#morbid

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Rest in power Petrov

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I don’t need this News

The heart of my enemy

About once a month I run into an older American gentleman who tells me stories about his life and his time in Vietnam. He regularly reads my blog and recently told me that he has one of his own and that there were several posts I (and anyone who reads my blog) may be interested in so I thought I’d share one here!

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(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
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This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
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I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
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On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
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Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
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I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
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Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
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I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
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Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
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Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
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So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
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I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
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It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
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[Sources: news of a new study, reported in Science Daily online, Sniffing Out Danger: Fearful Memories Can Trigger Heightened Sense of Smell. The original journal article was published in Science and titled, “Fear Learning Enhances Neural Responses to Threat-Predictive Sensory Stimuli.”]

Some days you just decompose in a strawberry patch.

My friends and I went strawberry picking at the beginning of the summer and found coyote remains in the middle of the field. Been thinking about the vibes of it all as we’re leaving summer for for autumn.

Original letter from Dead to Paulet Andrea in Switzerland.

CREDITS: thetruemayhemcollection

“I can’t remember much about that night (Abhorrence show and an after party at Mayhem house in Kråkstad). One thing I remember is that after the gig, Anders from Cadaver told us that an afterparty would be held at some house in the woods and we would travel by train to get there! Me and Arkki from Impaled Nazarene thought "fuck this, we are going home”, until we realised we are in Norway! I don’t recall much from that night but there was a Mayhem performance at one point (loud!) Pelle was cool. Talking with Juice (our bass player), about Christianity, I think. He wasn’t acting crazy or anything except throwing Tomi on the floor for a good reason! I slept on the mattress on the floor and Tomi was sleeping in Pelle’s bed. I woke up when Tomi crash landed beside me, with Pelle cursing and yelling at him! This was the time before any notorious fame for Mayhem, they were ordinary guys just like us, Anders or Darkthrone. But I am glad I got to witness it" - Kalle Mattsson (source: mayhem.chronicles)

Some words from Euronymous to Maniac about the Euronymous, Manheim and Ihlen project L.E.G.O and a match.

Source:thetruemayhemcollection

Øystein, Tony and Kenneth. Party at Lars.

New years eve 1987.

Credits: Irene

Pelle smiling for the picture. He was wearing a Napalmdeath t-shirt. He was a goofy guy who smiled and laughed a lot.

New years eve 1988.

Credits:Irene.

Letters from the Dead:

Kråkstad, 4 October 1990

Letters from the Dead:

Kråkstad, 24 August 1990