Paranormal Phenomenon

mountain laurel buds
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, as we know if we scroll down, I saw a question mark formed by light and shadow on a rock. Whooo! Scary noises! Paranormal activity, clearly! Well, that was pretty cool. Just a coincidence, right? Just a momentary flash in the pan, a demonstration of the human brain and how it wants to find faces in everything. You know, like how when you're little and get a fever but you're not all that sick, just sick enough to stay home, where you then have to stay in bed and so entertain yourself (after, that is, you get tired of counting all your freckles and drawing connecting lines to all of them just in case they make a treasure map) by staring at the blanket very, very close up and inevitably, it would form into faces and small people and little landscapes and stuff like that? You did that too, right? Right? I mean, that happens to everyone? Let's not answer that. Anyway.

After the question mark incident and the rest of the hike, I went home and proceeded to basically do nothing for the rest of the day except study the groundhogs with binoculars. I may not have a garden this year but by god, I bet I can write a doctoral thesis on the everyday lives of groundhogs by the time I'm done. Frankly, they're kind of more interesting than vegetables on an hour by hour basis anyway. But, that aside, eventually it got too late to watch the groundhogs and so I started doing nothing in front of the computer. I thought I was going to have to drive out to Candler to pick up young M later that evening so I was a little annoyed when it started raining. It rained softly for a while and then it rained hard. Great, I thought, it's dark and raining and bah, I don't feel like driving to Candler. Then the rain stopped and I went out on the deck for a cigarette and to call young M and tell him that this was as late as I was prepared to wait before picking him up.

It hadn't rained on the deck. Well, this is Asheville, so, okay, rain in the front yard and not the back is weird but not unheard of. I went out in the front just to check, just in case.

It hadn't rained in the front yard either. No rain anywhere. No wet spots. Nothing. I swear I heard rain, a whole summer shower of it, with a beginning and a middle and an end but apparently it was either an aural hallucination or. Or. Or, I don't know. That's the problem with messages from the other side - they're confusing as fuck. Ghosts can never just get it together to grab a pen and write something useful down, like, "The treasure is in the attic of the house you moved out of in 1974, or, well, it would be but the new people found it during renovations and they spent it, so, kid, bummer, but basically it sucks to be you." No, instead they throw question marks and fake rain showers at you and you're supposed to figure it out with way less clues than the Da Vinci code. Rain. Question. Hmmmm. The earth is going to flood! Or, maybe the toilet is going to start leaking again. One never knows.

The year after my father died I found a succession of 1945 and 1946 pennies all over the place, like 6 of them. What did that mean? I considered going to Italy, which is where my father was in those years, being a 20 year old soldier in the Infantry, on the off chance that he'd buried a treasure there (okay, okay, I pretty much think of everything in terms of treasure maps. That is because treasure maps are so fucking cool and also, hey, I could use the money.) but without more information, it seemed like kind of a pointless trip, not to mention expensive. Therefore I didn't go. And this time around, I have no idea who's even sending the message, much less what it means or where I should go to find the damn map. Come on, paranormal entities. You can do better than this. Send me an email or something.