santa Carla".

Santa Carla, California, became the pseudonym for Santa Cruz, California, when the film The Lost Boys was filmed here. The movie has attained something of cult status among many people.

Why was the name changed, though?

Well, Santa Cruz at one point was afflicted by several serial killers. In the movie these are implied to have been vampires. Still, any reference to death in a tourist trap is bad publicity and so names were changed.

I bring this up because Halloween approaches, and my new friends and I will be celebrating in downtown Santa Cruz...or, for the evening, downtown Santa Carla.

Our theme for the evening will be Tiger Army's "Santa Carla Twilight," which I heard them play live when they played at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium last September with AFI. The irony was not lost on them, as Nick 13 even remarked on it.

Watch the moonrise tonight
The ocean looms past bonfires alight
I am a stranger in this place
And when I see you, I can't turn away

Under this beach lie pirate bones
We stand above them, at long last alone
There's something different in your heart
You're not afraid of the darkness within us all

And we kiss, in the Santa Carla twilight
On the beach, under a Santa Carla moon
I am lost - but I've found you in my arms
And my heart is blacker than the dark ocean

Eternity... belongs to us
Eternally... lasts our love
If you want forever close your eyes and surrender to me
Just remember today was the last that you'll ever see the sun
In Santa Carla

Hear the song of night tide
It's been ages since I felt this alive
At long last I've found you and it ends
The loneliness we feel that they could never understand

And in this land beyond the dusk
A consummation of unholy love
Between two children of the night
As all time dissolves into a crimson dream

My friends and I are going to be LARPing as vampires out for a Halloween frolic that night...and then I will be hosting a five woman and one man show of The Lost Boys, which will be amusing at the least. My dad bought the movie back when I chose to attend UC Santa Cruz over a rather more prestigious UC campus, and we watched it together the night before he drove me to the move-in festivities.

...I had planned on spending Halloween alone on the beach, all dressed up in costume and just thinking, but my friends here are my friends here, and I should spend it with them I suppose, even though I'd really rather not be bothered on this holiday which is so sacred to me.

I just don't really want to spend my Halloween celebrating without my best friends. We always spent Halloween together, chasing each other about under the moonlight. Laughing. Yelling. Making idiots out of ourselves but loving every minute of it because it meant that we were young and alive and celebrating the fact, even if no one else was.

Halloween was the night when we celebrated our friendship and our youthful exuberance and reaffirmed out mutually adopted sisterhood with each other. This will be the first Halloween in over a decade that I won't see at least one of them the night of.

It's going to feel very distressing, I fear.

Be prepared to by my agony aunt the day following.

The Santa Carla twilight without my friends is going to kill me this Halloween. But at least I'll be estranged in a way that unites me with my sisters.

I may yet decide to abandon my school friends and spend the night on the beach, early morning classes the following day or not. The ocean, no matter how black, is always reassuring to me. It's a void, into which I can throw everything that is troubling me and let the tides carry the emotion away with them.

To days of inspiration and Halloween spent celebrating life instead of death...

But most of all to my friends.
--Rose Back | Older | Current | Next