perzephone: (Default)
I can't help but feel that I am at least partially responsible for this wind storm we are having. I was pushing very hard the other day to prevent it from snowing, and I had the feeling that what I was doing was working, despite all the people wandering around going, "OMG, I hope it snows!!!"

I probably should have just let the weather do what it intended to do and not given it the incentive to take its wrath out on me this evening by waking all the goms up, among other really creepy shit.

Rob picked me up from work and took me to the grocery store. After the grocery store, we went home. I distinctively remember pushing the remote control to open the garage door. We then waited in the car in the garage for the garage door to close. We do this because we don't want to let Chelsie out of the car before the garage door closes. So we got out of the car, gathered up the groceries, and it wasn't until I was picking up the last bottle of water that I noticed a package from amazon.com on the garage floor. It was a fairly thick package, figure about 1 1/2" thick. I asked Rob if he had brought it in from the mail. He looked at the floor, took a minute to see what the hell I was yammering on about, and said, "No. Did you?" I'm like, "I haven't been home all day, when would I have brought that inside?" Even though I knew it was probably my Access 2007 for Dummies book, for some reason I didn't want to bend down & pick up the box. Rob picked it up & put it on the garbage can, where we both stood and stared at it. He finally said, "You better open it". I'm like, "I'm not gonna open that, you open that!"

It's the weirdest fucking shit I've ever had happen to me, and I've had some weird shit happen around me and to me. How in the fuck did the box get in our garage? All the doors were closed and locked, there were no signs of entry, the garage door was intact and didn't look as though it had been tampered with, and I even went outside to confirm that there was no way the package could have gotten in the garage & ended up where it was. Even if someone had managed to push the garage door away from the sides of the wall, in order to push the book completely inside the garage would have involved pushing it around a corner formed by the wall & the seam of the garage door. I could see someone wedging it there, but not successfully pushing it inside. The garage door is extremely heavy & can't be opened from the outside, not even a little bit (that knowledge freaks me out sometimes, so I try not to think about it too much - you can't manually open it from the inside, either).

The only plausible solutions we've arrived at involve the possibility that Rob forgot to close the garage door when he left to pick me up from work, or, an invisible UPS man from an invisible UPS truck slid the box under the door as we were coming home.

I was cleaning up the kitchen about 15 minutes ago, and someone knocked three times on the kitchen window, loudly and sharply. It was the sound of knuckles on glass. Of course, there's no one in the back yard. The dog heard it & went apeshit, I heard it. All I could think about was, "Oh Gods, she's back", thinking about whoever it was that knocked on the back door that one day. I didn't want to go out in the back yard, but of course, I've seen too many horror movies & I know the rules - me in my husband's flip-flops, my big ass coat, armed with a dog quivering behind my knees and a flashlight, went to inspect the back yard.

Nothing but the neighbor's palm tree and a bunch of trash blowing around.
perzephone: (Default)
Every once in awhile I like to sit up late at night and surf the dark underbelly of the ‘Net.

No, not 4chan… but the purveyors of the strange. The bloggers whose blogs read like HP Lovecraft and Charles Fort. The birth defects, teratomas and momento mori sites. Auctions of dolls and clowns gone horribly awry. Schizophrenic artists. I have satisfactorily ruined sleep for myself tonight.

It’s a day for it, though.

Let me describe my back yard to you, just to set the scene. The lot our house sits on is roughly square, divided into a front and back yard with the house plopped into the middle. The back yard forms a U around the house - on either side is a narrow walkway with the rectangle of the yard behind the house. Around the perimeter is a cinder block wall - on either side it’s about 5 ½’ tall - I can barely see over it. In the back, there’s a retaining wall & the main wall is about 8’ up. On the kitchen side of the yard, the walkway ends in a block wall, & on the other side, we have a padlocked gate. I am not the most nimble person around, and I am short, and I would have trouble scaling these walls. I don’t think anyone could do it quietly, or without the dog taking notice. I doubt, seriously, that anyone other than myself or the dog was in the backyard today.

Rob had gone on errands. I was sitting here at my computer, and the dog was laying on the floor next to me. The wind was blowing a little - breezes, really. We have a wrought-iron grate over one side of the back sliding-glass door, w/a gate on the door side. We usually leave the gate open during the day. Sometimes the wind will slam it, but today the breezes weren’t moving it, and it was open halfway, sticking out into the porch area.

Someone knocked on the back sliding glass door and I heard a child’s voice say, somewhat indistinctly, “I know you’re in there”. Chelsie startled at the same moment I startled & looked at me like, “Did you hear that?!” She got up when I got up, but it seemed like she was reluctant to approach the door. Usually when something makes noise she begins barking her fool head off, running from front door to back door, wanting out… but today, not so much. I don’t know if it was because I hesitated or if it was because she felt something not-quite-right herself.

