"crimson," this guy asked me today, "why the hell aren't you living in california?" i usually laugh at these kinds of comments. i'm frequently told that i belong in new york or california. i am, in fact, still in arkansas. the whole concept always seemed so pathetically lame to me--that i'd need to drag my ass to one coast or the other to achieve some sort of trendy, socially-approved coolness. i can do my gig right here. i can, in fact, be just as fucked up & bizarre here as i can in LA. i'm the same in arkansas as i would be in new york, california, amsterdam or paris. but i do wonder, at this late date, if i haven't somehow screwed up by staying here a bit too long. a lot of people w/ "underground" tendencies here--especially the younger ones--make a mad dash to the west coast as soon as they're able. i always thought the whole thing was ridiculous. i figure that anybody who can't make it in arkansas isn't going to make it in california, either. if you're an unimaginative loser here, you'll be an unimaginative loser there. plus, most people drag their own problems around w/ them wherever they go. so if you're having problems here, you'll just pack those same damn problems w/ you...you'll end up being the same annoying dickhead you always were; nothing will have changed but the scenery. if you're a jackass from arkansas who's suddenly moved to california, then you'll just be a jackass w/ a palm tree in your backyard. but perhaps i've been short-sighted on this subject. i filed this rant under "regrets". it's not really a regret. just a wondering-out-loud sort of deal. would my life have been any different if i'd have moved to the west coast (or to the east) during my youth? probably. still, i think if i'd have moved into some kind of urban hell at too young an age, i would've been swallowed alive. then again, i've been swallowed before & enjoyed it. things might've turned out OK. i think the one advantage of going to such places is that i might've been more likely to assemble my own cadre of like-minded mutants. which i have, to some extent. but my entourage is rather small. i'm beginning to think that if i'd have gone to a larger area, i could've attracted more people who could actually understand what i'm saying & what i'm trying to accomplish creatively. my chances of finding other musicians & creative souls might've been better. my chances of finding other people who GET IT might've increased. on the other hand, geographical location doesn't necessarily guarantee coolness. i've inadvertently freaked people out who boasted about how they were from NY or chicago or california or some other overpopulated, trendy hellhole...& guess what? when shit turns weird, they get freaked out like sappy, blushing schoolgirls. so do i need to move to the city? i dunno. i've seen plenty of hillbillies who were capable of rolling w/ weird shit...stuff that sends the trendy wanna-be types storming out the door in righteous indignation. i loathe dealing w/ people who are pulling some kind of quasi-leftist poseur act. i'm sick to death of candyasses & flakes, regardless of where they come from. it's not as if i haven't been around. i've lived in a lot of different places. most people here travel, but i've met a few individuals who've never been out of this small region in their lives. i've met people just over the line in missouri who think that this area of arkansas is like sodom & gomorrah...there's a small-but-thriving gay/pagan/hippie/freak/mutant population here. it keeps some of the locals chronically wigged out. it gives me great hope (although i've found that many of these people are disappointingly mainstream beneath their weird clothes & pseudo-bohemian posturings...they think they're so insanely hip, but their views can be alarmingly conservative). anyway, i can see some obvious cultural problems around here. this nearby town had a guy running for mayor who wanted to wall the entire city & give the gays 30 days to leave or be prosecuted. he wanted to make women's rights illegal. needless to say, the joker didn't get elected, although he gave this area plenty of bad press...made us all look like dumbass hicks. we've got all kinds of Ph.Ds running around this area, all kinds of bright & brilliant people, but when the national news is looking for copy, they focus on the obvious dimwits, so we end up looking like cousin-diddling retards. truth is, i've met some seriously spooky people here. i've also met some cool ones. i think the same would be true anyplace i went. every town's got its assholes & angels. the only advantage could be that, due to sheer population, my chances of meeting someone similarly bent might increase in a larger city. the rednecks aren't all in the south. the only person i've seen actually burn a book, besides my stepmother, was a woman i encountered in pennsylvania. i've met some serious, king-hell rednecks from CA--rednecks that even appalled the homegrown rednecks here (i was later shown an amateur porn flick featuring two of these goddamn baboons...horrific...two brothers playing w/ each other's asses in slack-jawed, drooling abandon). i've met useless wimps from NY who couldn't handle the slightest bit of weirdness. it's often hard for me to roll w/ such things. they're from the big city. they're SUPPOSED to be hip, for chrissakes. anyway, as much as i often find myself defending this area, we do have our share of homegrown dumbshits. for instance, we've got the boogermen (not to be confused w/ the boogeyman, who lives in the apartment above me). my husband & his colleagues call these people "boogermen". they earned this nickname from their unfortunate habit of picking their noses & wiping it on the walls. literally. no joke. many of them dropped out of school by 8th grade (i've met quite a few bright dropouts...trust me, these wretched creatures don't fit in that category). they openly brag about beating their kids & wives (damn near all of them have a shitload of kids). one was boasting about sticking needles into the feet of his newborn as revenge for its crying & keeping him awake. another proclaimed that his 7-year-old boy is a homosexual because he doesn't like killing animals (he's convinced that this is a sign the kid's gay--he calls the kid "pussy" instead of his actual name). the middle-aged men, the ones who almost never bathe & show up at work drunk, brag about about knocking up 14-year-olds, most of whom are their co-workers' daughters. the parents think this stuff is funny. one guy punished his teenage daughters by making them strip for him. many of these people still don't understand the concept of sexual harassment; some are blatant stalkers. if a woman refuses to date a man, he'll simply hunt her down, because that's the way it's done. the women fight in shitkicker bars on the weekend, making their friends & families come bail them out of jail. some of these folks are illiterate & don't care. they're too dim to even function as rational cogs in the industrial machine. they creep down from the hills w/ their 10 kids, looking for work. for some of the 50-year-olds, it'll be the first job they ever had. once they get the job, they have to be told that they have to show up on an actual schedule. otherwise, they'll just come shambling in when the mood suits them. they have to be asked to bathe. the boogermen aren't just good ol' boys; they're serious freaks of nature. they roll in from all over the tri-state area, wiping their snot on the walls & shitting on the floors. really. some of them don't understand about putting toilet paper in the toilet. some don't use the stuff at all. there was this boogerman once who was simply dubbed "the mad shitter". used to do this sexual thing...jerked off, cut his pants up w/ a knife & shat on the floor, leaving the whole god-awful mess for others to clean up afterward. they're animals, w/o the grace to turn their animalism into art. hell, the mad shitter probably could've been a hot performance artist in new york, but down here, his act has limited charm. anyway, there are many intelligent, creative people here. but there are the boogermen, too--although i think they're everywhere, not just here. i've lived in most parts of this state & it's an OK place to be. i remember being less than enchanted during high school, though, not having running water & functional roads. we occasionally kept hogs & cattle in the house. no heat. a dilapidated shack w/ plastic wrap for windows (one year, a goat ate the windows). weird neighbors...there was this cajun guy who used to beat up his cows in a drunken rage & this ancient voodoo woman who believed she could stop tornadoes w/ an axe. one time, we took a pig home from auction in a 1950s car. there we were, rolling down the interstate w/ a pig riding in the back seat. suddenly, a car races up beside us. it's got NY tags. they're fucking filming us. i can see them shooting back & forth between the pig, the run-down old car & our arkansas license plate. somewhere, those people are probably still laughing about encountering the world's biggest hicks. anyway, i do wonder if i screwed up by staying so long in this state. if i had headed either east or west in any serious way, i might've had a better chance of finding people to work w/ artisticially. then again, maybe things aren't as hip as everybody suggests & i'd have gotten seriously disillusioned. i don't know. it's just something i wonder about sometimes.

