Weblog 28

August 06, 2006~ 10:00pm
The dog days are upon us. It's almost 10:00 pm here, and humid temperatures still hovering around 80 degrees. The days crawl in this sort of heat. Days that feel like dog tongue on the skin. The yucky days of sticking to the furniture, bodies feeling bloated-- heavy as lead. Ah, the month when I was born. LOL...what a cruel joke. I've always hated August. The mind goes numb with humidity. Snarls begin deep in the throat at every turn because I'm so uncomfortable. So to torture myself further, I made it impossible for me to sleep last night-- the one night it was actually a little cooler-- by spending all night looking through ghost sites and paranormal stuff.

Yes folks, I scared my self shitless...lol...learning all sorts of lore and superstition, urban legends and sighting of this creature and that, but I found a new one-- a particularly nasty one-- the one that made it impossible to close my eyes while it was still dark outside. Anyone ever hear of a 'BEK'? Well a 'bek' stands for 'black-eyed kid' and they seem to share a lot with vampires. In fact, they creeped me out so much, I wrote a poem about them just to get them out of my system. I think their eyes must look like this

. . pretty creepy, aren't they? The sclera of the eye is the white portion. BEK's sclera is undifferentiated from the black iris itself.



Keeping Up With Things

Got a ghostie bug
up my butt last night,
and started looking
at paranormal sites
and sucking
up the creepiness, downloading
EVP'S
and raspy demons from some
Russian exorcism, getting pleasantly uneasy
like I was ten again, enjoying being scared.
I thought I was pretty
hip to all the phenonmena, until I ran
into a new one ruined my easy scare
and made me wary. Made me more afraid
than I like. Now who out there
ever heard of these
BEK things? Stands for Black Eyed Kids
and the story goes
you'll hear
a knock at the door or a rap
on your car window, see a kid anywhere from twelve
to eighteen, who needs some help.
He'll ask forsomething-- change, or a ride-- or he'll ask
to come in
and use
the phone.
And the eyes, the eyes, you see, are black-- not just
the pupil, but the iris, whites around it-- solid pitch. And if you refuse
the son of a bitch, he'll become
angry,
really agitated, pounding at the door
or the car window
and the person
being solicited goes from being
uncomfortable at approach, to threatened, then to terrified
because the eyes
are solid black: reflecting nothing, reflecting every
awful thing you could ever
conjure while alone. And as I read the stories, I realized
that it was 3:00 am, and I sat
in the dining room
at the computer, but my front door
still stood open, screens
finally
put in, and though
the screen was locked, what good would
that do against some damned old demon voodoo manifestation
who might come calling,
begging alms? So I rushed to the door
and closed
it, hoping there wasn't
another kind
of door I'd opened during the evening
might cause
a caller
to come back some night
when I'd forgotten
all about it. Settled in nicely at my monitor, might I hear
an insistant
"KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!", and other
than shitting
in my pants, I wouldn't
have a punchline
or a prayer: those beetle
eyes would
knock me flat. "BEK! GO BEK
TO HELL, YOU DEMON SPAWN!"
I'd shout
in my best
albeit, shittiest Van Helsing, but wondering
if
I have
enough of a soul
to pay them off.
The moral is: keep up
with things,
but never, ever
delve.
Not while
alone. Not if part Irish,
not the part that believes
in everything
there is, and everything
dark and creepy
trying to get into a home a normal burgler
wouldn't bother--too blue-collar
looking, but
perfect, I just know it,
for those soul-sucking pitch-eyed
BEKS.


If you want to learn more about them, they're nicely ensconced in the weird links on the net- the ones I walk like a high wire late at night, and allow my too-active imagination to start seeing 'shadows'...hearing whispers and malicious laughter with a sibilance that makes my skin crawl. Here's a couple of places you could start-

about:paranormal.com or here with the guy (a journalist) who seems to have started this scary stuff.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the kind of spooked you'd feel alone in a graveyard on a moonless night, these creepy kids are turning 10's into 11's, I think.


August 07, 2006~ 4:45pm
The promised rain did not come. Remember that dog tongue I mentioned in the first entry? Well it licked us all, all day and mostly last night, which was stifling. Somehow-- if the US Weather Service is to be believed-- we're to get down to a reasonable 78 degrees with 63 at night by tomorrow. I sure hope so. Leaving the house this morning, the back porch thermometer read 77. At 6:00 a.m.- and tonight when I came in it was reading 90. NowI can take 90-- but I can't take a clammy, heavy-aired 90-- a 'tall.

One day under my belt back to work. And I was set to go to my daughter's tomorrow night for dinner, then back again on Thursday to watch the two kiddoes but Holly called me today to say that the whole family has fevers and are sick with 'Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease'....and pinkeye. All four of 'em! SEE WHAT HEAT DOES???? It INCUBATES. We live in a petri dish of germs that just love this hot, soupy weather.

Fevers of 103 are nothing to be dismissive about. Hope they're drinking gallons of liquids and languishing around resting. Trouble is it's a virus, and antibiotics won't do squat for it. Just analgesics for symptoms like sore throat, and staying hydrated. (Thus, the hope for the prescibed 'languishment'.) Pretty hard though, with a sick one year old and a three year old. Hard to be Florence Nightengale when your own wings have been clipped. I never heard of the virus (except for 'hoof and mouth'....lol....which is something cattle get) but apparently it can be epidemic in summer and early fall, especially among children.

