The world is terrifying, but I’m just not enjoying it as much as I used to.
It used to be we’d have a good long stretch of sunshine clear blue skies with the birds all tweeting and kids playing outside in the yard and glasses of fresh cold lemonade and then BLAMMO! Disease! Inflation! War! Disaster!
Now it’s just terrifying all the time. It’s a given; I wake up every single day KNOWING it’s gonna be terrifying somewhere and they’ll bring it right to my pocket to make certain I can’t miss it. I don’t want to sound unappreciative for the miracles of the digital age, but I think I like my fear more analog, ‘cause this is like living in a haunted house.
I mean the idea of a haunted house makes sense, scare-wise, when someone accidentally visits, but if someone’s just living there, the co-habitating wraiths unfinished business pales in comparison to the incredibly bad decision making of their warm-blooded roommates.
Don’t move into other people’s houses. It’s rude, even if they’re not alive.
Also unless it’s a total accident, why visit? Disney had this incredible children’s record, “The Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House” – were you lucky enough to have a copy of that? I played it like a lost Beatles disc. I can sing all the ghost sounds like a mescaline fueled opera. It is the absolute best because it is the only record on the planet that begins with the words:
You are a bold and courageous person.
And I was! I am! Laura Olsher’s voice rang in my head, a definitive precursor to my passion for the work of Laurie Anderson, as she told a tale that went pretty much downhill from there, as some egotistic idiot decides to go into a dilapidated house to investigate a light on the uppermost floor. Moron.
Don’t visit other people’s houses when they didn’t ask you over.
Again, super rude. Many ghost problems can be solved with simple courtesy.
The last haunted house I went to was in Kansas City; they have the absolute best ones there, entire abandoned department stores that take 9 months to prepare, where every floor has a different theme and people not only jump out at you but there’s a 5 story tall slide at the end that sends you hurtling out into the street. Each of these is a masterwork in theatre art, and right after I got married I took my wife to one.
But when I got there the “house” wasn’t as haunted as I was by my 10 year old self; horror filled my feet and though my eyes saw that all the ghouls were disaffected teens scoring early holiday money, my brain was that of a fifth grader.
I am not proud of all the screaming, though I will not deny that it happened. My wife was able to hear it with absolute clarity since she didn’t scream once. While I was shuffling through a pop art hellscape, she was an urban archeologist touring a converted pre-war building.
The apex of my shame was when we realized that the management had seen me coming on the night vision cameras (they use those to pick out there real rubes in the crowd). I was the talk of the event for a few minutes. By the time we reached the werewolf village a couple of the guys had gotten up the nerve to tell Zoe what time they were leaving work and ask her out to some party all the performers were going to. Every time I tried to interrupt they just snarled at me and I yelped. And cowered, there was some pretty good cowering.
Very very politely, she told the werewolves she’d just stick with me.
I knew someone whose family suddenly developed a predilection for religion one summer and decided that Halloween was a forbidden holiday; they lived in one of those nice neighborhoods with porches and fences, but that Halloween night they turned off all the lights and pretended they weren’t home. She remembered peeking out of her windows to watch the trick-or-treaters slow down and stop in front of the house, discussing what could possibly be the matter before reluctantly moving on. She said it was a great Halloween because since her mother wouldn’t let them turn on any lights they effectively were all ghosts, haunting their own house.
Houses can be haunted, people’s eyes can be haunted… haunting is the past trying to encroach on the present, so anywhere that memory can go, ghosts may swiftly follow. The only thing that can’t be haunted is the future, but people are terrified of that too. It’s not so bad, I mean it’s impossible to be brave without fear being involved, and every living person is a ghost in training, trying to finish our business so we don’t have too much homework left to do when class is over.
I mean, of course she stuck with me, I mean they were tall and young and one of them flexed a bicep, but I’m, y’know, lucky, that’s what I am, I see that now.
Giddy Haunts.