HAUNTED THINGS AND EX-FLINGS: Of Scenester Exes, Interior Decorating, and Pissing in the Bathtub

NOTE -- This post may seem a bit out-of-sorts, but, heh, cut me some slack. I've got Mono. I'm kinda out-of-sorts, myself. And thanks, Steph, for calling me a hot librarian. Not feeling too hot, but, well, I'll be back, hotter than ever. Promise.

- JASON

"Here you are, with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with. "

- SYKES, (EDMOND O'BRIEN)
From Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch [1969]

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- There's nothing in the world like someone calling simply to say hi. I rarely get phone calls like that.

No, I get the I just had a nightmare about Sharky phone calls from exes at 4:30 in the morning.

The ex in question, for some reason, remembered Sharky, remembered the story behind it. In her dream, Sharky had come alive, transmuted into some evil demon, had slit my throat as I slept.

Er. Yeah.

There's a reason I'm no longer involved with this woman.

Her unhealthy obsession with death and demons turned out to be a little bit more intense than her skull tats and love of Joy Division had led me to believe.

After reassuring her that everything was okay here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, she hung up without so much as a goodbye. It's been four years.

I don't know how she got my phone number. Hers, of course, is now blocked. C'est la vie.

There are exes I still think about, and there are exes I wish I could forget.

* * * *

Sharky (right) is an heirloom, a knife that has been in my family for generations.

According to legend, the bayonet blade was used in combat during the First World War. It came into my family's possession shortly after being removed from some Prussian soldier's corpse.

In the 1940s, relatives of mine, somewhere out in the Great Basin badlands, commissioned a Native American craftsman to fashion a new, ornate handle. Where once there was nothing but military-issue wood, the old American Indian created a new handle out of pieces of glass and scrap metal salvaged from the desert.

The name Sharky appeared on the leather sheath sometime long before I was born; it's been known by that name ever since.

* * * *

Every woman I've ever been involved with seems to believe that the damned thing is somehow cursed. The fact that the blade has been a constant on my nightstand since I was a teenager, an ever-present fixture in my bedroom, probably doesn't help things much.

Makes for a great conversation piece.

And it goes well with the ever-present copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

* * * *

There are times I think some of my personal effects cause more relationship problems than I do.

There's at least three decks of tarot cards floating around my living room, in plain sight, at any given time. There's the pseudo-Voudun saint candles (right) near the front door, the gris-gris hanging from the wall, and an ornate Ethiopian crucifix above the bed.

I've got a Seventeenth Century soapstone pipe fragment in my change jar, for chrissakes.

You know... the one next to the cassette copy of Ice-T's Original Gangster, beside the uncut pieces of turquoise, on top of the copy of The Book of Abramelin...

What bachelor pad would be complete without a Fifteenth Century grimoire, a colonial-era souvenir from an archaeological dig in Virginia, or a copy of one of the greatest rap albums of all time?

And who needs those silly posters of Playboy Playmates, anyway? I learned a long time ago that live, three-dimensional women make better playmates. Posters don't talk, think, or taste good.

Yup. Just a normal, single guy. With normal, single guy stuff.

Right?

Right???

* * * *

There are women who find this sort of decorating eccentricity attractive, at least at first. And then they realize that, well, it's not an act. I'm really a strange dude.

I've been involved with women who, for some reason, felt the need, early on, to compare my lifestyle to that of guys like Hunter S. Thompson, even Jack friggin' Nicholson. Those are the nice comparisons.

In the end, illusions of who I am, their image of me, often fall well short of the reality. While I may fit a particular lifestyle, as an eccentric lover, women who are attracted to me simply because of that soon realize that, well, I'm just being myself. And that's a scary thing for lifestyle-conscious women.

I could give a flying fuck about what parents might think about a guitar amp three feet from the bed, how embarrassing it could be to some folks that I read comic books in the john. Yes, I recycle pickle jars into drinking glasses and, no, I don't care what so-and-so said about it in her magazine column.

And I really don't give a shit if the seat's up or down; if you're a woman and you're using my john, I'm stepping over you and pissing in my goddamned bathtub.

The only image I have has been created by others. And I don't play that game. Not my bag.

There's a reason I've sworn off Scenester Women. I just don't do trendy. I do not change with whatever scene may be popular, or counterculture, or indie. I just live my life how I want to live it. And I own some very weird things because, well, I just naturally a weird guy, from a long line of weird people.

If you want to date Dr. Gonzo, well, go ahead. Feel free to fuck his ashes.

* * * *

After the phone call, I couldn't sleep.

Pfft. Crazy goth chicks. Nowhere near as worthless as Emo Girls, but almost as creepy as Born-Again Virgins.

I reached over the nightstand, flipped on the lamp. There, beside the piles of books, sat ol' Sharky. I picked up the knife, withdrew the nightmare-inspiring blade from its sheath.

And I laughed.

Jesus Christ. It's just a knife.

I don't even believe the Dead Prussian story my great - grandmother used to tell. Makes for great pillow-talk, but Grammy also claimed The Rougarou would come get me if I were a bad little boy. I didn't believe that, either.

And who the hell calls an ex at 4:30 in the morning? After four fucking years? Last I heard, she was married with a kid, living out in Oregon...

Now that's fucking creepy.

I wonder how many other exes still have nightmares about this damned thing?