I really do hope she and Gary are feeling well enough to let me babysit on Thursday. Those two NEED A BREAK....a nice, leisurely meal and an evening out. I'll keep my sweaty fingers crossed for them- (between turning up the air conditioning and positioning fans, like this house is some kind of Hollywood set. lol)

And I'm over 'being spooked'. That stuff only lasts for the hours you're in its immediate thrall. Honestly, it's like being a kid again, and that's why I think those sites are as popular as they are. We all like a good scare. (Not car crash type stuff or the IRS saying you're up for an audit, but good old fashioned ghost stories...luv 'em, I do.)


August 07, 2006~ 6:00pm
O.K., that's enough meaningless travel on this computer for one night. Time to give the puffy ankles a rest and foil gravity for a while. Time to watch another movie-- a DVD I bought a few months back and never peeled the cellophane. After I bought it, didn't care to watch it. lol...so it goes with so many things in life seem so good at first.

I will be propped once again on floor cushions, fans facing me and watching "THE ANCHORMAN: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" with Will Ferrell. (He's another comic actor like Jerry Lewis or Jim Carey. You either LOVE em, or you HATE em. I happen to split my pants over the type of mugging and antics they're capable of.) Dim-witted, perhaps. Juvenile...but ah....it's that kinda day. Wheeeeeee!!!


August 08, 2006~ 6:00pm
Another MOVIE NIGHT! And to continue in the 'creepiness' vein...I've selected a tape I own, but only watched once- "Signs". So tonight it's crop circles and invaders from outer space. And who is the BEST spokesman in the world for spacemen? YOU GUESSED IT-->....Who else?

Seriously though, the poor guy! It's about time he tackle that monkey hanging onto his back and humping his ear. Poor Mel

I too am a reformed drunkard. (I do not say 'recovering alcoholic"...that's too PC. No, I was a simple garden variety drunk- as he is- and getting some treatment I understand. Good for him.)

Without treatment I would likewise be bugged-eyed out of my tits with crazy ideas. I too would be making adoring movies about a dead Jew, only to turn around and profess my hostility toward his people by blaming them for everything that's gone wrong for the last two thousand years. Drunks are notorious blame-shifters.

So tonight, we celebrate- my cats and I- the fact that Mel has seen the light and is headed for dry land at last. In the meantime we shall be delightfully chilled by his tale of scary wheat-- and tinfoil hats. Beethoven, my eldest- a male cat- is certainly geared up for this- . -but then, he's always been such a Fraidy Cat. He'll probably want to sleep with me tonight...

Postscript: I'd forgotten what a truly fine movie 'Signs' is. The editing and restraint of the director is fabulous. The hush, the long, panned views of that wheatfield and the lovely farmhouse, symbol of stability and the way family stands as the one thing in the field of the much larger world around it. The closeups of faces. The restlessness of wind mirroring the restlessness within the character of Gibson himself, without his faith. The sense of 'waiting'.

The terrific scene in the livingroom on the couch between Gibson and his younger brother, as Gibson talks about the two different kinds of people in the world, what miracles are and 'signs', spoken so quietly and with such importance, the viewer feels drawn in completely with the intimacy--the importance-- of that moment.

The seamless way it all comes together- his wife's last words, "swing away"- the way his little daughter has a fetish about never finishing a glass of water- the fact that his son has asthma so his lungs remained closed off from the alien's poison gas. This is so much more than a 'scary' -or a genre film. This is great movie- making, oh yes. So glad I watched it again.....get better, Mel.


August 09, 2006~ 6:00pm
Tonight, I'm really tired, so it's NOT going to be a 'movie date'-- on the floor, flanked by two cats. The last hour at work all I could do is yawn and fantasize about laying in bed- propped up with a book. I wasn't even coming here to this weblog...but while I was taking my make-up off and getting ready for a really zonked out evening, my cat Ed Harris (the moron) who 'talks' up a storm while I'm undressing after work while she's simply impatient for her half-can of Fancy Feast, did a really FUNNY THING! This is amazing-- because Ed Harris does nothing amazing. She's simply a waif who nearly starved as a street kitten when I found her, and has basically spent her entire 8 years of life trying to score FOOD.

So this afternoon I was trying to get myself as comfortable as possible- fiddling around in the bathroom and removing gloop from my face- and I looked over at her in the hall, answering her "wow wow" noises, staring at her really hard (which always makes her nervous)- she looks sort of like Don Knotts at those times: big eyed, frightened, and ready to bolt.

Well as I stared at her, I began to exaggeratedly lick my lips, smacking and moving my jaw around, really working the phantom food. Pretty soon SHE started doing the same thing...LOL!!! Everytime I started up, she mirrored what I was doing, looking more and more nervous about it. ("What's she doing? Does this mean she's not feeding us REAL FOOD? Is she tasting anything? Am I supposed to? Is it good? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS???")

After a while, she began to look like Moms Mabley to me, and I laughed until there were tears- which of course, just made her more nervous about getting a meal. LOL!

Yes, Harris is a moron....but she has ONE TRICK, AND IT'S THIS- ....only MUCH more energetically.

It's a mouth dance!

Harris is the Barishnikov of CHOPS! (O.K.....gonna get that book now and haul this tired butt up to bed.)



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