We’ve got a black-out style curtain hanging over the back door, so I couldn't see the back door. But I had heard no footsteps leading to or from the door, and of course by the time I had shaken off my paralysis and gotten up, whoever it had been was gone. The wrought-iron gate was still in the exact same position, so I know the wind hadn’t smacked it against the grate on the other side or the door itself.

The household goms have ramped up a notch or two over the past few weeks. I think the weather’s keeping them active. We’ve been getting a lot of weird noises lately - knocking on doors, metallic banging. At least it all seems to be coming from the outside, and they haven’t been knocking on Rob’s headboard or smacking the back of my chair.

And a little extra that I wouldn't feel comfortable telling on fb... )

Well, it's 4:03 and it might be able to get some sleep finally.
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I'm used to stuff getting broken and going missing in the house... It happens all the time. Stuff just disappears. Put it down, turn your back, it's gone, never to be seen again. Stuff gets broken - like stuff hanging on the wall out of reach. Things fall down and fall over with out anyone even walking heavy nearby. It's like we live in a tiny Bermuda Triangle all our own. A Bermuda Triangle with a tiny fault line running under it.

But tonight Chelsie brought me this green cord. I've never seen it before. I don't have a clue as to where it came from. It's a green silk or shiny nylon cord, much like the ubiquitous black silk cords of occult jewelry everywhere. She found it somewhere either in the den or in my room. Rob doesn't recognize it, either.

It's bad enough when stuff goes missing, but this is a first as far as random things mysteriously appearing. It's got me kind of weirded out.
perzephone: (Default)
Today my toilet decided to go silly-bonkers. Every year around this time, the Las Vegas Valley Water District 'aerates' the water, probably to help keep the sediments from Lake Mead from wreaking havoc w/the treatment plant. As a result, all the extra air pressure in the system makes our toilets flush by themselves and run constantly (yeah, so much for drought-condition conservation, right?) A week or two ago, I flushed the toilet & the little hose in the tank flipped out of the pipe & began spraying water out from under the tank lid. I managed to stuff it back in, dried up my bathroom, bitched about it to Rob & went on w/my merry business. This morning, about 5 minutes before I was getting ready to leave, my toilet tank asploded again, soaking me and the bathroom in the process. I wrangled it back into the pipe (why do all plumbing problems sound sexual? 'I wrangled the spraying hose back into the pipe'... geez) & dried the bathroom as best as I could. I was just glad I don't normally put a shirt on til right before I go out the door (I spill coffee & peanut butter on myself a lot in the mornings - I don't gain coordination til after noon). So Rob came back from dropping me off, was in the bathroom himself, and heard water hitting wood... The toilet had flushed itself & I had never put the tank lid back on when I left this morning, so the little hose was just spraying water everywhere like a miniature fire hose.

This is the really funny part, though. Rob got up from the toilet long enough to make sure it was coming from my bathroom & not outside, went back to clean himself up & the water stopped. He went back into my bathroom, and the hose was neatly tucked under the bobber arm, filling the tank instead of my bathroom cabinets, almost as though something had done it on purpose. Like one of the household goms had walked by, gotten soaked & said, "That's enough of that already!"

Rob whipped out some of his handy-man genes & fixed my toilet, so hopefully tomorrow morning I won't get two showers.

It's still humid, and it drizzled a little today :)
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The motion-sensor light in the backyard came on a while ago, and now I'm all freaked out. Especially because not long after, one of the snakes decided to have a hissy-fit. A neighbor's dog sporadically barks, one of the behind-us neighbors motion-sensor lights was also on... I hate this prickly feeling. Start hearing things click off the windows, the roof creaks, the a/c makes the house thump. Crap.

Dammit!

Mar. 26th, 2008 04:33 pm
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I was looking forward to seeing The Mist this weekend. It's one of my more favorite Stephen King short stories, and it would make a really good movie. However, I saw the newest preview for the DVD and those fuckers gave it all up. They just showed off a good portion of the creepy crawlies that lurk in the mist to the general public, which I happened to be a member of at the time. I wanted to cry. Probably still see the movie anyway, but that preview totally blew it for me.

I had a hard time sleeping last night. Kept waking up, of course. No dreams... just a vague feeling of something heavy and hot with harsh rasping breath laying on top of me. I couldn't even shoo it away effectively because it had the comforter wrapped around me snug as a sausage in a pancake. Maybe it was the barking ghost again. I know the barking ghost isn't a true ghost, it's something else. A messenger or harbinger of some kind. It's trying to tell me something, but I haven't had time to listen. I know it's been around but at least it hasn't been standing over me barking. Something else was wandering my room last night, too - in the form of a tiny red spark. Kept making me think the iron was still on or someone outside had a laser pointer.