- # # # -

AND IN HEALTH NEWS TONIGHT: A 29-Year-Old and His Spleen...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- So they finally figured out why my left nut was swollen, why I've felt downright icky for three weeks, why I've been sleeping 14-18 hours a day, and why my lymph nodes were swollen to twice their normal size.

And it only took hundreds of dollars in insurance copays, about a pint's worth of blood and gallons of urine, one trip to the ER, one trip to the urologist, and three trips to the ol' ZenFo Pro physician.

Mono.

As in mononucleosis, known as glandular fever to the rest of the world, the so-called Kissing Disease.

Er...

Yup.

* * * *

My first reaction was, of course, thank God its not what I thought it was.

When the ol' spleen swells like a balloon and the under-skin bumpy things start bulging, so many nasty, nasty things come to mind. I come from a family with a rather nasty history involving prostate cancer and leukemia. And then, well, there's a certain three-letter abbreviation that, when followed by a plus sign, scares the living shit out of sexually active young adults... not even going to go there.

My second reaction?

Jeebus. I'm 29 years old. How the hell does a 29-year-old librarian get Mono?!?

And what the hell do you mean I need to get more bed rest? Holy hell! I've got a career. And it's summer, which means I can date locally without having to worry about asking for I.D....

I can't do that, either? Holy shit.

* * * *

And then I thought back to where I could've caught it.

Actually, I searched the ol' blog. When the memory fails, there's always the written record. One of my archival science professors used to preach that constantly in grad school...

And I found what I was looking for. Yup, in one of the Quotations posts.

Fairly certain that any woman who could leave me with Hamilton Hash Marks could also be the one who unknowingly delivered unto me my plague.

There was, from what I remember, eight hours' worth of making out involved (I'm not known for being a quick foreplay guy) - plenty of time for contagions to infiltrate the ol' immune system...

In all fairness, it could also possibly be from the woman who puked all over me at my friends' party a while back, briefly mentioned in another April post.

A lot of saliva floating around in the corn and cheap booze she projected...

Dude, when the hell did you become Mr. CSI? You're a fucking librarian, dude. Don't do that. It's unhealthy.

There's no sense in trying to figure it out, Matlock. Look, it's like the Doc told you - it's going around Oxford like wildfire. Could be from anywhere, and anyone.

* * * *

And do you know what the most embarrassing thing is?

I've been asked out three times this week. THREE TIMES!

Once by a woman who was sunbathing in the park this afternoon. Bummed her a cigarette, made her laugh a couple of times, and, she asked me if I'd be interested in going out sometime. She sees me in my library all the time, and figured, well, since I was outside of work and we were both single...

A very attractive blonde. In a bikini. Reading H.G. Wells - for fun.

A woman who indicated that her roommates had left her alone in their big ol' apartment for the summer...

Aw, dammit.

* * * *

Anyway. Quick health update.

While I didn't bother to ask the doctor about it, I'm fairly certain you, dear reader, cannot catch mono from reading this blog post.

- # # # -

STEEL OF THE SOUTH: More Scary Virginia Stories to Blog in the Dark...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Recently, while stuck on bed rest, I had the opportunity to get some pleasure reading done. At one point, I unearthed my old high school yearbooks.

Flipping through the vulgar comments and past pictures of people I've long forgotten actually brought back some interesting memories.

I found a photograph stuck between a few pages, a photograph of this frightening brute of a kid. He had a sneer on his face that could kill weaker men, eyes full of all sorts of illicit substances, hair parted straight down the middle, bandages covering gashes over his eye and across his nose.

Man, I'd almost forgotten what a hoodlum I was when I was 17. Scared the shit out of me.

And some people wonder why I consider myself fortunate to have survived high school. But I think I turned out just fine. Wouldn't change a thing.

- Jason

* * * *

The machete was brand new, fresh from the Rose's five-and-dime, plastic shrink wrap dangling from the handle.

I heard one of the school's vice-principals shout into his two-way radio as he chased after “Muhammad,” ordering the school's receptionist tell the sheriff's deputies that the “suspect” was armed and dangerous.

Muhammad was normally a peaceful kid, a Black Muslim whose parents had sent him down to Farmville to live with his grandmother. Muhammad had spent his early childhood being instructed in the ways of the Five Percent Nation.

Though a man of peace, who had many friends of many races, he readily admitted to distrusting white people, to being convinced that the FBI had killed Brother Malcolm and Dr. King, to believing that the federal government was pushing crack in housing projects across America.

Muhammad had been suspended from school for fighting with a white kid earlier that day. The white kid had received a lighter sentence. So Muhammad was sent home, and the white kid was sent to In-School Suspension.

Muhammad had obviously gone shopping for some very mean-looking hardware, purchasing a tool to extract his pound of cracker flesh for what he apparently viewed as a racist conspiracy. As he ran past me, after the white kid who'd passed me only a few seconds earlier, I noticed his eyes were aflame with that lust, that murderous thousand-yard stare of a man consumed by his own hatred.

I learned a long time ago that one does not step in the way of a man wielding a machete, even a normally peaceful man. Machetes do not leave pretty wounds and often sever limbs.

Mr. S., a chisel-faced man in his late fifties, was the senior disciplinary administrator of the school district. He'd survived the 'Nam; he once claimed that maintaining discipline in a rural Virginia high school was nothing compared to dealing with Charlie. But despite his reputation as a harsh man, he was also known to be fair and once, according to legend, had even laughed.

Mr. S. plowed through the throngs of 13-18 year-old kids who clogged the sidewalk as they waited for their afternoon buses. He pushed students to the ground as he ran, hollering ahead for students to get out of his way or risk being run down. Some moved out of the vice-principal's path; most did not.

