Mind Vomit by the ikss ~ a journal
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Friday, Oct. 31, 2003Boo!
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�Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead�
-Lucille Ball
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
REGISTER TO VOTE
"The time is always right to do what is right"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The "seven social sins": Knowledge without character,
Science without humanity,
Wealth without work,
Commerce without morality,
Politics without principles,
Pleasure without conscience,
Worship without self-sacrifice."
--Gandhi
"We have not inherited the world from our forfathers -
We have borrowed it from our children."
--Kashmiri, proverb
Except to say the following:
A) Egg McMuffins taste much better when one is on vacation than when one is on their way to work.
B) One can find a certain smug satisfaction in the discovery that some old boyfriends get fat once they get married. I discovered that last night, while playing darts with Cathy and Barbara.
C) I won a game of Cricket last night. I can�t remember the last time I could say that, so it bears repeating. I WON a game of Cricket last night.
D) I fear I am becoming that old woman who hangs out at the bars and flirts with people half her age (Cathy and Barbara aside. They�re in my age group. I can flirt with them all I want).
E) The majority of the people I work with are tight wads who aren�t even willing to fork over dough in the form of a donation to the American Red Cross. I�m sorry, I know these are hard economic times and all, but please. Those of us who have been left untouched by these fires are very lucky. Are these people seriously telling me they can�t donate even $5 to help someone who has lost their home and possibly even their family members this week? I just don�t understand that kind of thinking. Seriously.
F) By the way, please make a donation to the American Red Cross. Their resources are being stretched VERY thin by these fires. And also, donate blood, people. We all should, across the country, but I need to point out that Southern California only has one day�s blood reserve on hand. That is extremely scary. We live in a state which suffers more than it�s fair share of disasters, natural or un-. We need blood on hand.
G) A few drops of rain added to layers of ash on a Nissan Sentra makes for disgusting sludgy slop that is only made worse when one tries to wipe it off with a rag.
H) As intimated, it rained a little last night; it is going to continue to rain in little bits for a couple of days. We�re even supposed to have snow in our mountains, down to 5000 feet elevation. This is wonderful news because, as those of you who don�t live in S. Cal. may not realize, our mountains are on fire right now. I�ve hiked in those mountains more times than I can tally. I watch the fires on the news now and it just breaks my heart.
I) One of our fires is pert-near out now (the Simi Valley one).
J) Hopefully, we will have a positive after-effect from the fires in that all of the Bark Beetles went up in flames. You see, our trees have been infested with Bark Beetles. This is actually one of the reasons why the Lake Arrowhead or �Old� fire got so bad, so fast. The trees were all practically dead anyway, because of the Beetle infestation. They were just tinder up there, waiting for someone to drop a cigarette. Same thing in Arizona (remember their bad fire last year?). So now, hopefully the trees will come back all nice and healthy.
K) That creepy creator of the Girls Gone Wild series of videos is just a pathetic excuse for a human being, if you ask me.
And now...as promised...The Friday Five.
Have a wonderful Halloween, peeps!
1. What was your first Halloween costume?
The first one I remember was the year I went as a Cheetah. I had this Cheetah-striped unitard thingy on and I believe it was made of flannel. I do know I slept in it that night. It was groovy.
2. What was your best costume and why?
Hmm...I love Halloween and have dressed up in some fun stuff, to be sure. I think the �best� was when I went as the Grim Reaper. I had the cloak and scythe and all, but the really cool thing was my face. I made a goopy concoction out of flour and water and put it all over my face. When it dried, I looked�icky. It was way cool (well, except after wearing it for like 8 hours, at which point my face was screaming to breath a little).
3. Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn't give you a treat?
Nah. I played lots of tricks on people, rest assured, but not on Halloween.
4. Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)
Uh...no. I used to dress up in scary costumes and scare the bejeesus out of the neighborhood kids every year, but that was just sort of my own thing and since I don�t do it anymore it can hardly be called a tradition.
5. Share your favorite scary story...real or legend!
The time has come to share the stories from the first haunted house I lived in...
When I first moved out of my parents home at the ripe old age of 23 (yes, I know I was old to still be living with the folks. In my defense, I did pay rent...well, a little rent. More importantly, I had a car payment and knew I couldn�t afford both the car and an apartment at the time, so I stayed with my parents until the car was paid off. I love my parents and get along with them very well. So stop preaching at me already!), I moved in to a four bedroom/three bath house in Brea, with my married friends John and Michele. Oh and their blonde Lab, Dakota (the best damn dog in the universe and I blame him entirely for my wanting desperately to have a dog now). Loved them. Still do. Great people. It was really the most ideal set-up for living with roommates. First of all, they were extremely anal-retentive. This is actually a good thing because you don�t have to clean up after your roommates or their dog when they are compulsively cleaning up constantly anyway. Of course, when they start cleaning in the middle of your New Years Eve Party, that�s an entirely different story, but I digress. It was also ideal because we may as well have lived in two separate houses. Being a married couple, John and Michele of course used the master bedroom, which was at the front of the house, off of the living room. Next to the living room was the dining room and kitchen, then the laundry room and a bathroom. The house was shaped like a big, square horseshoe (with a pool on the patio, in the middle. It also had fruit trees. Yes this was One Rad House. If it had had air-conditioning I may never have left) and so at this point one would turn left and go down a long hallway off of which were the remaining three bedrooms. Another bathroom was at the other end of the hall. I stayed in the last bedroom at the end of the hall and used that bathroom. There was also a back door right there, which led out to the patio and the garage. Therefore, I would park my car in the garage, walk in through the patio and use the back door to get in. I didn�t even have to see my roomies for days, if I didn�t want to. I mean, we loved each other and got along very well, but still�they were married. Did they really want me around all the time? And I was (and am) just a person who really liked my alone time.