I'm going to pick up a multi-vitamin & some minoxidil today, see if I can stave off any further hair-thinning. I'm hoping it's just my roots coming out back there & that it's just making my hair look thin. It's been so healthy since I switched to the black dye & I'm more upset than I imagined I could be. Of course, I've never considered that I'd fall victim to 'female pattern baldness'.
perzephone: (Default)
Something has changed because I am seeing things again. Either that, or my Elavil has stopped working, one of the two. Or maybe some combination of the two because I've also been waking up in a raw sweaty panic every three hours. I hope that stops once I've gotten settled into the new job. Seeing things again is ok except they like it when I'm in the kitchen. Once last night my waking in a sweaty raw panic was because it sounded like something was standing over me barking in a harsh coughing way. It was a gruff lionlike noise, or maybe like a cheetah with a deep voice. But whatever it was it was standing over me like a tall wispy person. Honestly, no, it wasn't exactly wispy. It was sort of tall, thin, angular and jangled together. These are the moments when I wish I could draw. Maybe it was a tall smoky mummy-shape wearing a Thoth-head mask. Ah... here, Il Medico della Peste . That's what it looked like - a tall jangly smoky carcass wearing the plague-doctor's mask. And chuffing or barking at me in my sleep. I think I know what I'm going to be for Samhain. Thank you, bizarre barking ghost-beastie in my room last night, for waking me on a work night!

It rambles. )

Right now, for whatever reason, the house goms are loud and want to be seen and heard. I've done a lot of ignoring over the past few years, mainly out of animosity but Something has changed and I'll be damned if I know exactly what it is.
perzephone: (spooky mulder)
I don't. Not one bit. Especially wind like the wind we're having tonight. It's a storm wind - with no storm behind it. It makes the house goms restless - they keep pacing behind me, shadows falling on my back while I'm cooking. Giving me the shivers. It doesn't help that I'm tired. Makes me more susceptible to...

... rats in the walls, heh.

Paranoia

Dec. 20th, 2007 02:33 am
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Ok, so I know it's ludicrus.. (sp very ??), but I have harbored this suspicion that someone else lives in this house. Like there's an actual guy living in the walls who takes stuff and breaks stuff. He opens doors & windows, turns lights on & off, you name it. He had the PS2 out one night & was playing with it. Generally, he's an okay roommate except for the taking/breaking. But he takes weird shit. Like this balloon. Rob got his dad some balloons to give to the m.i.l. for her birthday. She gave them back to Rob for Halloween. They've been remarkably persistent balloons - one is still flying high. The other one is black & has a bunch of eyeballs on it & the word "Boo!" scattered across it. That one had lost just enough helium so it had begun to lurk lower to the ground. The last balloon that had reached that point suffered a bad scissor-induced death by my hands, so Rob told me this one was off-limits, & I respected those wishes as long as he kept it locked up while I was sleeping.

Anyway, the balloon has disappeared, and I didn't kill it & then hide the evidence. It has literally disappeared. We have looked everywhere in the house, even places a balloon (even one that was sort of drifting at floor level) couldn't go, and it's gone. Totally gone.

I think the guy who lives in the walls took it.

Prevention

Apr. 20th, 2007 02:49 am
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Left an offering for the fox spirit... just in case.

(Sunday 4/22 - it's been a quiet couple of days. Maybe it worked.)
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I'm beginning to wonder about the bad luck that seems to be plaguing this household. On top of everything else that Rob's had happen, he broke a tooth. This morning as I was falling asleep, it felt like something low to the floor hit the corner of my bed. I only freaked out a little... but then this afternoon, I took a shower & noticed four fine parallel scratches on my inner thigh. Last night I found a fine scratch a little deeper in between my thighs. I keep my fingernails short and smooth... so even if I did manage to scratch myself in my sleep or while rowing the little man in the boat the other morning, the scratches would have a different configuration. These are almost like cat scratches, or even razor slices, not stubby human fingernail scratches. Not to mention it would be something I'd notice previously when going to the bathroom. Anyway, while I was taking my shower, my shower stool broke. I'm fat, but damn... not that fat.

Just some weird crap happening, and it all seems to have started after seeing that fox on television. Anyway, Rob's back from Hammerfall, so I gotta go loot some tomb.

The Wind

Jan. 12th, 2007 05:04 am
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I don't like the wind when it's strong, like tonight. It buffets the house, making it creak & groan. Sounds like someone walking in the walls & on the roof. Reminds me that Pazuzu lives in our fireplace.