“Muhammad” apparently did catch up with the white kid, who'd run to the school office for shelter. The principal convinced the Five Percenter, the normally peaceful kid with many friends of many races, to put down his weapon before he ended up doing something he'd later regret.

By the time the county mounties arrived, the incident had been resolved. And "Muhammad" went to jail, never to return as a student.

Later that week, the school yearbooks were distributed to those who'd paid for them. I remember wishing that Muhammad had waited to go crazy, wishing that he'd waited until after the school year ended, so I could've gotten him to sign my freshman yearbook.

After all, he was a peaceful man, most of the time, with many friends of many different races.

* * * *

I don't know what inspired me that night.

Maybe I'd seen too many gang-related films - movies about South Central Los Angeles, Miami drug lords and New York crime kingpins were all the rage in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it was the gangsta rap or the aggressive punk music, the stuff I started to listen to the moment I hit puberty.

For whatever reason, I was inspired, after helping a "Max" jump a guy behind the Food Lion, to piss in a kid's face as he lay on the ground.

We used to call this sort of juvenile code enforcement schoolin' a motherfucker. And, as my friend put it so eloquently that night, if this motherfucker wants to steal shit, he needs to be taken to motherfuckin' school.

Nobody else wanted to help this friend of mine out. None of our mutual friends, who all talked a good game, stepped up to get his back. They were all conveniently busy, had baseball practice or dates. So “Max” and I sat alone in his beat-up yellow tank of a car for two hours, drinking forty after forty of Colt 45 and waiting for this stupid kid to leave a shopping center cineplex.

The poor bastard didn't even see it coming. Walked right out towards his car as if he owned the world.

“Max” did most of the work. It was his stolen property, his lost income. The only thing I did was hit the kid from the back while Max informed him of the charges against him, of why this milder sentence of the Court of Street Justice was better than the alternative.

As the kid lay on the ground, squirming and begging, the 160 ounces of malt liquor filling my bladder suddenly demanded a prompt exit.

It was nothing personal, really. I just had to take a leak.

As Max reminded me afterwards, when I felt guilty about it, that kid probably would've done the same to me if he'd had the chance. And if it'd been other guys jumping him, less civil individuals from Church Hill or Hampton Roads or D.C., then he probably would've endured much, much worse.

An eye for an eye, a piss for a piss.

* * * *

That motherfucker had a .22...

When he first pulled it from the front of his boxers and started waving it around, screaming about how “hard” he was, most people just laughed. And when he fired into the air, bobbing his head up and down, one hand holding up those baggy jeans and the other holding a weapon, people just stood there and stared.

Here is this 16-year-old, skinny-ass white dude, who everybody knew was crazy, save for the court-appointed dumbass who'd let him off probation early. Here's this Crazy-Ass Peckerwood, waving a gun around in a parking lot at two in the morning.

And the only thing anyone could do was laugh, then stare in amazement.

If this kid's parents hadn't been wealthy socialites, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have been set loose by the correctional system. If he'd been poor, or a minority, or poor and a minority, he would've been rotting in a juvenile prison somewhere.

But because he came from a good family, one where the poor little thing's psychosis was easily blamed on a desire to fit in and his parents' divorce, he was set free to go all apeshit in the middle of the night without so much as an ankle bracelet.

When Mr. Crazy-Ass Peckerwood started beating that tiny handgun upon his tiny chest, screaming about how he was going to bus' a cap on someone if he did'n get respec', people finally began to back away from the scene.

The cops, surely, had been called, and nobody wanted to be around an armed nutcase when the cops showed up. As I ducked down to climb into the driver's seat of the Maroon Doom, my prize Dodge Shadow, the idiot started firing again. But this time, he wasn't firing into the air.

I remember being shoved from behind, with a friendly hand on the back of my neck. My chin caught the shifter and my shin caught the door frame as my body fell into the car. My first reaction was to start laughing. Earlier that night I'd watched a documentary on the Reagan assassination attempt - the idea that my friends would choose to play Secret Service agents to a would-be Hillbilly Hinckley was too absurd not to laugh.

I rolled over and sat up in the driver's seat, still laughing. A hand reached up from the backseat and smacked me upside my skull, with voices screaming for me to drive, motherfucker, drive.

As I started the engine and shifted down into second gear, I looked over at the crazy motherfucker. He was pointing that little pop-gun .22 towards the Maroon Doom, firing away. From the back seat, people were arguing about someone needing to see a doctor, about me needing to drive to the emergency room.

As I drove, the person who'd been grazed climbed into the passenger seat next to me, showed me what looked like a long cigarette burn, and said that, no, he didn't need to go to a doctor – our other friends were just being pussies.

He'd been shot before, so I took his word for it. He smiled and pointed out that getting grazed was a much better alternative than having me get shot in the face.

I laughed at first. And then it hit me like a cinderblock to the chin.

I spent the next few days barely sober and rarely narcotic-free, afraid to face the nature of my own mortality, the fact that, yes, a .22 pistol is a small gun that can still, if someone's shooting at you, end your life if its rounds hit you just right.

... And he just tried to fucking kill me.

- # # # -

THE LUNENBURG COUNTY HOODOO HUNT OF '92: A Southern Tale of Witchcraft, Ghosts, and Other Human Terrors

"Pete" and I rode out into the dusk on our bicycles. It was the summer of 1992, along the Lunenburg/Prince Edward county line, a few miles east of the Green Bay, Virginia, post office.