well I can say growing up in a suburb of atlanta, living in urban atlanta, and living in metropolis LA, they only thing to be gained by leaving the dust bowl for cali or new york would be just as you said, the greater chance of meeting others you can bond with. There is a reason why many gay folk leave the rural hometowns and head for the city. We do have our share of freaks and pond scum but the sheer numbers of the population as a whole make them virtually invisable. If I were you I would get out, thoughI have never been to arkansas, i would guess it's culturally starved. You have implied through your many posts your interest in "fetish" culture (for lack of a better word to sum it up). Do you have a fetish attire shop in town? Do you have a gay and lesbian study/culture center? Do you have an art museum? Decent work in it? In LA alone, we have 3 major museums of art, LA County, MOCA, and the Getty, not to mention the dozens and dozens of galleries and other museums with specialized material. (We have a Neon Museum I have been meaning to go to) Music wise: do national acts that you like stop in your area? It's this type of thing that would push me away from your area. I understand the zen of living in such an area as inspiration, and yes a dumbfuck there is a dumbfuck here. But alas, you are not a dumbfuck. If I had to make an assesment, I would guess you would be much happier in a major metropolis than where you are at now. by the way, a buddy of mine, orignally from KC, worked for 6 weeks in Little Rock, bearing in mind where he is from, a punker exile from KC, he was terrified in Little Rock. He said he did meet a handful of interesting people but that for the most part the he only foud people to be talking about the up in coming Willie Nelson concert and just as you said, banging their 14 year old girlfriends. He said it was a rather pathetic town, that had nothing but mexican ditch weed to smoke, not mention the assholes on the film crew from NYC were complete idiots who didn't know what they were doing on the job, but thats another story.

Hot dammm! Git's me bus tickits. Yeehaaaa!