Not too long ago, I had picked up an anthology of the year's best horror. I don't remember the exact title, but one of the stories has stuck with me. A family moved into a country house. It had a pair of large stone rabbits on the walkway & rabbits would congregate in the yard at night. Everything was okay at first, but then, gradually, things began to become haunted. At first, I think it was just a mirror. They turned the mirror to face the wall or some such. Then it was a pair of shoes under a bed. Then this wall, or that piece of furniture. It wasn't the whole house - just a bit here & a bit there. Even the cat became haunted, probably because it spent so much time under the bed. The father still worked in the city & eventually, he became haunted, too. At the end, he shrunk down to brownie-size, mounted a rabbit, picked up a spear & the story ended w/him about to lead a pixie raid on the house.

Sometimes, I just don't like living in this house. It's noisy. It's been invaded. It belongs to the scorpions. Nothing I can do seems to be strong enough to keep what's inside, or outside, at bay. All truth be told, we don't belong here & the house isn't subtle about reminding us, every single day.

perzephone: (drummer)
Got my drums yesterevening... UPS delivers really late in our neighborhood, and I was like Bart at the door from about 9am: "Where's my spy camera? Where's my spy camera?" 

So I opened the box when it was finally dropped on our doorstep, and there were not one, not two, but four drums. Two frame, two rain. And four beaters, one badly warped. Now, a part of me is bad. I figured, "Hey, maybe they don't know they sent me four drums. Four drums for the price of two... Not bad for a day's work... BONUS!" But then the Pisces-Moon part of my Capricornian soul took over & said, "Now now, you better e-mail those nice people & tell them that they sent you extras". So I gave in to my conscience and did so. I got an e-mail back from them this morning wishing me much good karma for my honesty. Aww. 

Of course, I have not yet been able to really play with my drums because of Rob's ass. He's got a prolapsed something-or-other back there, it's been plaguing him (and by extension, me) all weekend & we finally got him a dr's appt. today. I keep telling him, considering all his problems, that anal play is unwise, but he's always gotta be sticking inanimate objects up his ass. We got absolutely nothing done all weekend - Ed's tank is still sitting in the living room, unwashed & unmodified. The shelf Rob was going to convert into a gun safe is still unconverted. I've been doing a lot of extra fetch-&-carry, though, and laundry, and dishes, and because I hate having to cook two separate meals, I've been on an unintentional liquid & soft-easily-digested food diet. Needless to say, I'm not in the best of moods, so it's probably a good thing I can't make glorious noise because the least bit of motion or rhythmic noise makes Rob nauseous right now. I have to admit, sometimes anal really does it for me. Wakes up the serpent, gives good orgasms, but after seeing what Rob's been going through, I honestly think I'm done w/being fucked up the ass. I don't understand the difference, either - we eat pretty much the same diet, but I'm regular as sunset & sunrise, don't get constipated, only get diarrhea if I've got food poisoning (which I do get more than Rob because I like food that still moo's, and I'm not picky about 'well aged' meat ... if I ever end up w/Creutzfeld-Jakob's disease, I would not be surprised). I probably do include more whole grains in my diet because I do not like white bread and I will buy two separate loaves if we're in the bread mood.

I was sitting on the floor sort of just exploring the rain drums. I don't know exactly how they're supposed to be played for best effect, but it was kind of cool - if I shifted them just slightly, tilting them back & forth, they sound like the ocean. They're very loud, and I could feel my lower coupla inches of spine start to resonate with the vibrations. Of course, any time any kind of percussion music gets played in the house, all the lares get woke up & make for a restless night. Things walking up & down the hall, talking in ways that lets me know it's not REarM's, light moving in the hallway & living room that isn't coming from any window.

Dropped the programming class yesterday, bringing me down to part-time. Yippee!
perzephone: (Default)
I was at work last week, I don't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday (or early Wednesday or Thursday morning, whichever you prefer). I left the casino & went into the hallway that leads to the express food service/freight elevators & all of a sudden it was like I was in 'The Shining'.

I didn't want to walk down that hallway, but I did because I had to make my deliveries before the Troll Women of Non-Gaming Audit come in... Now that I think about it, it must've been Tuesday night/Wednesday morning because we had early dateroll, so I was making my deliveries around 3am... but anyway, I walked past a bread cart that was covered in that slightly opaque garbage-bag type plastic - the plastic billowed out towards me & a warmish gust of air came up the hallway. It was discomforting.

I went around the corner to where the freight elevators were, & there's a door that leads to the 3rd Floor hallway of the Tower 1 rooms. The door was ajar, & it clapped on its frame & sort of bounced. It bothered me & I was hoping that the elevator farthest away from the door opened first, which of course, being as it was one of those kind of scenarios, it was the elevator directly opposite the door that landed. I sort of rushed past the door, not looking into the gap between the door & frame, expecting a short, dark shadow to be on the other side. With my back to said door, the elevator door opened & it really didn't seem like such a hot escape route. It gusted another warmish poof of air my way, & to be honest, I wanted to just run back up the hallway to the casino.

I felt very alone at that moment, as if I had walked into another version of the Excalibur, the one should have been in an episode of 'The Twilight Zone', basically. I felt like the last person left on earth for those minutes.