We'd heard the stories for years, the tall tales of old white women, the legendary yarns of tobacco farmers and soybean sages. And we'd been warned by our elders, too, to never look for that old shack, because anyone who trespassed there would be doomed.

According to Pete's grandmother, the shack, whatever remained of it, was cursed - decent white folk, as she put it, never went a-looking for that nig'ra witch's place.

Despite the warnings, Pete and I had decided, in the midst of one of the hottest summers of our lives, to find out the truth. We sat out to locate the mythical witch's cabin, to investigate the rumors and legends for ourselves.

* * * *

Older people in that area knew the legend, but all of those who told it to me are now dead. I don't know if the story is still told in the 2000s, in this modern era, around campfires and at family cookouts. I suspect that those who are now the age I was in 1992 probably have never heard the tale.

This may well be the only written account of the legend of the Washerwoman Shack.

According to the versions I remember, the shack once belonged to a black laundress, a former slave. Her name has been lost to history, but she was said to have been a witch, a practitioner of the lost arcane art known throughout the South as Hoodoo. Rumor had it that her death was the result of arson, that several white teenagers had trapped her in her own home and then set the place ablaze - punishment for being an uppity nig'ra.

No historical record exists of the old midwife, or of the fire that supposedly killed her. That should shock no one reading this; the barbaric history of the Jim Crow South is full of convenient disappearances. Black people who were different from or educated beyond their white counterparts, especially in a region once known for its Klan-dominated government, tended to disappear, and people often left it at that.

To this day, in fact, there are still old white men alive throughout Dixie, family barbers and nice country doctors, kindly police officers and polite retired shopkeepers, who helped make people like the midwife disappear. And they will take their secrets to their graves as surely as they smile at church suppers and play poker down at the VFW, the face of one man or woman's unsung butcher simultaneously the face of someone's cherished grandfather or favorite teacher or beloved community leader.

With such hidden horrors of this mortal coil, throughout Virginia and the rest of the South, why would anyone be afraid of a dead woman's curse, a woman for whom there may be no record of her having ever lived in the first place?

* * * *

Pete and I didn't believe in witches, of course.

Sure, "Sara," Pete's neighbor, claimed to be a witch, a follower of something called Wicca. But she simply smoked a lot of pot, burned incense, and liked to dance around her mobile home naked, calling her acts sabbats. To us, witchcraft, at least the Caucasian version, was nothing more than a stoned redneck girl who collected dragon sculptures.

And curses? I believed in them, but, well, I'm part Cajun, with a great - grandmother who used to read my tea leaves on a regular basis. I still cross myself every time I pass a cemetery. Pete, however, did not. He was a Good Ol' Boy. He believed in the Holy Trinity of the Peckerwood - God, Guns, and the Rebel flag.

Pete and I had just celebrated our fourteenth birthdays. We were almost men at the dawn of the 21st century. We'd grown up with things like television, FM radio and VHS machines. We'd watched the Challenger explode a few years earlier, listened to Def Leppard and Winger and Warrant, and frequently shoplifted softcore porn from the local video store ...

* * * *

The Virginia dusk soaked us in sweat a few miles into our journey, so we stopped alongside Molasses Hill Road for a quick break. After carefully hiding our bikes in a patch of pokeberry, we did what many rural Southern teenagers do when there's a lack of adult supervision during the summer.

We had a pint of moonshine liberated from a local farmer's private stash. We had an ounce and a half of a certain illegal plant, rolled up in fresh cured tobacco leaves. And we had a backpack full of pimiento cheese sandwiches.

No great adventure, as a teenager, is ever devoid of a ceremonial meal. And witch hunting, in Southside Virgina, is hard work.

* * * *

We knew the legendary haunted ruins lay just off a timber road, somewhere along the county line. And by sundown, we'd found it.

The pine log structure was charred, held up only by the crumbling red clay that filled its joints. Inside, those same logs were found to be half-consumed by whatever fire had once raged through it. In what was left of the kitchen, a rusted iron kettle still hung in the back of a river stone fireplace - the walls around the hearth had collapsed long before we arrived. The remnants of two chairs and a table rested on the ground, partially buried in leaves. Firs and maples grew up from what had once been someone's well-worn dirt floor.

Pete and I decided to make camp for the night, right in the middle of our Virginia version of El Dorado, our great archaeological find in the Lunenburg wilderness. In the morning, we'd return home to tell of our expedition, to boast to friends on the phone, and to, well, begin planning new ways to use the site as a party spot for our forthcoming high school careers.

The way I remember it, I built the fire, using some of the chimney's collapsed stones to build a decent pit. We needed light to explore by, and, like the young juvenile delinquents we were, we'd forgotten to bring more than one flashlight. For some reason, the air inside seemed cold and damp despite the lack of a roof, as if the southern summer stopped at the walls.

Pete had brought his father's .45 and a box of shells; he spent most of the time killing off the blunt we'd started earlier and shooting at what had once been the outhouse a few yards past the "back door." I tossed him the old kettle at one point, figuring he could at least practice his aim on something smaller than an outdoor shitbox.

* * * *

Shadows cast by fires can play tricks on a person, especially at night. Moonshine, of course, doesn't help matters much.

