Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Man Who Wasn't There

Last night upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
One day, many moons ago, I woke up in the guest bedroom of my friends house to a fairly quiet morning. I had probably been drinking the previous night, but that's what teenagers in small towns do. Well, that and one other thing, but my girlfriend had a curfew. After a time I heard my friend enter the bathroom at the end of the hall just to the right of his bedroom door, which was just to the right of the guest bedroom. I stepped out into the hallway while my eyes glanced curiously to my left where the stairs began and descended to the right. At my immidiate left, against the wall, was a bookcase at about mid-torso height. Past that was an empty hallway corner at the top of the stair.

Running, definitely running up the stairs was a very small man. I knew right away that he wasn't "really" there because his footfalls made no noise. He was, perhaps, three and a half feet tall and wearing a cowboy hat. He was also completely monochrome, as if he had been dipped in bronze. When he made it to the top of the stair, he brought both feet together and hopped into the empty corner of that end of the hallway, ducking down as if he were trying to hide behind the short bookcase against the wall.

Pausing for an appropriate "what the fuck," I then arched my neck and peered around the bookcase to see if the mysterious homunculus was indeed playing an impromptu game of hide-and-seek. He was not. About this time my friend exited the bathroom where I proceeded to make myself sound like a crazy person, haranguing him with tales of a bronzed midget cowboy.

(Sent from my iPad, while I am in bed.)

I was on Will Morgan's (A Few Shots to Shaman) podcast 42 minutes recently (EPISODE7), so.. umm.. here it is: Download (click to play, or right click save-as to download).
BONUS! Extra audio, Skype session: Link (click to hear, right click save as to download) Fast forward past to the 5 minute mark when you hear music, because the beginning is part of a Jake Kotze interview.. and you're here to hear me, right?! RIGHT?!...

Aaanyways, this blog post begins with a poem I first heard in The Sixth Sense and appears later in The Haunting in Connecticut. Both of these movies feature the dead existing along side the living, which is a theme discussed in my Land of the Dead article, which was the basis of this recent podcast.

The story which follows the poem is a true account of something that happened to me oh, about 11 years ago. It's one of several "hallucinations" I've had, most of which probably happened when I had been drinking or sometime shortly after. Alcohol is known to make people hallucinate, so I'm not going to say that these occurrences are proof of anything like faeries or what-have-you. Perhaps the altered state of consciousness created by alcohol lowers certain filters and allows a little more reality to enter the field of view. To borrow a term from LUMINOSITY, these experiences may represent a bleed-through from one "world" to another. For example, one day, perhaps 6 or 7 years ago, I was waking up from a dream and was in a partial wake-sleep state. With my eyes still closed, and on the edge of wakefulness, I saw a very large red balloon in front of me; slightly up and to the left. As I opened my eyes the red balloon continued to be visible, even though I was now fully awake and outside of the dream realm. I blinked and rubbed my eyes but it stayed consistent for maybe 5 seconds before dissolving away.

Two of my most recent "hallucinations" gave me the sense that what I was seeing was not imaginary or caused by mis-fired neurons in my brain, but were actual glimpses of a closely parallel world to ours. These happened between 5 or 6 years ago, and are the last ones I can clearly remember having.

Before moving to Texas for a for years, I was staying with my cousin in Southern California and admittedly was drinking a lot those days. This article is making me sound like a lush, by trust me, these were rare occasions. My yearly drinking usually consists of buying a sixer of Guinness on St. Paddy's Day and not even finishing that. My cousin was big time pot-head those days, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't smoking because I thought I would be having job interviews right after I moved and I didn't want to worry about passing the drug tests. Oh, wait a minute, that was true at the start, and then I decided "fuck it" and smoked anyways.. Hmm, not sure when the "hallucination" happened - before or after my "fuck it" moment? Well, that incriminating evidence aside, we were sitting on some bleachers between a school and a baseball diamond waiting for someone to meet up. We weren't actually that close to the baseball diamond, it was to our right up a sidewalk about 30 feet away. It was at night and a little league game was just finishing up. All the kids, still in their cleats and holding their bat-bags, were walking with their parents along the sidewalk which would bring them past us. My cousin was playing his guitar and I was watching the group walk towards us. Weaving through the crowd was a kid, dressed like the rest in a blue and white uniform, running soundlessly along the sidewalk. I knew, as usual, that he wasn't actually there because of the lack of noise that should have been produced from his cleats against the cement, and that his footsteps would have been at a different cadence than the rest of the kids. He seemed to cut through the crowd seamlessly, without bumping into, or "phasing" through anyone, and then he cut a sharp 90-degree angle to his right and ran off into the grass and the more shadowed side of the backstop; continuing to not produce any sound. After about 10 feet he dissolved away. This was the most realistic figure I've seen that, again, "wasn't there."