'one time, we took a pig home from auction in a 1950s car. there we were, rolling down the interstate w/ a pig riding in the back seat. suddenly, a car races up beside us. it's got NY tags. they're fucking filming us. i can see them shooting back & forth between the pig, the run-down old car & our arkansas license plate. somewhere, those people are probably still laughing about encountering the world's biggest hicks. ' Sorry i just found that incredibly funny. I have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Imagine chasing a car with your video camera cause they had a pig in there. wooo ....look what we saw on our holidays....

this is probably where i should mention that new zealand (where i live) has more sheep then people and i would stare (but not chase and film) if i saw farm animals in a car.

i, too, was laughing at the NY people filming us. my folks were cracking up, as well. we laughed all the way down the highway. patrick, as for your questions: yes, we have an art museum. the work varies, but the few exhibitions i've seen there were passable. there's a lot of money sunk into the art center here. gay culture center? we have a feminist library but no gay culture center that i'm presently aware of. there are a lot of gays here, though. we do have a fetish attire shop. we used to have erotic art shows & live sex shows here. musically, we're lacking. we get some national jazz acts on occasion, but the jazzheads complain that we don't get enough. we get a lot of different alternative bands & some blues acts, but nothing too major. for the major shows, usually, it involves a jaunt over to tulsa. we get some older acts, too...little richard & guys like that. i think they're popping in here to make a buck on their way to/from branson, MO, which isn't so far from here. we do get national/international dance & theatre troupes coming through here. as for LR (little rock), i'm going there tomorrow & will be there all weekend long. it's not that bad a place. i lived there for years. it's a dirty, congested city in its worst parts. plenty of crime. anyway, there used to be more to do there. a lot of the cooler types have ended up drifting this way (to the ozarks), or just leaving the state altogether. but there's a nationally recognized theatre project down there w/ a heavy subgenius flair--village voice & others have noticed them. weird bands & strange art. independent radio. rogue filmmakers. as w/ most places, you have to know where to look for the weirdness. i used to play music & do various oddball gigs down there, but that was a long time ago. i haven't lived there in ages. on the whole, i've met more creative types here in the northern part of the state. a lot of the cool people i used to know in LR left or died or otherwise disappeared.

Arkansas is notorious for its subgenii. So is Ohio. California and NY are not known for their subgenii,however, although there are a few up on the NW coast and the upper east coast as well. Not many in the Midwest past Ohio. I think I may be the only one in Wisconsin. I think i agree that it's time for you to make a change of scenery. minneapolis/St.Paul is rather nice, as is the NW, although a lot of people slag it for being too trendy. Whatever - I like their wilderness. Upstate NY is rather nice as well, but I am a Northern boy, so I am prejudiced for areas that actually get snow. I think if I lived in LA, the first winter would drive me seriously nuts.

AR is, indeed, known for its subgenii. there used to be a ton of them in little rock. don't know if they're all still there, though. i think several of the more prominent popes may still be hanging around the LR area. as i said in the initial post, i'm doing a lot of "wondering aloud" about this stuff. the truth is that i'm probably not going to be able to leave this area for a couple more years, due to my hubby's job situation. still, i don't really plan on being here forever. it's actually not a bad place to retire & there are a few definite advantages to being here. i can always come back. but i've never lived this long in one place before. i've moved a lot during my life...but i've been here since the early '90s. enough, already. time to move on. ultimately, i'd like to be more mobile. i'd like to spend summers in the mountains & winters at the beach (i love the beach in the winter--i hate hot weather & large crowds--hanging out at the beach in february ensures that i won't be dealing w/ either one of these problems). i'd like to stay as cool as humanly possible in the summer & spend the winters on isolated stretches of beach. i'm looking for a way to accomplish this objective in as cheap a manner as possible. it hasn't snowed here so far. we've been running the air conditioning all winter. wearing short sleeves. today, it cooled down enough that i actually had to wear long sleeves. what crap. i'd like to see some snow (but not this weekend, hopefully, as i'm trying to get some stuff accomplished on the road). anyway, there's been some talk around the house about our summering in colorado & wintering on the gulf coast. i dunno. i just want to go somewhere else for a while. i never really even entertained the idea of our moving to a large city until recently. but there are some aspects of it that might make sense. but i'm spoiled...i'd also miss some of the hometown friendliness. i had a miserable time in philadelphia while i was there briefly in the late '80s, conducting some business. the people i dealt w/ were rude without any good reason. i was very polite & they responded w/ hostility & sarcasm. several of them made fun of my accent, & not in a nice way. i mean, they were fucking rude. how much effort does it take to be polite? the bastards were asking me if any of my relatives were featured in "grapes of wrath"...that kind of bullshit. they changed their fucking tune when they found out who i was & what i was doing there, but that's another story. recently, when i went away on my thanksgiving trip, i really didn't want to come back. & the millennium celebration here was an utterly hokey, corn-fed dud. it kind of woke my ass up...happy new year, i need to fucking MOVE. i stood there watching all the farm-fresh, family-friendly hokum & felt like a goddamn space alien. saw two random goth kids in the crowd who looked like i felt--surly & bored w/ it all. i think it's time for me to plan the next phase.