Pete and I explored the ruins carefully. There were only three rooms to the place - a front room, the kitchen in the back, and what we guessed had at one time served as a bedroom. In every room, there were remnants of life buried in the leaves underfoot. Old tin cans, broken lanterns, and even what looked to the remains of a bed frame. Everything bore the signs of one hell of a house fire.

And then we found the door.

* * * *

There were no interior doors in the ruins. And the back door into the kitchen was long gone. The four windows, which probably hadn't held glass anyway, were nothing more than gaping holes into the darkness.

But ten feet away from the front room entrance, just past the charred remains of what had once been a porch, we found a z-frame door, propped against an old walnut tree. The hinges looked as if they'd been blown apart at the pin, as if the pin itself had exploded. The door looked as if it had been carefully placed there, like a tombstone in some old cemetery.

Pete, in his eagerness, wanted to drag the door inside, near the fire, so it could be inspected. He grabbed both sides and lifted the sucker while I held the flashlight. When he turned around, the backside was exposed for probably the first time since it had been placed...

I remember the chill that shot up my spine, the numbness of shock and childish fear that enveloped my body. There were bones on the back of the door. Not human bones but animal, firmly attached with wires, dangling in the light. There were whitetail antlers and groundhog skulls, petrified bird feet bound together. There were strings of bottle tops, too, interlaced into long bead ropes with animal teeth.

Pete dropped the door, its rotten timber splitting in half at the cross brace. We ran back into the house, swearing as we ran, huddled with our backs to the fire. Suddenly, the typical nighttime noise of the woods, the crickets and owls and whippoorwills, was amplified against the night.

As illogical, as irrational, as it sounds to write now, in the 21st century, I'm quite sure there was something out there watching us, something that we'd disturbed. And I remember feeling as if we were squatting in that something's ruined house.

* * * *

Pete and I sat in silence for almost four hours, afraid of the dark for the first time since we'd been little kids, terrified to make a sound without so much as a blanket to cover our faces.

And then, without warning, Pete reached into the backpack, withdrew his dad's pistol, and started firing wildly into the night. I tried to stop him, but the weed-induced paranoia had gotten the best of his fears. Ghosts, even if they do really exist, have never been known to be afraid of a gunshot.

Pete kept pulling the trigger until he'd emptied the clip. And I started to yell, to scream. I felt it in my throat, working its way up from my lungs. But my scream died somewhere between my teeth and my ribcage, died mute and still in captivity.

There was nothing but silence. Not a sound coming from the darkness.

Suddenly, from above us, from the back of the chimney, came a shrill scream like none I've ever heard. A large black bird, probably a buzzard, tore off into the night sky. I saw nothing but a looming silhouette against the light from the fire, felt nothing but the breeze of its wings.

At least, as an adult, I've convinced myself that it was simply a buzzard.

* * * *

The South is full of stories about black people who mysteriously disappeared, of old Hoodoo women who may or may not have met their ends at the hands of a lynch mob or group of white supremacists. While I'm convinced that whoever lived in that house probably practiced some sort of folk medicine, there will never be a way to prove or disprove the tall tales I'd heard.

Every once and a while, I'll have a nightmare about that ruined house, about that door. In the parts that I remember from those dreams, the door is almost always somehow alive, possessed by demons, the animal skulls and bird claws dancing with the strings of fangs and bottle caps.

And there's an old black woman there, too, my mind's interpretation of what she may have looked like, her white hair made of clouds and her body aflame, cursing those who killed her and crying out for justice.

And when I do dream those little dreams, I find myself hoping that I'm not cursed myself. I know, it's a silly thought. But one never knows what sinister powers exist in the World of the Supernatural.

A few days ago, I caught the smell of burnt pine drifting through my apartment windows here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, the same scent I smelled back in those Lunenburg ruins almost two decades ago. I flashed back to that night as I lay in bed. And I felt that strange chill upon me once more, that terrifying cold of the unknown.

I wonder now, as I did a few nights ago, what it would feel like to simply disappear, to become nothing more than a phantom in a tall tale?

I wonder what those surviving old white men dream about, the ones who will go to their graves knowing the true fate of African-Americans like that phantom hoodoo woman? What haunts them as they lay in bed? If there is indeed a Devil, the Judeo-Christian fallen angel of lore, I wonder what flesh-tearing things he has in store for them in his infernal pits of brimstone?

I wonder what terrifies those men? What torments those still alive who lynched innocent men across America, or burned them alive in their homes? Did their victims forgive from their disappearing graves? Or do the Undead rise like a mojo hand, returning to this world to serve as brown-skinned swords of a vengeful God?

Maybe, just maybe, that property really was cursed. And maybe we disturbed the restless spirit of a murdered black woman that night. And maybe, just maybe, Pete's gunshots were merely a reminder to her that the time had come for her to depart this world for a better, more Hoodoo-friendly afterlife.

Maybe we were spared that night because we were simply drunk, stoned children in search of adventure, not the old white men who once roamed Virginia nights in pointed white hoods?

The realm of the supernatural, if it does exist, is one a 13 year-old Virginia boy couldn't explain in 1992. And that kid, as a man, years removed, can't explain it, either.

Some of the things that haunt the sons and daughters of the American South, as real and as vivid as Emmett Till's bloated corpse, as haunting as Medgar Evers and the other ghosts of Mississippi, are much more terrifying than a simple ghost story could ever be.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Of Dogshit-Covered Money, Summers in College Towns, and the Nicer Side of Life in Oxford Fucking Ohio

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I should know better than to fall for the ol' dollar - glued - to - the sidewalk trick.

