Ghosts, Birds, Bones and Red Things

This should be slightly entertaining... 

Recently I wrote about how I imagine social anxiety to be its own entity that lives inside a human brain, acting as an extra personality in MPD and taking over the primary personality of a person during social situations. I do this often. I take thoughts and ideas and give them bodies and tangible scenarios, because my imagination is constantly in overdrive. I interpret thoughts like a child, quite literally, giving those thoughts physical attributes and behaviors. I thrive on visuals.

I've also expressed several times now, my belief that some spiritually based being is prodding me to write, share my weird thoughts and stories, and even guides me to do certain things that end up shaping my present lifestyle into something abnormal. This following of either an imaginary friend or maybe some hallucinatory experience I interpret as a spiritual awakening keeps me out of reach of how our society usually runs on a daily basis, and I end up feeling very untouched by bad politics and ill mannered agendas. I'm perfectly happy in my strange alternative to humanity's widely agreed upon reality. I flung up my hands one day, feeling the climax of my despondence, and divorced the world. We're still friends, and I still visit. We're just not headed towards the same place anymore. Now I spend most of my time alongside the avian community. One of my best friends is a giant blue heron. He's always visiting my creek bank, looking for live prey. I like watching the birds. I have small ones and colossal ones. Hawks and buzzards and kingfishers and sparrows. Enormous woodpeckers, cardinals, ravens, bluebirds, and various owls. Heron is so big and beautiful that when he floats down towards me, my whole body lights up with excitement. The tree beside my cabin makes a canopy that shades what is going to be my little cinder block root cellar.Red birds love that tree. I call it Cardinal city, as there are so many of them they act like New Yorkers on a mission to work every morning. It's so close to my window that their cheeps and channels wake me like an alarm, yet much more pleasant. It carries over the sound of the rushing water. I don't hear cars, sirens or frustrated commuters on their way to work anymore. I don't smell smog or greasy, subway train gears or a thousand contradictory food aromas coming from city food trucks. I smell the brook. I smell fresh air.

When I open my eyes, I see the sun slipping quietly over my bed and my form. No more early knocks at the door, phones ringing, or train gears making that screaming, high pitched noise that punishes sleepy morning heads and ears. Just the faint sound of the fire flaring up in the gas heater to warm the room.

I often sense the presence of people who lived here years ago and are now dead. I've felt in completion, messages they've sent my way. I know this is not due to my spending too much time in the middle of the wilderness, because this was happening to me in New York as well, constantly surrounded by action and people and too much to do. There, I lived in an apartment I swear I saw the ghost of a German man in the hallway of. He'd appear there several times before I looked up the origin of the building. I found out the entire street had once been an area populated by Germans in the 1800s. There were beer breweries all along the street. I found a newspaper clipping of an obituary one day, while typing in the address of the building. It was scanned into a library and dated 1833. It was the obituary of a German man who died in my building, but it did not say which room he'd lived in. He apparently died from an illness, and it stated his body would be kept in his apartment for viewing for three days. They did that back then. I don't know if this man was my ghost or not. Maybe it was another German who was also kept in the building for viewing after his death.

I know the spirits running about in my current location consist of my own family, along with older ones belonging to communities living here long before my relatives took over the property. I've heard children playing by the creek, and I've witnessed very old objects moving. I used to feel terror at seeing them, but I've gotten used to it. It still causes my heart to skip, yet I can calm down more quickly these days. I used to worry about sounding like a raging lunatic when I'd share these secrets and experiences, but I'm getting too old now to give a damn. And I don't know who or what prods me to share my thoughts and stories. It could be a ghost, or it could be God. Or maybe I've been a closet schizophrenic my entire life. I do remember the first time I saw a man who wasn't there. I was not even three years old. I reported the man's presence to my mother in a very matter of fact and calm manner for a toddler. She nearly lost her mind looking for an intruder.

Sometimes I've known what would happen before it happened, and I've tried to give these things some sort of scientific explanation. I've called it “smelling pheromones”, and decided I could “smell” a person's intentions before they actually performed the action. Maybe their nerves and perspiration was giving them away, and I was primitively catching the aroma of their stress. An example of this was when I was walking through a parking lot with an ex boyfriend who owned a cute little miata. Two young men passed by us as we moved towards the apartment. I looked into the eyes of one, and immediately knew my boyfriend's car would be broken into later that night. There were many cars in that lot, and several people walking around that day. They never saw us get out of the car, and had no reason to focus in on us. There was no way to know what was going to happen. I can't read minds! Yet as I met his eyes, I knew. As we crossed by each other, it felt like time slowed down and everything was moving like molasses. Time was suddenly very bizarre. I told my ex when we reached his door. I suggested he move his car into another parking lot, as it would be broken into that night by those men we'd passed. He thought I was paranoid (and a little crazy). He didn't move the car. The next morning he got up to go to work, and found his convertible top ripped open and the radio face stolen. I wish he'd have listened to me.

My world is unreal. My dreams are constant and lucid, and there are occurrences most would consider odd all around me during consciousness. I'm inspired by everything. I can understand the heron. I talk to the buzzards. I even receive messages from the water and the ground. I can feel life right under my feet, and I feel how human minds are connected on a mental matrix that stretches out like unearthed mycelium. Our network is invisible, but it exists.

