Up and down Elmwood Avenue in the city, ethereal estate endures. I just gotta get out more and talk to the solid humans who share space with, well, just with. Let me warn you, I just had three cups of coffee after an overnight fast for a blood test and whammo, this post may be fragmented and pumpkin guts sloppy, but well, art is art. Besides, today's car ride took me past the old restaurant I worked at, an old stable converted to bar and kitchen. Whoof, haunted as a mirror in grandma's attic. Footsteps, doors slamming, tense cold waves of anger; all there. Not a happy place to change into whites, I did it as fast as I could...whites being what a kitchen worker wears. Really, I don't know what nibbled the ghost's angst other than the owner of that restaurant favored a Frank Sinatra Rat Pack Jimmy You a Good Boy Hey Lookit Them Tatas persona, and the stable boy ghost who supposedly hung himself in the loft maybe resented the raucous noise of it all. Italians with guns, just imagine. My question is, where does the energy go when a haunted building is knocked down?
Ground level? The tenth floor? Say if a high rise was haunted, the day after the wrecking ball did the job, would the vapors stay in say the general area of where the tenth story existed? Or does reality hit the ectoplasm and it fades into what? Are there sky ghosts? Do ghosts really know what they are doing? Are they aware of being pains in the ass, is there kick bucket pleasure in continuing as a nuisance to the living? Jerk humans probably stay jerk spirits, telling us who are still scurrying on the surface why they think it is their moral duty to exact phantasmic justice.
I mean, there are stories of dead relatives coming around, watching over the children beneficently, sending small tokens of remembering, a penny, a feather, a shared connection. But most of the reports detail the squirrely side of death, the emotionally distraught spirits who haven't access to medication and now have to deal with it face on. Oh who knows. But how far back does haunting go, and what's the time limit? How is it managed? The ones evident don't seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. Yet museums are haunted by former curators, buildings by former presidents, bygone pets appear at doors, so perhaps sentiment enters into it as well. I need to take a tape recorder and begin work interviewing the living, if only to satisfy my own innate nosiness and search for reality.
My couch now faces the window, and yesternight I watched the cuticle edge of the moon cut through clouds and become whole; the brightest full moon of 2010 says the almanac. I pulled up the window shade so I could see the ascent and the reflecting light played green and blue over dark, jagged snow clouds. Mars was there, it was lovely. The mercury streetlights added an orangish glow to segments of the sky, and as temperatures plummeted into single digits, the atmosphere was lit with subtle colors from long ago. It made me feel all right. Things go on.
Sleep well, dream of colors blending with snow villages in the heavens; dream under blankets, under the spell of life, under the wishes for safety and recognition by those who love you best.
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