The last of my "hallucinations" which I will leave you with happened perhaps a year or two after the above story. I was laying on my futon at one end of the room watching a movie on my TV in the dark. The only light was coming from the TV and it came up at an angle where it hit the ceiling and spread over my side of the room, opposite the TV. I'm not sure if I had been drinking anytime around this event, so I don't think that can be explained as the cause. As I was lying there watching my movie, I happened to look up at the ceiling to see a very large, perhaps volleyball sized spider (the kind with a huge ass and not much else) which was a translucent yellowish skin color, covered in purple polka-dots. Hopefully not representative of any actual spider, because thinking this thing was real would have made me wet my bed. It walked in a very hobbling way, almost bouncing along the ceiling going from the light of the TV into the quickly darkening shadow of the opposite wall. I knew my air-conditioning vent was in it's path, and I have to admit I half expected to see the vent wide open to allow such a creature into my room. During it's walk I was rubbing my eyes, blinking and so on, but it continued to be visible until it had gone entirely into shadow. I slid along my wall to the light switch, just to make sure, and thankfully it was not there anymore when I flipped the lights on. I have read about spider creatures being used by evil government-employed shaman to create "webs" which prevent remote viewers and astral projectors from visiting certain locations. But I don't that explains what I was seeing. I really hope to never journey into a world with freaky giant bugs, but I do think this could have been a bleed-through from somewhere else. To be fair, he was walking on my ceiling, not in mid-air on an invisible surface, so where ever this thing is from, my ceiling is there too. Maybe it's like in Constantine where once you cross-over the whole world is the same, just in hell. Or that there's an archetypal world under this one.. that has giant arachnids.

Last night, before I walked up my stair, I think I met a man, or woman, who really wasn't there. This is a new house, and though it does have its creeks and cracks, it doesn't seem like a "haunted house." The women in my family tend be the ones more likely to see ghosts, but again, no such sighting has occurred here. Nor do I personally think there's a non-corporeal presence here. Disclaimers aside, I either have to admit that I'm more absent minded than I thought, or something made contact last night. Now, I am extremely absent minded. For instance I'll sometimes forget if I've already shampooed my hair in the shower. I do a lot of thinking in there though, so it's easy to lose track of what has been soaped up already and what has not. Well to make a short story longer, I had just watched Frailty as well, which is about demons. So, I'm getting ready to go upstairs to my bathroom and I'm getting a glass of water in the kitchen. At about that time I either scratched my own neck and didn't realize it, or someone (or some-thing) scratched it for me. I wasn't itching, so I'm not sure why I would have done it. By the time I got to the bathroom and had a look in the mirror, the scratch was feeling very much like a rug-burn on my neck. There were, and still are, two raised reddish lines running from basically the back-left of my neck up at an angle towards my left ear. At first I thought it was obviously self-inflicted, but the angle is perpendicular to the direction I would normally scratch my neck with my left hand. Even my right hand wouldn't scratch at that angle. Also my fingernails, which I do keep rather long, didn't have skin under them. I don't know what to make of this one except that I either scratch myself at odd angles without consciously knowing about it, or something else scratched me. Meh, they know where to find me, and maybe next time I can get them to scratch my back instead.

Psychopomps

What are you saving up to be.. Jewish?