I was hiking on the Buffalo river 2 yrs ago,around Jasper,great country, but decided to go for a dip,{not in the buff},and this guy who reminded me of one of the characters from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" shows up,an odd looking sort[thats an understatment],and started doing all sorts of unusual activities,ablutions,gyrations,etc.I chalked it up to Ark. mountain madness,but kept a close eye on him to make sure he didn't whip a chainsaw out of his trunk.I made a hasty retreat as soon as seemed "socially" appropriate.But later went to a quaint town called Ponca and joined right in their 4th of July festivities, even entering their turtle race,I placed 2nd with my entry,and they were quite charming and sociable.HE he he, they're probably still wondering who the hell we were.I often think about going back,just so they don't forget me.

how funny...so you got to meet one of our brethren from newton county. i've been lost out in that part of the state before. things can get hilarious and/or spooky pretty fast. the whole ozark region can be kind of odd, but that area, in particular, can get particularly strange. i've been to both ponca & jasper, but it's been a while. i think ben-hur & snowball may be out in that area, too. i've had weird things happen to me in both of those towns. at least i got laid in ben-hur, which is always a plus.

how weirdly appropriate... i just got an e-mail from an former editor of mine. haven't heard from her in ages. she wrote me out of the blue to tell me that this other writer we know has just gotten a slick-ass book published. a few years ago, this kid--this author--was still living in arkansas (where he was born & raised). we were talking on the phone one day. he said he wanted to go to california & i advised him against it. i thought the whole idea was lame. but he was insistent. he was absolutely hell-bent on getting away from this state. well, i just figured that it was due to his age (young thang) & inclinations (cross-dressing goth). he hit the west coast as soon as he could get away & never looked back. i haven't heard from him in a long time. just today, i was wondering what had happened to him...& out of the blue, i find out that he's gotten a book deal & more. i'm proud of him. & i'm so glad that he proved me wrong. anybody who can make a monkey out of me by actually achieving something worthwhile gets a round of applause. if somebody's going to prove me wrong, i hope it's like this--by getting off their ass & accomplishing something. at this point, the whole thing seems to be just one more omen--yet another indicator that i should probably get the hell out of here.

well, i'm heading down to the tombs (doing a photo shoot & other fun stuff in some little rock cemeteries). i'll probably be back on either sunday night or monday morning. see y'all then.

well, i'm heading down to the tombs (doing a photo shoot & other fun stuff in some little rock cemeteries). i'll probably be back on either sunday night or monday morning. see y'all then.

sorry 'bout the double-post. anyway, while i'm down in LR, i might be recording, as well. somebody wants me to roll tape in one of the cemeteries overnight to see if she can pick up any EVP (electronic voice phenomenon...voices of the dead). long story. anyway, i'm outta here.

pffft, silly girl, the dead can't talk! they can dance though speaking of the dead......a weird thing happened last night. i am curious how others might feel. My wife found an old disposable camera from before we were even dating. She finally got it developed. It had pictures of an ex boyfriend/friend. Some money shots were also included, nothing terribly dirty, just a skirt up here and a penis there. They weren't sexual, but looked more like drinking games to me. And again this was before we met, actually just a couple fo weeks. I knew the guy and partied with him many a nite, in fact he was a good friend of my wife's and was happy she was happy with me. He was a real nice guy and never a threat to me. They only fooled around afew times. But these pictures were kinda disturbing, and moreover, he is dead. He was killed in a car accident about a year ago. I had to confess they made me feel weird, and i was little off key because of them. How would you react? I mean ther were also pictures of us, when we first starting dating and in fact the pictures of one of our first body painting experiences were included, and obviously she married me, so it's not so much a pointless insecurity thing, but the morbidity of it threw me off, i think....i dunno..... the dead do speak but it ain't nothing you will pick up with a tape recorder

a quick disclaimer...i don't necessarily believe in EVP, myself. i'm just doing this for someone who's really hell-bent on trying it. i want to comment on the rest of your post, but i'll have to do it when i get back. take care, m'dears...be back soon.

Dam,missed her,the one person I could say have fun going to a graveyard and know that she would:)How odd that you would mention something like that Patrick,a good friend of Heathers was killed in an auto accident,last Fri.,a very bad one,his girlfriend is still in the hospital and might not make it.I couldn,t bring myself to go to funeral,I sent flowers,it was Tue. afternoon,I have pictures of us together,at parties and school,and at my house.I was looking through them and crying,such a sweet kid.I hope everyone here uses their seatbelt,

My wife of 8 years passed away 5 years ago. She was only 33. I still look at her photos and when I really miss her, I listen to an old tape that has messages of her from our old answering machine. I suppose this could be called the ultimate EVP. It's electronic, it's her voice, and I guess it's some kind of phenomenon that I can still hear her. It's kind of surreal listening to those tapes, hearing her messages about normal, everyday, mundane stuff -- when she'll be home, remember to pick this or that up, etc.