Yet I still squatted to pick up the extra bit for laundry money. With more than $300 in insurance copays spread amongst three different doctors (still no answers, other than just finish the meds prescribed for the swollen nut, stay off my feet as much as possible, apply ice for the swelling ... and wait - probably injury-related), money's a bit tight this month.

I stopped just short of falling for it. I noticed the brown/black smear around the bill, the smell of fresh, mashed dogshit filling the night air.

Creative.

We used to use already-been-chewed Big League Chew, especially on hot days, back in Virginia. Adhered to the paper better, plus it proved much more entertaining to watch some random stranger struggle with sticky mess afterwards.

I glanced up and down High Street. I hadn't even noticed the group of smirking middle-schoolers camped out on the picnic table ten feet away. One lanky kid, greasy blond hair covering a acne-filled face, whispered to one of the giggling girls in the group, sure I'd be a sucker.

I waved at the kids and smiled. One of the girls waved back, before one of their party sucker-punched her in the kidneys.

The greasy kid looked pissed, his attempt to relieve his peers' boredom and to earn coolness points with the pubescent ladies foiled for the night.

In return for his gift of rolling eyes and mouthed "pick it up, fucker!," I gave him the finger.

God, I love summer in a college town.

* * * *

I took a moment to appreciate the emerging summer nightlife, here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

The vast majority of undergrads, who normally would be littering the sidewalks with vomit, their drunken bodies and foul behaviors ruining family outings past sundown, are gone home to the gated communities that spawned them.

It has been more than a week since I saw my last Hummer, since I last overheard my last Daddy just has to pay for me to go to Italy... or I was so fucking wasted I think I fucked that chick from my Accounting class... conversation.

Instead, at nine o'clock on a Saturday night, the streets are now full of parents pushing strollers home from Uptown dinners at restaurants. Parents are playing catch with their children in the parks beneath the city's streetlights. The locally-produced college students are home for the summer, sitting outside of bars, smoking cigarettes and swapping war stories from places like Columbus, Muncie, Athens, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky, and Bloomington.

And, of course, there are the teenagers, making out behind the burnt-out shell of the former Wendy's, skateboarding down sidewalks and grinding down curbs, and making the town theirs again. Teen-aged girls fill one street corner in their respective cliques; the boys conglomerate across the street.

Several alumni, frustrated by what they see as the decline of the Local U.'s positive contributions to Oxford's culture, have told me that this is how Oxford was once, year-round, with student behavior held in check by the presence of the "townies."

Townies notice it, too, often citing the almost murderous hatred many full-time residents now feel towards the stereotypical Local U. undergrads as an example. As one long-time Oxford resident puts it, Local U. students, for him, are nothing more than "the occasional piece of dumb rich girl ass ... cockroaches with Mommy and Daddy's money who pay my fucking bills."

Trust me. If you're single, make less than $50,000 a year, and over 22 in this town, you've had similar thoughts. And if you say you haven't, well, you're a better liar than I am.

During the Academic Year, at night, one would think that Oxford's entire population is made up of nothing more than drunken privileged 18-22 year-olds, overworked police officers, and under-tipped bar staff. But during the summer, Oxford Fucking Ohio becomes, for all intents and purposes, a real college town.

* * * *

It feels real, honest, almost cliche - the All-American campus village that surrounds the ol' Public Ivy, the place American poet Robert Frost, according to rumor, once called one of the most beautiful communities he'd ever visited.

According to some versions of the legend, the poet was only talking about the Local U. campus. But according to at at least some of the older Oxford townies, there's always been speculation that Frost was actually talking about the perfect blend between campus and community that once existed.

Yes, THE Robert Frost, the Road Not Taken guy.

I sometimes wonder what ol' Bobby would say now, in 2007, if he walked around town during the school year.

What would Frost say, for instance, if he spent an evening sometime between August and April, tripping over Natty Light cans and listening to sophomore girls debate the merits of Botox? What would his reaction be, say, if he spent a night in an overcrowded bar, listening to the spawn of the Wealthiest One-Percent - the popular campaign target of just about every election - bemoaning the fact that, yes, they do have to leave a tip and, no, those dirty "townies" just won't move somewhere else?

What would Frost say about the faculty, had he seen some of the things I've seen in the past three years? I once watched a group of professors at a restaurant as they trashed a union groundskeeper, someone that I work with on a regular basis, for being a "lazy redneck." A group of regional campus students at another table, one of whom was the daughter of said redneck, got up and left.

I've always figured he'd probably say what many visiting artists say upon seeing the zoo that is the local Higher Education Underground:

"Hey, as long as you're paying me and I can get outta this dump quickly, I'll entertain your sorry ass..."

But if he showed up during the summer, well, his opinion of the Local U. and surrounding community probably wouldn't change one bit.

* * * *

As I walked home for lunch Tuesday, enjoying the ability to walk without groin pain on a balmy May afternoon, I overheard a fascinating conversation between a pair of summer session undergraduates in front of me.

"I wish I could just take classes during the summer. Everything's so chill and there's nobody here."

"Oh yeah. I even like the summer professors better. And you graduate so much quicker."

See.

I'm not the only one who notices it.

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FIVE COMPLETELY BATSHIT THINGS FROM THE ZENFORMATION WORLD: Trips to the ER, Student Abandonment Issues, Etc.

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It's been more than three weeks since the Woeful Librarian @ The Library hit me up with a meme.

