Funeral Diner
The Underdark

"The darkness sorrounds you. The darkness shrouds everything. Movement is apparent and the movement is dangerous. All around the walls are crushing, looming as if to threaten the collapse. But this   is home, the dark, the warmth."

You are afraid. The darkness surrounds you, the darkness engulfs everything. You see nothing, understand nothing. You no longer know where you are. Are you at home? Are you on the brink of a precipice? Anyway, you are paralyzed. Colors no longer exist. You try to move an arm, place your hand in front of your eyes, maybe you perceive a shadow, something, perhaps some faint distant source of light still exists. No. You touch your face with that hand, the sense of touch warns you that the experiment gave a negative result. There are no nearby sources of light.

The darkness envelops you and makes you feel a biting cold. Not physically though. Everything is in your head. The physical no longer exists. Thoughts are amplified and clearer, sensations exponentially stronger. And it's dark, you're afraid.

The monsters, of course, the monsters. Who knows what hides in this darkness, who knows what monsters ready to pop out, who knows what they'll do to you. Who knows...

Who knows what you might do yourself. 

"Fighting back becomes more difficult and we resign ourselves to existence in the dark (you must stay afraid). And the hate only gets worse. Hidden in the low light the hate only gets worse."

You are not afraid of the monsters, you are afraid of the darkness. You are afraid of ignorance, you are afraid of what you do not know and what you do not see. But the darkness hides nothing, the darkness only hides you.

"The truth is what we make it, not what you see, so ask no questions."

And you do not see. You are hidden even from yourself. You no longer recognize yourself. You are losing yourself. Your mind is unraveling. You are afraid because the person you thought you were is gone. You are afraid of yourself. That self that becomes the exact same thing as the monsters from when you were little. 

The monsters are real and they are all inside you, restless, bloodthirsty, and in frantic search of the exit. They are under a veil of darkness and wait patiently, tearing you apart little by little.

 "How could we free anyone when we can't save ourselves."

Half Moon Bay is a town about sixty-five kilometers from San Francisco, a cheerful and wealthy place. Rich teenagers attending private schools divide their time between stereotypical parties and poor-quality drugs, and poorer teenagers divide their time between stereotypical parties and poor-quality drugs. Basically, the same stereotypical California from low-grade teen-drama, or just plain stereotypical California from teen-drama.

This is where the Funeral Diner comes from. This is where "The Underdark" comes from.

The ceiling of this sunny reality collapses, engulfing even the floor and revealing all the darkness, morbidity, falsehood, hypocrisy, and destructive chaos that hides the illusion that everything is fine. The one that seems reassuring and real. The one we do not want to know. 

"Decline" is the instrumental intro that begins this dizzying spiral into the deepest and darkest recesses, the most haunting, nooks we thought did not exist, which would have been better not to exist. And the worst is that they concern not only the world around us but also ourselves. Then we proceed on a psychic journey in ever-worsening conditions. There are screams, pitch-black melodies, darkness always and anyway, a hell with icy flames, a decadent and resigned poetry. "Collapsing", "We Become Buried" is the delirium. "It Is Good We Never Met". Annihilation. A meticulous and surgical deconstruction. We continue to descend.

 "No voices were heard and none were memorable. We were left to our own destiny, failed at that and sought solace in the coldest arms imaginable. We are the makers of our own fate and we failed.     We all have blood on our hands."

 Here we are. We have reached the end. The monsters are here. We are face to face. We are in front of a mirror.