I,m so sorry

just the thought makes me wanna sob like a lil baby. If i think about my wife passing away and all the little things like you mentioned for just thirty seconds or less i tear up........

Crimson, have you heard some of the EVPs that are posted around the internet? Some don't sound like anything at all (even static), but some are really neat. I heard one (okay, I'm a dork who believes in all that kind of stuff, and je ne regrette rien) that supposedly was recorded in a cemetery as a cop car drove by...the voice whispers, "Busted!" I thought it was kind of cute, if you could say that.

though i have hard time accepting internet-posted recordings, it is fascinating to enterain the idea. Plus I love ghost stories and legends, thanks to this conversation i am now passing my otherwise dull fridays by reading ghost stories. I'll post links to some good ones if anyone is interested

I have dreams with my grandparents in them. They're both dead. The dreams are surreally real though. Hyper real. In the dreams I always recognise they are dead but I accept they are alive, I'm usually very happy to get to see them and do stuff with them which is usually really mundane. I do think it is their spirits in my dreams, that they're not just 'regular' dreams. I think it's comforting to feel their presence still in my life. Though a bit eerie I guess. I think about what will happen when my Mother dies all the time. I'm obsessed with it. We're very close, and she's my only parent. It ruins some of the time I spend with her. I cling to every second thinking 'this could be it, she could die tomorrow' it's sick and sad but I don't know how to wean myself from these black thoughts. I would like to. I just always feel haunted by the idea that everyone will die on me. I'm not afraid of my own death, just others leaving. Still, with my grandparents I've adjusted fairly well. What I can't get over are the memories of the times we three were together and knowing I'm the last living witness to those times. The thought that if I don't tell those stories they are gone forever. If I die, did they really happen? (Geez - so metaphysical!)

Patrick, I like this site (esp. the Australian ghost hunt pages), and this site has lots of pictures, EVPs, stories, explanations, links, etc. Dinner Lady: is your mother not doing well?

President Abraham Lincoln was elected to office in 1860. In 1960, John F. Kennedy became the leader of the United States of America. Both were assasinated on a friday in the presence of their wives. Abraham Lincoln was shot from behind...in the head, as was Kennedy. After they passed on, both men's successors, Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson, became presidents. Andrew Johnson, born in 1808, and Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908, were both Southern Democrats. John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Lincoln, was born in 1839. Lee Harvey Oswald, who killed Kennedy, was born in 1939. Both men, southerners, held unpopular beliefs. Lincoln and Kennedy both lost children to death while in the White House. Lincoln's secretary, named Kennedy, advised him not to go to the theater. Kennedy's secretary, named Lincoln, advised him not to go to Dallas. Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and then ran to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran to a theater. Seven letters make up both the names "Kennedy" and "Lincoln". Fifteen letters make up both the names "John Wilkes Booth" and "Lee Harvey Oswald". The names "Andrew Johnson" and "Lyndon Johnson" each contain thirteen letters. Both assasins were killed before being brought to trial, and both murders were rumored to be committed by other forces besides the two men. Both Johnsons were opposed for reelection by men whose names started with "G".

I just spent the last two hours reading this http://www.midlink.com/wil/index.html a personal diary of this guy living with a ghost. Due to the depth and time obviously spent on this journal, i tend to accept it as perceived truth on his part. Although he tends to ramble when you want the freaky paranormal shit, it is a wonderful tale and another very fascinating story that i had read about many years ago in a book called 13 Tennesee Ghosts, written by an author who lives wuith a ghost named Jeffery..... http://www.bellwitch.org

http://www.bellwitch.org

Dougie, if you don't mind my asking....how did your wife die?

Do the sorabji participants ever get together and have "Sorabji Conventions"?The reason I ask is because some female friends and I have a girls week-end out on an annual basis.We have different festivities planned each year, one year we rented an isolated cabin/lodge in the woods and we made a giant penis piniata[sp?],and filled it with goodies, condoms, feminine hygine products and the such,then headed to town to local bars on a scavanger hunt,and guys,don't get offended, but stuff on our list was more or less male related, to get points we had to say, dance with a guy wearing white shoes,dance with a guy wearing a toupee, acquire an container,can/glass that we had seen any local celebrity using, points to anyone who could get on stage and sing with the band,get a guy to tell us his wife didn't understand him, get a guy to call us "baby",dance with someone with chest hair showing AND wearing a tacky gold necklace,I think you get the picture. We had 50 things on our list, and we were after the coveted first prize, which was a speculum mounted on a trophy base,[its an instrument gynocologists use to examine female sex organs]{he he he, you should have seen the look on the womans face when I brought it in and explained what I wanted her to do with it!} Well, anyway back to the ghost business.One year we did a murder mystery week-end.Theres a plantation house in Lousiana, thats a bread and breakfast,its supposedly the 12th most haunted house in the world,[National Geographic came and did a special on it],anyway, you can stay the night in it. At dusk, this soft spoken woman takes you on a candlelight tour of the house,going from room to room,telling about the deaths/murders that have taken place there,and all the sightings since.Then she leaves and you're in the house all night by yourself.Theres no TV,no phone,no ceiling fans,nothing to muffle noise,so you hear every creek and grumble from the house. Anyway,my friends and I rented it one year,and did a "Murder Mystery" weekend.It was grand fun,we scared ourselves half to death.

