Stereotypical Introspection

Stereotypical Introspection

“Howard!”

“What?”

“You going out tonight?”

“NO!”

“Why not?”

They ask the same question every year, and I give them the same answer. What is so special about this one night?

Does one day or night, a week, month, year, century, really make a difference, after you are dead? Faces change, people fear differing things, but fear doesn’t drastically change the emotion elicited, or the reaction invoked.

Take Jeremy for instance. He is one of those wanting to know, why I don’t care about going out tonight, playing my part, doing my duty as he sees it. It wasn’t even a year ago, that some homeless guy jumped out from behind a bush, a prank no doubt, but it caused Jeremy to run into the street out of fear, and now he’s here with the rest of us. I asked him why he thought it was a homeless guy, and he just said, “I just did.”

We all are complicit in hijacking a social response to a problem by internalizing it. That is why fear is so easy to sell. He’s bored, I get that. Being dead is one thing, but having nothing to do, the truth be told, is worse when dead, than when alive. When you are alive there are many things you want, goals. When you are a spirit, you neither need nor want anything. It’s like the Advent Calendar. You know what’s behind each little door on the way to the big day, but you open them anyway, something to be said for tradition.

We have a kind of school for the newbies.  I call it the, Life After Death Collage.  It’s supposed to be an orientation for all, but mostly it fractures into two groups who handle, well, no longer being flesh and blood mortals in one camp, and those that think it’s wonderful, not to be restrained by the human condition. I understand the idealism of both camps, but what they fail to realize, is that there is another alternative. No one in either camp ever contemplates the notion that perhaps the focus, is on the wrong objective. 

Being a ghost has been the focus of millenniums of conjurers of the dark side. Pure speculationists, who when suffering from, the onset of cabin fever, or fear of it, causes them to visit the deepest and darkest recesses of their minds, for an explanation for their lengthening depression. That Tell-Tale Heart guy, Poe, for example.

You’d think after years of being exposed to the seasonal changes of light; they’d adapt. Physically they go out and buy seasonal clothing, but mentally, they don’t seem to be able to adjust. They make up horror stories to entertain. A form of self-delusion, as I recall. I believe the fear of a gruesome death, helps erase the realities of an anxiety filled life.

I remember getting a pumpkin spice latte once. Wow! Now that I think back on it, what a wonderfully progressive way to ruin a completely good cup of coffee. OH! coffee, how I miss that stuff. It wasn’t the jolt of enthusiasm it provided, but more the sense of places it enshrined. I can look back now and remember all the wonderful times I had, and a lot of them included coffee. Well, sometimes the brandy helped, but artificial pumpkin spice only made me look forward to Christmas, and everyone knows what a contrived disaster that always is.

One thing I’ve noticed in my thirty-ninth Year of the Dead, is that being bored with being bored, might just be the answer for all the enthusiasm about going out into the world, and scaring the be-Jesus out of people. I have to admit, when their faces light up, elongate, distort, and then their eyes look like they are going to jump from their skulls, I can’t help but find it amusing.

But it is being overdone, trivialized to the point where people are going out, looking for fear. The whole obsession with ghosts, in my opinion, started when humans became aware of their ability to alter another’s behavior, for better or worse, by the implementation of fear.

I should explain the idea of fear, at least as far as I have come to regard it. It is simply a tool, used to cause a reaction in a person that will alter the way they think or believe about something or someone. For centuries, or at least according to those I refer to as the Ancients, it had been used primarily to get kids to do what is required of them. One reminiscence I heard recently, was that if you disobeyed your elders, the arms of those interned in the cemetery, the next time you passed, would reach from the ground, and grab you. How that frightened anyone is beyond me, but they claim it got the job done, but then that was several hundred years ago.

To me, the thing that changed everything, took place only two thousand years ago. That whole thing with the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trifecta, and the other Two, are proselytized responsible, for not only creating all living things, but for teaching them how to behave. Obedience seemed to be the origin for so much of what has been expected of us, and I don’t believe it is a predictable expectation. When you see a guy that looks like he is maybe, 90 pounds, you may presume he’s not the athletic type. It’s that predicated assumption that leads us down the path of presumptuous speculation. The last badminton champion at the Asian Games was, Yon Fu Chan, 89 pounds, four feet nine inches tall. He slaughtered the competition, metaphorically, of course. Looks can be and are, deceiving.  

Take me for instance. I’m not considered attractive, but even when I pretend to lurk on the street corner, as if waiting for a bus, or perhaps rob you, no one pays me much attention, because they don’t see me as scary. It’s how you interpret things, that makes them frightening. You may think that’s just because, no one can see me, but you’d be wrong. We have the ability to become visible when we deem it necessary or need to prove a point. Being visible at times, has its rewards.

Our energy is limited however, so it is advisable to not abuse our powers. I had to have a talk with Jeremy about him wanting to try out his powers after he discovered he had them. He tried to frighten me by projecting himself to be a talking tarantula. Took him nearly a month to get back to normal power. Trivializing ones powers, is never a good idea. 

I understand why Jeremy is so excited about getting out there, being part of the festivities, and doing what is expected. It is exciting. But I’ve attempted to get him to consider that fear, although a way to have fun at the expense of others, of course, can also have unintended effects. I told him to remember how he got where he is today. I think he saw my point. I suggested he go out, his first night, and just observe. What we experience when human, is not a good indication of what we should expect to experience, after you have experienced, being bored to death. 

To make my point more poignant, I disclosed to Jeremy what had happened to Mr. Johnson, my neighbor. My friend Arnold and I, set up this trick, where we’d string some fishing line across the alley. We’d attach it to a scare crow figure we borrowed from Mrs. Fitzsimmons garden. When a car came down the dark alley and hit the invisible line, it pulled the scare crow from between the garages and into the side of the car, the treat. The driver believed they’d hit someone with their car. Funny though, they never seemed to notice the burlap head or straw stuffing flying all over the place.

Anyway, Mr. Johnson that night, had a heart attack, and plowed into the garage of Mrs. Fitzsimmons, damaging the garage door and her classic Buick; my dad said it was worth a fortune. No one ever knew it was us, who killed Mr. Johnson, but not an All Hallowed Eve went by, without me thinking about going to hell, for sure. 

I don’t know if Jeremy got the gist of my story, but I hope he did. Sometimes we can’t imagine the repercussions of things we do. You can only be sorry, afterwards, and really, what good does that do. I apologized to Mr. Johnson when I saw him one day, over by the charging station. I explained what had happened, and how sorry I was. He told me he wished there was a hell, so I’d have, “Some place to go, to atone for my transgressions.” He talked like that before he died, so I didn’t take it too personal.

This afternoon we are getting together with our charges, the new arrivals. I should have said before that Jeremy is my latest charge. Kind of like an apprentice. I’m supposed to tutor him in the ways of the Ghost, as I refer to it around here. Like I said, I want him to understand the whole fear phenomenon, and think more about being more humane, more thoughtful, if that is even possible for some ghosts. 

I guess we’ll know tomorrow. We have a communal session, where everyone gets a chance to talk about what they did, and how it made them feel. It’s kind of like that Jung versus Freud kind of controversial debate. Mostly, the same kinds of antics are reported, but every once in awhile someone comes up with something most imaginative.

Like last year, when Sister Betty, she had been a nun at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Baltimore, said she went to a church service and appeared in the holy water fountain, as the Blessed Virgin Mary.

She said the church investigators were called out a few weeks later to verify if she, as she testified, “Hit miracle status,” and if Mrs. Fitzsimmons daughter, Jean, was “Destined for Sainthood.”

Life after death, crazy; who knew?