But I got on the elevator - paperwork, yanno. Can't let the imagination get in the way of paperwork being delivered.

So the elevator takes me to the 7th floor executive offices, and everything seemed normal again. Hallway door to the hotel closed, garbage & random office furniture stacked in the entry way... and as I walked up the ramp & down the hall towards Surveillance, I was feeling kind of stupid for bringing up images of 'The Shining' to myself. Until I turned the corner & saw the office chairs neatly lined up down the center of the non-gaming-audit office hallway. A whole row of nondescript rolling office chairs.

They've been doing some remodeling & repainting up there. It all has some logical explanation, really, but considering my weird creepy feelings, it startled me to be faced by a platoon of office chairs. There is no other way to get to non-gaming audit's drop box, and the wrath of Mike is far more terrible than anything office chairs could conceive of doing to me. I didn't want to accidentally touch any of them, though, and for once I found myself wishing I was somewhat skinnier. I know how to compress my bulk into small spaces, though, and I went around the corner to Managerial Auditing's door to be confronted with more lined-up office chairs.

Managerial Auditing has a strange legacy for me & Alea. It's always about 20 degrees cooler on the other side of that door's mail slot, and I constantly think of that one Lovecraft story about the old scientist who's air conditioning broke down, & then he ran out of ice before more could be delivered... I think about some old auditor living in a perpetual state of suspended animation on the other side of that mail slot, and I've passed this bit of imagination on to Alea & various relief auditors. So I go around the bend & my mind really starts to gibber because the entire hallway from the network room to the door of the executive office is lined with more office chairs. I was wondering why, or who, had so many chairs that they could fill that hallway from end to end. And Room Reservations was still closed, the lights out, the doors shut, not even a lone Eye-in-the-Sky in the breakroom. So I carefully sidled past all those chairs, lurking there ominously, slipped Room Res' report under their door & booked for the executive elevator. Which was also creepy.

Once the doors opened & I was back in casino-land, everything went back to being perfectly normal.

I have to go in early again this coming Tuesday. I'm talking someone into making deliveries with me, tho.
perzephone: (Default)
Oh I hate this house,
And this house hates me,
We live together in
Perfect animosity...

We just had a very short black-out. First, my computer stopped responding - not weird considering that most peoples' myspace profiles are too graphics-heavy for my dial-up to handle. Then I heard a loud 'thump', accompanied by a low vibration, the lights went out and I sat here in the dark. Pitch black dark, really. I mean, a complete, total, 100% lack of any light natural or otherwise. The main disadvantage to being a night person is that all our windows block out light. All light. Another disadvantage to being a night person is that preparing for bed & sleeping when it's light outside has left me childlike in my fear of the dark. All the hairs stood up on my body & head and my bladder sort of jumped up into the empty space left when all my other internal organs leaped about two inches away from their proper spaces. In other words, the sudden unexpected removal of all electrical stimuli scared the living crap outta me. Then, just when I thought I was going to start bawling like a little baby, there was another loud 'thump' & the lights came back. Thank the Gods!

I still sat here, momentarily stunned. The house started making cracking noises as the air pressure changed in response to the a/c shutting off & then coming back on, which startled me. I finally got control over my legs enough to do a once-over & reset all the clocks to their corresponding time zones... I kept making kissy noises at Rob, but he didn't even roll over, leading me to believe that whoever cut out the lights may have already entered the house, silently killed Rob & left as I sat here trying to talk some sense into myself.

Ed is shedding & restless, so I at least have some companionship, but his hissing at things invisible or unknown to me makes me more nervous than I already am.

I hate this house - the noises, the atmosphere, the weird angles of its architecture. There is not enough Vesta powder or protection spells in the world to ever make me feel comfortable here. It's a creepy fucking house, and I know it's responding to my dislike towards it because it doesn't like me either. Neither I nor the house want to 'shake hands & make friends'. The house is winning, tho - all I can really do is refuse to clean it or maintain it - it's got the upper hand because it can make me feel very uncomfortable.

I have taken some positive steps - I have a doctor perfectly willing to let me have a lifetime prescription to Elavil, and I have stopped watching ghost movies. The Pazuzu episode after watching the last Exorcist movie was enough to convince me that I am too susceptible to suggestion, and I am not entirely convinced that Pazuzu has left our fireplace. Pazuzu doesn't sleep, He waits.