Did you see anything? (In the haunted house, I mean, not with the speculum.)

i'm back. the weather down in LR was utterly dismal the whole time--so there were no EVP recordings & no cemetery photo sessions. saturday, back at the hotel, the person who was supposed to pick me up was over 4 hours late. i was in full goth drag for most of that time, looking groovy as fuck, but not especially comfortable. finally, i gave up & changed back into my usual crappy attire. anyway, the person who kept me waiting is a chronic case--i can always bet on her being at least 2 hours late to anything. i'll probably rant more about this later. i was not a happy camper. one of my pet peeves is being stood up and/or kept waiting for inordinate amounts of time. but i got happy later & had a jolly good time anyhow. i hung out w/ lesbians in a huge, soft canopy bed w/ mirrors on the ceiling. we ate a lot of ice cream & talked about love. i saw the graves of 5 of my family members. only one of them is actually planted there; the others are just waiting to go. i mean, they're still alive...they've already got their tombstones sitting out there. it was a bit odd. i stood at the graves & then went & visited some the people whose names were on the tombstones. but i disliked the cemetery (this is the first time i've seen it). i don't want to be buried there, myself. i'm going to be encrypted elsewhere, w/ any luck & prior planning at all. some of the posts left here have been pretty intense. some truly interesting stuff. also some heartbreaking stuff. i might actually address some of this later. for now, though, i've got to crash. i've been up forever. i'll snooze a bit & pop back in later. nighty-night.

http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/shelly/43/myrtles.html

Czarina,I just tried to call you,your going to have to get another phone line,got that microphone but S took it to work so this guy is going to show him where to put it.That doesn,t sound right does it?

J, use my cell phone number

You never gave it to me

I think I did, that night we were both,uh,indulging our hedonistic pleasures. I'll sign off, and you can call. I gotta make a gumbo.

To The Dinner Lady: Speaking of dreams, I also believe there are "regular" dreams, and then there's something more. For about a year after my wife passed, I was a mess. Drinking heavily, feeling sorry for myself, mourning her, and also having a lot of bad dreams. One night, about a year afterwards, I had the most beautiful dream: I was sitting on a stone wall, and along comes my wife. She smiles at me -- looking every bit as beautiful as she did in life. We don't speak. She leans down and gives me a kiss; and although it wasn't a passionate kiss, it was the most loving kiss I've ever felt. In the dream, I look away for an instant, and turn my head back to kiss her again, but she's gone. End of dream. I know that she came to me to let me know that she was gone but was ok, to say goodbye to me, and to tell me to move on. Most of my dreams I don't remember -- either they fade out a couple of minutes after waking, or all I'm left with is the feeling of the dream. But this dream I'll remember forever.

Dreams are really important. They often leave us with profound messages even if they are not otherworldly which I do believe some are. This weekend I had a dream that I was killing someone/thing and another where I spoke to a friend of mine (who is in what I would call a crappy marriage) asking him 'I just want to know if your wife makes you happy, I just want to know that you are happy' and the two of us just cried and cried and he didn't answer me. In the dream the love I had for him was so strong, not like a romantic love but a spiritual love. I'm sure it has to do with my current feelings of 'tired of touching the stove in love' - ie: I'm sick of dating people that I later think are losers and wonder why I went out with them in the first place - very pessimistic. Not sure what it meant in relationship to that. And to answer Spider's question my Mom is totally fine. I would even say somewhat robust for a 62 year old. My fears of her death have nothing to do with her real physical state, I think more with the fear that we can never know what is coming, what is going to happen to us and that she could be snatched away any minute. Intimacy issues? Oh ya! I see saw between feeling 'everything is gonna be ok' and 'help!' all the time in my life. I wish I could just stick with the former.

We have ghosts here. They're all pretty unobtrusive, though, except for the girl that sobs on the stairs. I like ghosts. There are a lot of houses up here that claim to be haunted--especially in Mendocino (the next town over). Some of them are, some are just hoaxes, but all the ghost stories from up here are very neat. I've never recorded in a cemetary. I slept in one once. It was very cozy, until they woke me up digging a grave. Dreams are odd things. I think that each dream has a meaning, a reason for being drempt, and so I pay attention to the ones I remember. Dreams that have immediate effect are usually ones about death--I don't go to funerals.