I know that whole first paragraph was convoluted and most likely hard to follow. I wanted to give you a feel, though, for just how far away from John and Michele I was most of the time.
I wasn�t living there long before I found myself periodically awoken to the sight of a man standing by the foot of my bed. Of course, I always assumed it was my imagination and/or poor eyesight without my contact lenses in.
One afternoon, I was taking a nap. I awoke to find Michele standing by my bed. As I was sleeping in the nude, I was a tad irritated by the fact that she just let herself in and was standing there looking at me. I mean, yes, we�re close and we�re both women so what�s the big deal, right? But still...I felt a little...invaded.
So I said something to the tune of, �Yeah? What the fuck do you want?� (Actually, I said nothing of the kind, but I am embellishing for dramatic effect). �Michele� said nothing, so I reached around her to turn on the light.
That�s when she disappeared.
Eyah. Turns out it wasn�t Michele. And this is when I decided that maybe the people I was seeing in my bedroom were not figments of my imagination.
That was the last time I saw either of those two �people�. However, this is where the fun really begins.
It�s been a �few� years since all of this happened, so the chronology of these events may be a little skewed.
It should be noted that Dakota would not come in to my bedroom. Now, I have to be honest here and tell you that he was told not to come in to my bedroom by his most considerate of owners, so that I wouldn�t have little blonde doggie hairs in my room. However, in the event that John and Michele would leave for the weekend or whatever, I would take care of Dakota and often invited him to come in to my room (he was used to sleeping in his parent�s room. I thought he might get lonely without them). Nope. He would come in for a few minutes and leave in an agitated manner. Anyway, so I don�t really know if he didn�t want to be in my room because it was drilled in to his brain not to or because he was sensing�something.
Many things now happened, none of which appeared to be caused by the two �people� I had seen in my room earlier. Instead, the �people� were replaced by�well, what my roomies and I began to fondly call O�Shea. Except that I wasn�t fond of him. At all.
I was repeatedly woken up in the middle of the night by noises in my room. I would periodically see a little ball of green light, close to the ground (this is why we called him O�Shea). One afternoon, I smelled cigarette smoke. I checked the house to make sure nobody was smoking (a ludicrous notion in the House of the Anal Retentives); I checked outside to see if anyone was nearby who might be smoking. Of course, there were no cigarettes to be found. Therefore, I made the announcement to my roomies: �Apparently, O�Shea is a smoker.�
Now, this would all be fun and games, except that O�Shea�s nighttime activities began to increase, greatly. Hardly a night would go by when he didn�t wake me up in some way and when he did, it always scared the bejeezus out of me. I spent many a night with the lights on. I didn�t know what the hell was going on, but I didn�t like it. I was getting bags under my eyes from lack of sleep.
One night, in my determination to ignore O�Shea and get a full night�s sleep, when he woke me up I simply rolled over. Apparently, he didn�t like my ignoring him in this manner�because he hit my bed. Bumped it. Jumped on it. Whatever he did, he HIT MY BED! I rolled back over on to my back, about to crap my pants from fear, and there was a green light right over my face! Being the courageous warrior-woman that I am, I immediately pulled the covers up over my head and I don�t think I slept again that night.
On another night, and it must have been close to the end of my O�Shea travails because I was very much on a wire, sanity-wise, O�Shea woke me up in some way and then banged on the window which was right by my bed. You have to understand that by this point I was so petrified by the O�Shea happenings that when something happened I could barely move, let alone get out of the bed and walk the freakin� half mile it would take to get to my roommates� side of the house. This is why I called my roomies on the phone (we had separate phone lines). I meant to ask them if perhaps Dakota was outside playing with something that maybe flew up and hit the window. I think I got the question out, but I was also blubbering in what I�m sure must have been an insane manner. On the phone with my male roommate. How embarrassing. Anyway, of course Dakota was snuggled up on his bed beside theirs. John did the manly thing and walked around outside to make sure we had no window-banging prowlers or anything, which of course we did not.
Finally, having had enough of the fear and tears and not enough sleep, I had a little discussion with Mr. O�Shea. When he woke me up one night, I said to him: �Look. I don�t mind if you want to hang out here. But please stop waking me up and please stop trying to scare me.�
It worked. I never heard from him again. Of course, my Jesus-freak sister also said a prayer in the room shortly thereafter, so you can take your pick as to which of these conversations solved the O�Shea problem.
I never asked our landlords about any of this. I wish I had. I often want to go back to that house and ask the present renters if they ever have any weird occurrences in the back bedroom, too. Of course, I never will and for the same reason that I never asked the Landlords about the problems.
Because I think enough people doubt my sanity anyway without my throwing tales of ghosts in to the mix.
~~~
RESEARCH BLOG: Hiding the Truth? President Bush's Need-to-Know Democracy
The breadth and scope of the Bush administration's clamp down on information is the largest such effort to restrict public disclosure since World War II. Conservatives like Larry Klayman are calling this administration, "the most secretive of our lifetime." Liberals like Gary Bass said the U.S. "is moving from a society based on the right to know to one based on the need-to-know." Check out the report that chronicles the Bush administration's unprecedented restrictions on the public and the media's access to information.
Read the full report.
~~~
Word of the Day for Friday October 31, 2003:
wraith RAYTH, noun:
1. An apparition of a living person seen before death; hence, an apparition; a specter; a ghost.
2. A shadowy or insubstantial form, appearance, or representation of something.
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~~~~~~~~~~~peace, love and smooches~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Copyright 2002-2005, Howl-at-the-Moon Words
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