Here I digress for a moment: This new one coming out, 'Pulse'... not gonna happen in this house. Same went for that one about the water... Apparently, there's a 'Grudge 2' coming out - no way, no how. The remake of 'The Wicker Man' isn't exactly a ghost story, and when it hits the video store, I will probably watch it. The original one was interesting, and I've grown to appreciate it more since the time I first watched it. There's nothing quite like an old-fashioned human sacrifice...
perzephone: (Default)
Yanno, when your nerves are overwrought and you're nervous and invasive things have happened in your personal life, the last thing ya need is the whispery voice of something to sound over your right shoulder, from the vicinity of behind the couch, or possibly from the fireplace. At least it didn't say "Get out!" because I think I just might have gotten up and left without an argument. It sounded like it said, "What's this!?" but I don't really know. It's bad enough that I felt adrenaline surge through my body and every hair literally stand on end as though I had wrapped myself around a Tesla coil or something. I was sleepy, but not so much now.

Tomorrow we've got someone from Sprint to come out & check the lines - we've been having problems since the burglary - pick up the phone & get static, feedback & clicking noises instead of a dial tone. Talk to someone & have those weird clicking noises come through, almost like call waiting or if someone was pushing buttons on their phone, but neither party is. I don't know if the thieves tampered w/the phone lines or if the timing is coincidental, or maybe the Feds have our lines tapped. Beats me.

Speaking of beating, I've got a cast-iron skillet & a military baton next to my bed. I had a large comforter tacked up over my bedroom window, and I could just imagine if someone tried to enter my room through that window. They'd be tangled up in that comforter like a cat in a burlap sack and I could just beat the crap out of them with the iron skillet. Having been hit by a cast-iron skillet twice in the span of 15 minutes, it's advisable to just stay on the floor after the first time you get hit.

It rained on us today, and I'm at least content with that.

Updates

Jan. 22nd, 2006 05:33 pm
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Just a note to doomsayers: The world is not going to end in 2012. And if it does, what exactly are you going to do about it? Quit complaining & start coming up with solutions please. You've got what, 7 years? Get to it. A lot can happen in seven years - ask the last Year King.

Went out & bought the recumbent bike. Haven't set it up yet. It was on sale at Wal-Mart for $108.67, a third of what Sears wanted. Pretty cool, even if I do say so myself. It's 9:30am, I have no idea what I'm still doing up & awake & wanting tomato soup. Been having some ghostie activity here, which is odd because, ok, nevermind, Candlemas is like, a week or two away. Duh. February 2nd, now I understand.

Put in an online application w/the County, see how that turns out. Got to run by Eastridge on Monday or Tuesday & get a business card to submit w/the test certificate to the county - they want the testing body's address & phone number, rotten bastards. Of course, Eastridge's typing certificate lacked this pertinent information. Stupid.

(Edited for content 03/16/08 - I no longer have a second lj, so I deleted the link)
perzephone: (Default)
Since I've figured this out, I've been a recording fool. As a result, tho, I have to listen to these tapes. Contrary to what I've read, MusicMatch doesn't recognize tracks on recorded cassette tapes. Oh well.

Anyway, so tonight I'm home alone for the first time in I don't know how long, and I'm paranoid & nervous, jumping at every little noise. I've cleaned my bathroom & the kitchen thoroughly, even mopped. Hel, mopped nothing, got down on my hands & gingerly on my knees & scrubbed places by hand. Cleaned some cabinets. Spring cleaning kind of crap. Pulled all the knobs off the stove, the burners & burner plates... poured vinegar all over the sink & made some headway w/the hard-water deposits. Utterly mundane stuff because as long as I'm moving & there's water running, I feel more secure than when I'm just sitting here. I've got the television on, almost all the lights on, and I'm still not fully comfortable. Trying to take a shower was an exercise in willpower. It's funny, I can take a shower here by myself in the early evening, like when Rob goes to get fast food, but after midnight & I become the Psycho chick in my head. I've been going to bed w/Rob around 2 or so (basically when 'Big O' ends on AdultSwim) but it's almost 5am and I am not even sleepy. Not by a long run. I've been trying not to take any Ambien, so as a result I'm wide awake & I can't stay asleep once I fall asleep. I've been cleaning in an attempt to wear myself out, burn off some nervous energy, but it's a no-go. How can I sleep when there's a configuration of fake logs in the fireplace that looks like Pazuzu? Tomorrow, Rob's gonna have to reach in there & rearrange things for me.