I once tried to become an alcoholic. I was 18 years old, pissed off, and wanted to be bad. For some reason, however, my body rejected my forced alcoholism. I couldn't seem to make myself desire it long enough to develop my little habit. I decided I was trying too fast, or that maybe what I'd chosen to drink was just god awful. I'd purchased a very nasty, cheap excuse for tequila. (Underage acquiring of alcohol wasn't hard back then.) So I started over again with a better drink and decided I should go slowly. People seemed to become alcoholics when they weren't expecting to become alcoholics. I apparently was forcing it down too fast. But alas, it never happened. My efforts to purposefully become an alcoholic and push away everyone around me with my drunken, filthy mouth didn't take. For some reason, my body won't allow me to feed it too much alcohol. That's not to say I've never been addicted to other things in my lifetime, though. I don't want to claim I don't have an addictive personality, because I could swear I'm addicted to caffeine and candy. I once tried abstaining from sugar, only to end up panicking at the register of a drug store selling m&ms. I dropped change all over the counter, frantically trying to count the correct amount of money for my sugar and quickly took to my car with them. Shoving m&ms into my mouth by the handful, I was like a rabid, starving animal. My cheeks were puffed full of candy, and colored saliva ran down the corners of my mouth just as I turned my head and saw a small child in the car beside me. I froze. She had an expression of shock on her face at seeing a grown woman shoving the chocolate so violently into her mouth. I was ashamed of myself and realized I was uncontrollably addicted to sugar that day.

I was one of those people who avoided cell phones for as long as possible when they first became popular. I hated them, and didn't want to be bothered by anyone calling while tending to daily errands. I didn't need one, seeing as I wasn't a die hard entrepreneur or anything, and I thought receiving cell phone calls at the grocery store was obscene. The fact that I could no longer use the excuse of being away from the landline when someone called drove me insane when I finally did get my first one. Now I was being bothered when I didn't want to be bothered. I eventually warmed up to them, though. I now use one constantly. They used to be annoying little flip phones. Now they're sweet little computers. I might be addicted to it.

Once in awhile, I must refrain from using electric lighting. Too much exposure to electric lights seems to depress me. I think my body needs more primitive things every so often, like fire. So I'll set candles out and go to bed early. I own lanterns and candles and I love building fires outside. I won't have an electric overhead light in my cabin at all. I hate overheads. I spent too much time in the hospital as a child, and now I cannot stand an angry, sterile light above my crown. I can hear them buzzing and soaring through my brain like yellow jackets. I prefer lighting that is housed under things; small pockets of electricity glowing from up under bars and furniture and even trees outside. Landscape lights are nice. Small lamps are tolerable. Candles rule the night. I've thought about installing a small chandelier that uses candles instead of electric bulbs. I can also handle Christmas lights and neons. Just no overheads. Not in my house. I shall die before I have any overhead lighting installed in my woman-cave.

I love the color red, but it has to be a deeper wine shade. I also love white. These two colors (is white a color?) send me into a state of mind so relaxed and captivated that I can stand and stare at a white wall for a full five minutes without moving. Put a shine on it, and I can look at it even longer. When I pull the top off a paint can full of bright, white paint, I have the strongest desire to push my hand all the way to the bottom and pull up the thick, beautiful liquid to watch it run slowly off my fingers. I could paint an entire house white; floors and all. I could paint myself, and fix myself into its center. Just to stand in the middle of all that white would send me off into a mental subspace and keep me in a visually induced ecstasy for a long time. The smell would enhance the experience. Freshly painted white rooms are climactic. Red is bold, though, and I don't believe I could stand in a red room for very long. But I love red accessories and clothing and other red things. Especially lipstick. I don't particularly feel like wearing lipstick, but I like the actual stick. Red. Drawing with it on mirrors and.... white walls.

Let's see- what other funny stuff occupies my brain? Bones. Yes, that.. I'm a bone collector. I once became obsessed with the headhunters of northern India and their tribal art that is now displayed in museums. They no longer cut off heads. Now, when you visit their territory, you can buy trinkets that look like shrunken, human heads, but are actually monkeys. This is how they make their money these days. I do know how to shrink a head now from studying how they did it. I've often entertained the idea of shrinking the head from a roadkill, but that's nasty. I don't want to touch something that's been decomposing for an extended period of time. I currently own cat bones, a dog skull, deer skulls and antlers, and I have one humerus from a person. (I didn't kill him; I acquired this legally. You can do so for educational purposes.) If you're wondering how I know it's a man's bone, well, that's because it's huge. Either this was a man, or an abnormally stout woman. I suppose it could be an abnormal woman, as all I have to go on is the word of the company who sold it to me. I keep my loose bones either neatly on display beside my handmade primitive dolls, or wrapped in a silk cloth inside an antique tin. I don't want my dog stealing them and burying them in the yard. We've already had a fight over the arm bone.

One day, maybe I will try and combine all these things into one. Maybe I'll make a head dress out of a dead bird's skull and red feathers, dress myself in a white gown and build a bonfire. Then I'll make a spiritual holiday of throwing cell phones into that fire and spit alcohol onto it, sending the flames buzzing around and sparks flying while I become possessed by my dead great grandmother. Then I shall craft a doll made from mud and sticks to visualize as a long distance stranger, and communicate with it like we're connected though astral telephone wires. Because we all work like mushrooms, of course. But right now, I'm putting my china away and clearing up to get ready for errand running in the real world. Oh yes.. I use real antique china set as my every day dish set. I display bones- not china. I use china. I serve myself coffee every morning in antique cups on saucers with a real sugar bowl. And I wash them in rainwater.