Ghosts don't like me - they never appear when I am around. And I've lived in a house where tow of my housemates kept hearing footsteps when no one was around (I never did). I don't know what it is, I do have a healthy skepticism, but I am also a Fortean and pretty open minded about that stuff. I have seen the "Paulding Lights" which are these unexplained ( well, to my satisfaction) lights in a remote area of the Upper Peninsula that hover about 20 feet off the ground and change color and size. Pretty nifty.

http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/3699/pagemyrtles.html This is the link with pics, click on "I visited the Myrtles, my account can be found here", for a few pics inside.[not my personal account] The reason I was posting about this place,[before my sleepy stupor overtook me],is that a bunch of us rented the place and did a murder mystery week-end there.We chose a doctor that we hated to be our murder victim,and brought him along ,in effigy, and laid him out in the parlour.We created alter-personalities for each of the guests, everyone had a reason to kill him,for instance, I work in labor and delivery, and my reason was because he had been forcing me to stay pregnant by him and then sell the babies on the black market, they cut out a pic of my face and glued it onto every pic of a pregnant woman they could find, even one in the stirrups giving birth, and then stuck his face on every baby pic they could find,glasses and all, every one had a "portfolio, full of these types of pics.{they were quite humurous}The one who eventually was found to be the killer, was an ICU nurse, who had gone to him years before for a hemorrhoidectomy, and he accidentally took out her tonsils,thereby ruining her career as a singer in the Turkish gay bathhouse, so she was forced into a life of servictude as a nurse, and had hated him for years. The plot was quite complex,and I was thinking, with the diverse intellects of the "board members", it could be quite an interesting get-together. I have stayed at the Myrtles twice. First I have to say my feet are firmly planted in science,I like things I can explain.I have never encountered anything, personally, that I could not explain.So I did not expect to "see anything". I took my husband there for our anniversary,one year.He did NOT have a good time,[ now that I think of it, our marriage hasn't gone to well since then, oh well] after our candlelight tour, we discovered that we were the only people staying there that night, and even though I don't believe in any supernatural happenings, I must admit that the ambience of this place is quite conducive to fear.It was rainy,nasty weather, and we kept scaring each other,[while it was still daylight], but after the tour, when we saw the lady drive away, it wasn't so funny anymore.My husband wanted to leave and go get a drink,[ he's not much of a drinker], so I thought this was pretty funny.Well, when we got back, we sat on the porch for awhile, cause he didn't want to cross the big stain,[suspossedly from a previous murder victim], so finally I said this is ridiculous,we can't stay out here all night, lets just make a run for it,we'll jump across the stain and run upstairs to our room, which is the stairs where you hear the 19 footsteps, of the guy who died. I finally convinced him to go up.When we started to open the door to go inside, we could hear loud water running like down a wall, our bathroom would have been directly above where this noise was coming from.I have to admit that I was somewhat unnerved at this sound,so realizing that 2 cowards wouldn't help the situation,[my husband wanted to leave and go home right then],I decided to be aggressive, and started yelling at the wall,"Who's in there? I hear you and you better come out now!"My husband is in a panic now,yelling at me to be quiet, because I'll just make it madder.The sound of the running water stopped,[it wasn't water running down the gutter,I still don't know what it was].I finally convinced him we had to go upstairs,so we made a pact, that we wouldn't scare each other anymore.We were in our room and we heard some pounding coming from downstairs, and it kept up, so finally I said lets open our [bedroom] door and see what it is, he did not want me to open the door,and frankly I was scared myself,but knew I had to look and find a logical answer, so I did and stepped out onto the top of the staiway so I could look down to see where the noise was coming from,I told my husband "I see a womans head at the door", the bastard slammed the door shut leaving me out in the hall, in my frilly little nightgown. One of the ghost stories is about Chloe, a slave who go here ear cut off and then hanged, and suspossedly haunts the place, being a disembodied head that floats around.The jerk refused to open the bedroom door,and I was scared.Then the downstairs door opened and I heard a woman call "yo-hoo, hello, is there anybody here?" They were guests that were suspossed to arrive the next night,they'd come from out of state and gotten there early.I was so grateful that they were live people,I went running down the stairs in my nightie,babbling about all the ghosts and murders and noises, and boy was I glad they were here and did they want to come into our room for a drink? They looked at me like I was crazy, and said "NO,we just want to go to our room,alone, so they picked one of the rooms, and rudely shut the door. Finally,my husband opened our door and let me in, and had the balls to tell me"Well, you handled that well,if you hadn't of acted so crazy they would have come in and we wouldn't have to be alone in this hell house!" My husband slept in his clothes that night,because he was afraid Chloe would come tuck him in[something she suspossedly does to guests]and he was really hot[I was glad]. The next morning when we went down for breakfast, the new comers got up and left before they even ate.I still hope that that night,when they got their candlelight tour,and were left all alone in the house,that they had scary things happen to them,too.