And for two weeks now, I've been trying to come up with something original, going through my usual routine of figuring out what's appropriate for an online audience, what I still need to keep private and what I'm comfortable discussing.

The problem?

I've already done this meme once in 2007. Jessica, The Cool Librarian, hit me up back in January.

The first time was way back in 2006, when I was inspired by Mizzy B's post (she didn't tag me, did it on my own). She, in her own Bohemian way, took the thing one step further, with six things.

So where do we go from here?

Oh well. Fuck it. Let's see what I've got...

5.

There's an abandoned beer pong table right outside my apartment door. It's been there for four days now, abandoned by my student neighbors. The unfinished plywood top reeks of flat Natty Light. One of its two-by-four legs, in true unskilled but educated fashion, bows inward and the table wobbles like nobody's business.

Rotten furniture lines the streets. There's busted futons clogging the curbs, busted plastic lounge chairs crumbling to dust in the gutters. Dumpsters around Oxford Fucking Ohio are packed with box springs and mattresses, busted plasma screens and junk MP3 players.

Walking about town this weekend, I found a perfectly good leather armchair left in an alley. There was one slight problem, however. The chair had been run through with what appeared to be a machete, the blade sticking out of the back. "Fuck FIJI" was carved into the upholstery by some very angry, artistic vandal.

And this is how the Academic Year ends - not with a bang but with a whimper.

4.

I spent part of Sunday night in the local emergency room.

It started last week sometime - I noticed that, well, I was having trouble taking a piss, pain and swelling in my testicles.

I called my physician Thursday to set up an appointment - the earliest available time was for a week from the time I called.

I figured I could wait. It's time for my annual physical anyway. I couldn't.

And nor should I have even considered waiting.

Testicular pain, shouldn't be ignored - ever. Men lose a ball or two all the time, as a result of trauma, infection, and illness. I've known two people in my life who've suffered from testicular torsions - one nut was saved, the other amputated as a result of a coach telling a kid to "just walk it off."

By Saturday, I was beginning to regret every "It burns when you pee..." or "I'd give my left nut..." joke I've made in the last, oh, ten years.

Fortunately, no trace of gonorrhea, chlamydia, or any other bacterial infection - the most common causes. Two separate urinalysis and culture tests were clean as a whistle. Unfortunately, neither the ER doctor nor the urologist seems to know what's causing it. No immediate evidence of hernia, either, but to be safe, again, it was recommended that I abstain from heavy lifting for a while.

To be safe, just in case, the urologist put me on antibiotics, and the ER guy slapped me with enough Motrin to make a gunshot wound feel like a pin prick.

3.

I had a confrontation with a local Radical Left blog reader a few weeks ago, over my silence on the issue of immediate troop withdrawal of "Imperialist" American forces from Iraq, why I don't use my blogging powers (ha!) for something constructive, like "raising awareness."

This young woman wanted to know - no, demanded to know - why I quit posting about politics and other things related to foreign policy. She felt the need to critique my blog's content based on my lack of "awareness raising" efforts to just about every progressive cause known to Man, only about half of which I support as, yes, an independent.

Completely batshit conversation. Nothing like an angry drunk activist.

Why oh why don't I blog about hot button political issues anymore? And what about "raising awareness" over this "immediate withdrawal" stuff?

Hmmm...

Well, it's simple, really.

First, I quit blogging about politics because, well, political blogging to "raise awareness" or to "advocate change" is a pointless exercise, a pseudointellectual circle-jerk of like-minded people reading only what they want to read, consuming opinions to merely justify their own opinions, or gloating with ideological glee at the slightest misstep of the opposition.

What's the point of blogging, really, if one just wants to scream from some bully pulpit? A personal blog should be, well, personal. And this is my personal blog. And I don't like it when people feel the need to tell me what I'm to put into this silly thing, based on their political agendas.

For the record, I don't support any of this current "immediate withdrawal" rhetoric pushed by pundits, activists, or, especially, politicians. To me, it's nothing more than the Democratic version of bread and circuses, thrown around to pacify and condition the masses, no better than the Republican posturing of the past four years. And lately, as a whole, the Democratic-controlled Congress hasn't been acting much different than the Contract with America era GOP-controlled Congress, spending more time attacking the new minority government Executive than actually moving anything past respite and petty bickering.

Ultimately, a hastily assembled retreat is nothing more than a momentary escape from ultimate responsibility. We, all Americans, bear some level of responsibility and accountability towards securing Iraq's future - there is no easy way out, no pointing fingers at the President or screaming that the opposition didn't try hard enough to stop it. We fix it, and then we can go. One does not enter another's house, burn it down, and then leave without paying for the damages done.

Most of the plans put forth seem to forget the legacy of the U.S. Civil War Reconstruction era, a time when hastily assembled, mob-rule ideas during a different sort of occupation played out as tragic comedy. While Reconstruction, in the end, did reunite the South with the Union, the far-reaching side effects still haunt this continent.

Reconstruction politicians and activists spent more time trying to figure out new and creative ways to expedite national healing with words and knee-jerk reactions than actually worrying about, well, the long-lasting ramifications. It is not mere coincidence that the bloodiest acts of genocide committed against this continent's indigenous tribes occurred during this period, that liberated former slaves earned physical freedom only to be faced with a century's worth Jim Crow terrorism and oppression, that political corruption and corporate influence blended industrialized, capitalistic expansion and influence to the concept of democracy.

Sounds familiar, eh?