One of the few commercial tapes I have left & haven't upgraded, for whatever reason, to CD already, has been my Les Miserables tape. I think it's a sentimental thing. I had such an amazing time when I went to see it at the 5th Avenue theatre in Seattle, way back when. 11th grade Drama Class trip. It was soooo cool. And I completely got sucked into it, too. They had the battles set up so it seemed like cannons were shooting over the heads of the audience - the first time one went off I ended up in one of my classmates' laps, three seats away. He was understandably appalled, but arranged it so I could sit next to him & grab his arm every time the guns went off. He had fingerprint-shaped bruises for a couple of weeks afterwards. And it got worse - first Fantine died, and I sniffled. Valjean died at the end and I was in hysterics. I couldn't be consoled at all. It was horrible. And now every time I listen to the tape, my chin starts wobbling, my eyes well up, and I'm bawling. Even when I watch the show on PBS whenever it infrequently shows up (usually when they're doing a telethon), I start crying. Crying to music or something like that is clean crying, tho. You're all emotionally caught up in something completely disconnected from your own life, something that isn't even real. It's cathartic, but not painful. I feel washed out afterwards, but not ugly. I think a lot of what overcame me in the theatre was from being so caught up in the emotional bullshit of my life at the time & not being allowed to express myself naturally, and the fact that I was once a hopeless daddy's little girl. Valjean reminded me a lot of my own dad, even the actor playing him looked quite a bit like my dad, only shorter. (at 6'6", everyone was shorter). I think I've recovered - mostly. (The only possible exception would be Amistad - I felt not only ugly, but violated by the truth in that particular movie. I don't think I could ever watch it again, mainly because I cried so hard & so long that I scared myself. The ending is a triumph, tho. What Dreams May Come was another scary crying jag - that one I couldn't stop). I'd love to go see Les Mis again, but I think I'll probably just have to settle for the DVD.

So here I am, fresh out of tears, waiting for the night to end so I can get some sleep. VH1's Insomniac Music Theater is on behind me. I'm not too fond of Gwen Stefani's solo stuff - I don't know what the song was called, but it involved her dancing around a high school w/an all-girl posse. The drumbeat was nifty - too bad it wasn't in a Snoop Dog video.

I heard something relevant on the Simpsons tonight. Homer asked Bart & Lisa if they were upset about his having to undergo a coronary bypass sort of surgery & they told him no because they were part of the MTV generation... no highs & no lows. Homer asked, "How does it feel?" & Lisa shrugged one shoulder & said, "Eh." I know that feeling. No highs, no lows, just this sort of median-line complacency. The fear & paranoia is getting to me, tho. I don't know how to combat it on my own. It just builds & builds. I've either got to get out of this house or somehow make it mine. I don't see the latter ever happening - to me, it will be the m.i.l.'s first & the scorpions' second. It will never be mine. I'm starting to wonder if there's an anti-anxiety drug out there that would actually mitigate these feelings somewhat w/out a lot of horrible sex-drive-killing side effects.

My arms ache. Nerve damage sucks.
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Quiet here. Rob's napping, I'm burning music, making $$$... that sort of thing. Stuffed envelopes all day. I'm so sick of those envelopes already & my ass hurts. Rob's talked himself into some kind of cold, mainly because he's working again & I won't feel sorry for him because he has to work, so he feels I need to feel sorry for him for something. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize that I have no sympathy for anyone, including myself. We get ourselves into things, we have to get ourselves out of things, & feeling sorry for people because they got themselves into something is about as useless an emotion as guilt.

This morning I got upbraided for leaving the gun under my bed. It's my gun, it's my bed. And last night, the Spirits were walking. All night I heard footsteps crunching in gravel, things scraping the outside walls, the gate softly clinking & chiming open & closed. Shadows flickered on my blinds. Voices echoed in the walkway outside. Even my candle-bellied coyote lamp couldn't keep my nerves at bay, so I turned to cold hard steel for solace. As it was, I kept waking up every couple of hours, sweating, heart pounding.

It's my own fault, tho - I cleaned my altar, mopped the floors. I gave Ariadne Her pomegranate, I gave Ellegua candy & rum... I had notions of burning sweetgrass & putting on the Nomad CD before I went to sleep, but thought to myself, "Um, yeah, sleep would be nice & the house is already restless." Nessie's been up & moving for a week now. The Veil is sundered, almost fully split to reveal the Abyss between this world & the next. I can feel the heartbeat of the World in the darkness.