Czarina,your party sounds like fun,but your husband needs someone to break a foot in his ass,you need to speed up your plan to knock him off.When I moved back to W.V.,before my Dad died,we moved to a huge house built before the civil war,it was a beautiful house,but I was scared to death the whole time we lived there,never saw a ghost,just a wierd vibe about the place,I was 15 and still getting in bed with my mom and I don,t even like her,that,s how scared I was.

I attended a similar event, except it was a live RPG run by one of the guys who helped write the game Bureau 13. I played Dr. John Dee, the occult advisor to Queen Elizabeth. It was pretty weird and I don't remember much else about that night, because it was all so damn weird.

Weird can be fun.The good thing is that creativity is endless,you just never know where you might end up. Good idea J, maybe I'll feed him a bunch of fried chicken and take him back to The Myrtles,but this time I'll lock him out in the scary hallway.That ought to do him in.

You kill yours,I,ll kill mine,then everythings going to be fine,cause I have one hand in my pocket and the other one is holding a pistol

You kill yours,I,ll kill mine,then everythings going to be fine,fine, fine, cause I have one hand in my pocket and the other one is holding a pistol

i'm back. i've been working my ass off...not much time to post. which is a genuine drag, since i'd rather be posting here or playing guitar or surfing for porn--something constructive. anyway, back to the whole paranormal discussion: i used to live in a house that was a hotbed for psychic phenomena. something was seriously weird about that place. even my most skeptical friends came to believe that something was truly wrong there. it was an old house that had been sectioned off into separate apartments. there was continuous stomping in the closets, weird shapes wriggling in the bedsheets (this alone scared the crap out of most people), a weird glowing blue ghost who showed up at my best friend's apartment (the one below mine)--the ghost pointed to my friend's kittens, who all suddenly & inexplicably dropped dead...all kinds of shit. breaking glassware. lights that turned themselves on & off. telephones that dialed themselves (you could see the keys being pressed, but no one was touching the phone). one day, an entire group of people saw an tall, elongated figure hovering over my head. i don't know if i truly believe in ghosts per se, but i sure as shit believe that those apartments were totally screwed. my husband used to live in a haunted plantation-style house. he grew up as a child laborer, chopping cotton. his family couldn't afford any plantation house. until one day, a beautiful delta home was offered for rent at a very cheap price. the family couldn't believe their luck. they moved in; a couple of weeks later, they moved right back out. the constant & extremely loud sound of footsteps following them around the house was just the beginning of their problems. the shack i lived in during my high school years was haunted. i used to hear a voice calling my full name at night. i never told anybody. about a year later, my mother abruptly told me that she'd been troubled w/ a voice calling her full name & it had been going on for about a year. i had chills down my spine when i heard that. i was also glad to know that it was happening to someone besides me. a guest stayed w/ us...he woke me up to tell me that something had called him by his full name in the middle of the night. it was a creepy-ass place. there were indians buried on our land & we lived next to an old cemetery where they used to bury slaves. an old woman had died on our property--she lived in the forest. she was part of the deal. you buy the land, you get her as part of the package. she simply refused to leave. she died there, having frozen to death just before our family took over the place. anyway, gotta get back to work. cheerio.

Crimson,don,t be a stranger,it,s always good to hear from you,I was going to post about some wierd things that I,ve seen in my life,but now it doesn,t seem important.

it's snowing like hell outside. the first snow of the season here. it's kinda weird...i've been running the air conditioning all winter long, until now. i love the way the snow looks. but i know a lot of people get spooked by it. outside, there's less than an inch of snow on the ground (but we're supposed to get about 5" or so). some guy is skidding down the road on an ice slick. our driveway will be impossible to get on or off (it's on a very sharp hill). anyway, it suits me fine. let it snow. i know that this little weather report doesn't have much to do w/ all the groovy paranormal stuff we've been talking about, but what the hell. everything outside is turning ghostly pale in its own wintery way. winter's a good time for ghost stories. when i was a little kid, there was this wealthy banker buried in a local cemetery. in the winter, his ghost was supposed to be more active. i used to be fascinated by his mausoleum. my folks told me that if i didn't behave, that he'd come out of his grave & get me. if i was bad enough, he might take me down to hell. i think that the concept of being dragged to hell by the rotting, shambling corpse of a dead victorian banker gave me some kind of lifelong psychological complex from which i'll never recover.

Life would be a lot better, I think, if being dragged to hell by the rotting, shambling corpse of a dead victorian banker was a legitmate risk, so much that you could be insured against it.

My reply: Open up them gates and get me a chair near the front.