Mark Twain called that period in U.S. history the Gilded Age. Lasted almost 40 years, and included the assassinations of three sitting presidents, an almost total restructuring of American diversity through waves of immigration and subsequent backlash, two economic depressions, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, massive government corruption, labor revolts, and a Centennial presidential election mess that made the 2000 election look legit.

Welcome to the Second Gilded Age. By my estimate, we entered into this era of American History sometime in the last decade, sometime before this clemency petition was released.

Getting out of Iraq by the end of the year? Not happening. Nor should it, without some sort of practical, actual solution that leaves Iraq a better place than when we invaded against international law in the first place. Immediate withdrawal by this Imperialist America? Even during the Manifest Destiny era, immediacy was measured in dead bodies and decades.

The Iraqi insurgents there, just like Al-Qaeda, are much harder to kill than those pesky Dakota or Sioux, and smallpox tainted blankets are, like, so 1872. We've modernized to suit or Nuclear Super-powered status - we just torture people in secrecy, lock them away in Cuba, and have secret military tribunals in charge of separating terrorist from patriot.

And, besides, now that the Dems are in power, they'll need at least a year's worth of preening and gleaning to give all of those defense contractors, corporate lobbyists, and little old ladies from Kansas enough time to fill the ol' campaign war chests for the 2008 Freak Show...er... Election...

See. Like I said. Simple.

2.

Last night, I dreamt that I was having sex with one of my sister's childhood best friends, a woman I haven't seen or thought about in more than a decade.

Sex at my senior prom. And it was snowing.

It wasn't as good as I remembered, at least compared to the dreams I used to have about this woman when we were both in Mr. D's fourth period journalism class.

Hell, it's been 12 years. I wonder if she's still single?

Trust me. Much more interesting than waking up and thinking about Iraq.

1.

Favorite quote of the week:

I had a cat once, but every time I tried to give him a bath, the fur stuck to my tongue.

- Howlin' Mad Murdoch (actor Dwight Schultz), The A-Team.

- # # # -

THE ZENFORMATION PLAYLIST 5/2/07: Remixes, Covers and Other Random Hip Sounds To Help You Find Your Bad Monkey Lovin' Self...

SURVIVALISM_TARDUSTED (REMIX) [HEAR IT HERE]
Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero, feat. Thavius Beck and Saul Williams, 2007

Saul Williams? A legend in spoken word. And Trent Reznor? Homeboy gets better with age, really. Thavius? The man is one of my favorite underground hip-hop producers.

A friend of mine turned me onto Thavius Beck a long time ago, but not before Thavius turned her on. She claims to have had the some of the best orgasms of her life while leaning her wooden stool against a nightclub wall in Los Angeles, listening to the cat's stuff blaring through speakers and vibrating her barstool just... oh gawd ... right.

I have a feeling, given the fact that the woman in question is also a huge NIN fan, there are a lot of violated barstools in the Greater Los Angeles area. I don't think I'd touch her washing machine, either...


DAMN IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A GANGSTA [VIDEO]
Geto Boys, Uncut Dope: The Geto Boys' Best (Rap-a-Lot, 1992)

How is it that I'm one of only a handful of people left who fucking remembers this song before it appeared in Office Space?


STRIPPED (HEAVY MENTAL REMIX)
Rammstein, Stripped single (Motor Music, 1998)

Remixed by Charlie Clouser, this cover of a Depeche Mode classic has been scaring the living out of the ZenFo Pro student neighbors for weeks now.


HEY JOE [VIDEO]
Body Count, Born Dead, (Virgin/Rhyme Syndicate, 1994)

You know, this is probably one of my all-time favorite covers of a Jimi Hendrix recording ("Hey Joe," itself, was actually a cover, mastered by the legendary guitarist).

Here's a piece of random trivia: Body Count vocalist Ice-T remains the only artist to ever perform guest vocals on a Black Sabbath studio album, their last studio recording, 1995's lackluster Forbidden. That album was, coincidentally, produced by BC guitarist Ernie C.


PARANOID [LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE ORIGINAL VINYL!]
The Dickies, 7" release (1978)

Speaking of Black Sabbath... how 'bout a Sabbath cover?


REIGN IN BLOOD [MP3]
Terrorfakt, via artist web site.

Yes, this is a grindcore/sludge remix of classic Slayer sounds. Terrorfakt's remixes are generally dark, brooding - a lot of that is tied to the act's history. According to the artist's web site, the project first formed on Sept. 11, 2001, as a sort of club tribute to those who lost their lives in NYC, Washington, and Pennsylvania that bloody day.


GOT UP THIS MORNING [VIDEO]
Sage Francis, Human the Death Dance (Epitaph, May 8, 2007)

This WILL be the be one of the most important hip-hop songs of 2007.

This track, leaked via YouTube, well, yesterday, was produced by Canada's hip-hop version of Tom Waits, Buck 65. The video features super-hot alt-folk contributor Jolie Holland and just about every major white underground emcee of the past five years.

Holland's voice gave me an erection. I'm not going to lie. June Carter and Bonnie Raitt's voices do the same thing.

Sorry.

Glad I'm not wearing sweatpants.


PROBLEM CHILD (AC/DC VS. THE SCAR REMIX) [MP3]
The Scar, via artist MySpace, 2006

This London-based (via Sidney and New York) remix artist has been a favorite of mine for some time now. I don't remember who first turned me on to the guy, really.

But trust me... He's very good at turning on women who find his work buried in your computer's music directory.

For Wombat and Shayna.

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