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2005-07-08 - 1:26 p.m.
I grew up in a house on an old orchard. We had apple trees, raspberries, currents, many cherry trees, grapes, blackberries even a pear tree. This is irrelevant to this entry. I just like that I grew up on an orchard. There were quite a few things that happened in those orchard years that would affect me permanently�bad things, good things, lessons learned, memories made. But the one event that stays with me in such a way that even today I am still very edgy about it, happened one night, it must have been in summer because it was still rather light out and I was going to bed. Here is the setting. We had two floors in that house. The only way to get upstairs was from the staircase in the living room. There was a door that opened to the staircase. My brother and I shared the upstairs. When one would walk up those stairs�and I believe there were fourteen but that could have been the number of stairs at my other childhood home, Floria�when one would walk up those stairs you would reach a landing, just a small square of a landing and you would be facing a wall. My mother had one of her clown pictures hanging on that wall. A big picture of gloomy, sad looking clowns, just their faces, I think there were five faces in that picture. The clown pictures were art, they weren�t cheesy clown pictures, they were quite tasteful if you had a thing for clowns (which my mother did back then�hey? What happened to your thing with clowns??)So after you arrived at the landing you could go left or right. My bedroom was to the right. You would step up a step and my fathers office (which would later become the room where I kept my rabbit and where I would talk on the phone to boys) was located immediately in front of you once you turned right and stepped up a step, and then there was a short hallway which ended in the door to my bedroom. Should you turn left at the landing you would step up one step and you would be in this big open room where we had a futon like thing for guests to sleep on. I don�t really know what the purpose of this room was supposed to be. I remember that there was a toy chest in there for a while, but that may not be true because we had a playroom (that would later become our TV room where I watched, in another traumatic incident of childhood, as the Space Shuttle Challenger blew to bits on the TV screen one day when I was skipping school (by feigning illness) in order to watch my evil neighbors house be bulldozed) Off the guest room there was my brothers room. At some point my dad built a bridge over the staircase so that it wasn�t necessary for us to walk down a hall and down a step and up a step to get to the other side. But I don�t remember, at the time of this event, if that bridge was there yet. So. One night, as I said it must have been summer because there was still light, I can see it in my mind through a tiny window in the guest room area�I was walking up those stairs and I looked up and saw that the eyes of one of the clowns in the picture WERE GLOWING RED. GLOWING. Had this happened now days I could say it looked exactly as though someone was pointing a laser beam pointer thing at the eyes of the clown. I was very spooked. Forever spooked in fact. Over the years I have come up with all sorts of explanations for it. Because I DO believe it happened. Still�. I still believe that I truly, truly saw it. One of my explanations came from watching movies. I got to thinking that someone had been aiming a gun at the picture, and had been planning to shoot me. You know, like when someone in a movie looks down and sees a red laser spot in his chest and knows that someone is aiming a gun at him. But the explanation that I stayed with was that our house was haunted. I started to believe at some point that there was a demon ghost in that house that was trying to work itself into my brain and make me commit suicide. Because how else could you explain the fact that I often would be walking down those steps and would feel the urge to jump�just jump from step fourteen to the bottom? Okay, well, everyone probably experiences that urge�but have people actually done it? I did. I did it numerous times and each time I felt as though I had been pushed by something other than my own volition. I bear, to this day, faint scars along the edge of my foot from one of those jumps when at the bottom I skidded and my foot hit a row of exposed carpet tack. Being semi possessed by a ghost would also account for the fact that through most of my teenage years I was deathly afraid all the time�always feeling as though I was being pursued by something. Anyway�I really got myself fucked up over the glowing eye thing. So you can imagine that I visibly cringed and my heart started pounding when I saw those glowing red eyes HERE. It happens sometimes here. But it isn�t a ghost, it is sunlight coming through thin spots, knotholes, in the wooden shutters. I had been trying to at least keep the shutters cracked open a little so this wouldn�t occur again. But last night the shutters in one room must have blown tightly shut so when I walked by that room this morning, still half asleep, I saw the glowing eyes and I actually gasped and grabbed my chest. It was scary. And now I feel like I am being haunted again. And that sucks because it took me the last twelve years to stop feeling so haunted. LEAVE ME ALONE DEMON GHOST!! Really, I am not crazy. OH�and I keep forgetting to write about this and every single day I remember that I need to remember�but about a week ago it rained. Which was amazing in itself. After it rained the pool was all cloudy and everything dried off with a thin layer of dust. So from what we have been told by a couple different people, and maybe it�s not true but I�d like to believe it is, the dust was from the Sahara desert. Sometimes when there is a sand storm there it will kick sand all the way up into the atmosphere and then the sand will get caught in a storm front and end up here or there or anywhere and RAIN SAND FROM THE SAHARA! It�s incredible. Really.
Oh, and, if anyone had any shred of admiration towards me for moving across an ocean...NOW that admiration is founded. Today, I, alone, went to the gym. I am a hero. I am I am I am. It's amazing what desperation (and feeling your ass growing minute by minute) will do to give one courage. If I was going to be left alone for any more days than one more I would also, out of desperation for vegetables, be forced to go to the grocery store and operate one of those stupid carts. But I won't have to be that brave yet, Boy returns tomorrow and I am taking him directly from the airport to the grocery store. Poor Boy. |
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