I just wish I had the energy to stand up against the tides this year. Instead of cleansing & invigorating me, I feel like what little strength I have is being sapped away, into the Void. Everything I do takes so much will & effort. Sometimes just getting myself out of bed in the morning (or the evening) I feel like Atlas shifting the weight of the Earth on his shoulders. I feel defeated & listless, but at the same time stretched tighter than the Veil itself, ready at any moment to give way & unleash a flood of the Unknown & Unknowable... Power walks.
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Intact. Got the sensation there was someone standing in the doorway, their hand on the door, sort of swinging it back & forth. Heard something thump loudly on the roof, rattling shingles. Probably a cat. I am so going to get some cat traps from the humane society in the near future...
I'm starting to feel like the guy in Stephen King's short story that opened "Night Shift". I can't remember the name of the story offhand & I'm not inclined to go into the darkened library to seek it out, but the opening line of it is:
"From the sound of it, there are large rats in the walls." It goes downhill from there, of course, w/the guy spiralling into paranoia & death. The last time I felt this jumpy was when I was coming off the Elavil a doc gave me as a sleep aid. I laid in the condo for a week, watching my bathroom ceiling, just waiting for the body to fall through... I just knew a serial killer had been storing corpses up there & one was rotting away the drywall it was laying on... at the time I knew it was the Elavil withdrawals talking. Now I don't have that drug-based excuse. So I'm just nuts & have to get used to it.
Over the Summer, coming in the house from the garage, right under the intake for the a/c, there was a lingering odor like bad hamburger meat. A part of my mind thinks someone got up into the rafters of the house, like a runaway or transient kid, & died there. I keep catching glimpses from the corners of my eyes of a little, bare-chested brown boy, probably Mexican, wearing footsie pajama bottoms that are too small for him. He stands by the fridge a lot, & I think it was him swinging my bathroom door tonight. It's plausible, to my sick mind, my overtaxed & anxious mind. I mean, this house sat uninhabited for long stretches of time, & the old woman who owned it wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Her backyard was such a jungle... anything could have gone unnoticed. I found more dead spiders behind curtains & in closet corners than I care to think about. Big ones. And their sheds, too, & husks of crickets & roaches. You don't have spiders leaving husks all over the place if you pay attention to your surroundings. The scorpions & snails & weevils are proof that her gardening service wasn't very diligent, either. Freakin' ear wigs, pill bugs & snails, i.e. watery bugs, in a desert. Wtf?!

Dreamt about my dad last night, but my brain put Duane's face & voice on the form, probably so as not to traumatize me further. He was looking for the "golden bathroom" & I followed him out into a martian landscape, seeking the "golden key" with which to open said bathroom door. Me & some kid that my mind added from "Holes". I know the bathroom thing was because I had to piss like Seabiscuit... so anyway, we're out wandering the mesas of Mars looking for this key to open the bathroom for Duane, aka my dad, when we end up in a junkyard/trailer park that I've been in before in my dreams. There are these two men, sort of mutated looking, forcing a heavy set, darkhaired girl wearing a net snood to unload their tow truck. She's crying & I know she's basically a slave, but I can't get to her because of the golden key, which is hidden somewhere in the junk yard.
Thank all the Gods of Sleep & Night that my bladder finally screamed loudly enough for me to wake the hell up!
It's funny how certain places end up in your dreams, over & over again. Some of mine:
1) A huge neglected chicken coop. The place scares the crap outta me for some reason. There are dead chickens, obviously starved, their eyes eaten away by ants or other scavengers, feathers blowing off randomly in the breezes & drafts... it's backed onto an old house somehow, but I never get past the chicken coop part. There are some live chickens, but I'm reluctant to let them go...
2) Red sandstone mesas, like the ones I was looking for the bathroom on last night. It's a huge open desert landscape, red as brick, always night, w/moon & stars overhead. There's a prominent, steep ridge w/no obvious pass, mountains on the horizon...
3) The junkyard/trailer park. This is the epitome of trailer trash livin', folks. Run-down mobile homes, motor homes & quonset huts w/trash & junk heaped in the alleys between them. Mutants dwell here, crazies & slave-drivers. I always end up w/my back against a wall of sprung mattresses, bare coils pressed into my kidneys & ass as Southern-Summer sweltering sweat rolls down my spine. It's always overcast, the sky that bizarre color of brushed stainless steel, threatening rain but never offering up more than hot, humid wind. And it reeks. Gods, does it reek. I wish I could summon up tornadoes in my sleep, because this place desperately needs one.
After going so long w/out dreaming, or remembering, now that I'm both dreaming & remembering the dreams, I remember seeing these places before, getting that deja vu' feeling, like "Oh, this place again." I can't really complain about the dreams, no matter how panicked I am when I wake up, no matter how much adrenaline is coursing through me, making my heart do flip-flops, the blood-taste in my mouth, fear covering my flesh w/sweat & stink... because I'm dreaming, & that to me is uncommonly wonderful in & of itself.

Funny thing - they say (whoever those anonymous "they" are) that you can't dream in color, you can't read, give directions, do math, smell, etc. I dream in Techno-color, w/full Dolby Surround Sound & complete w/Smellovision. I can read, tell directions better than I can in real life, count past my fingers, etc & so forth. But if it's something I really need to carry into the waking world, like someone's name or a place, poof! It's gone the minute my eyes flutter open. Or like my soldier life, I can't read nametags - they have a censoring blur over them, & no one around will say it for me... Pisses me off, too.

Oh, huh, a side-note in my life. I have a tiny defect at the top of my heart. A small flaw in the muscle... could be scarring, could be congenital, could be my devoured unborn twin, mwuhahahahah. A shadowy eye-shape crowning that chamber on the left. Only really visible when stress is applied, such as exercise.

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Rainbow Serpent Woman

August 2014

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