Dinhternet

Wow, I got a lot of hits yes­ter­day. Maybe I should post links within notes on Face­book more often.

Any­way, here’s one of the “lost” sto­ries I was going to link to in my 25 Things post…

I’m gen­er­ally a hor­ri­ble liar. I tend to have a hard time con­trol my facial expres­sions (that research was the basis for a new show that’s pretty good), which always give me away.

How­ever, when I was on a home stay in Japan, my host’s class played a game where we were split into teams and a per­son from each team had to eat one of three iden­ti­cal look­ing pieces of sushi/onigiri. The fill­ing of two of them would be nor­mal, but the fill­ing on the final one would be a big chunk of some­thing “spe­cial” like natto or wasabi. Turns out I was pretty good at that for some rea­son, and my team won the game.

Flash for­ward to the “Sum­mer of Toy.” It was sum­mer break after Toy class had crossed, and Joe M, Eddie C, and I were drink­ing every night. The game plan was basi­cally that we would alter­nate nights between Joe M’s place and ours, and call up every­one we could think of each night. Since we were drink­ing every night, we couldn’t afford new alco­hol every night, so every so often, we would have a “Scraps Night” where we just try­ing to fin­ish all the rem­nant han­dles we had lying around.

One Scraps Night, it was towards the end of the night, and we had killed every­thing we had left play­ing 7–11-Double. (That game nights the alco­hol go fast!) We had absolutely noth­ing left except for Bac­ardi 151. No one, of course, wanted to do (poten­tially back-to-back on end) shots of 151, so we looked around for mix­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, we were basi­cally out of all non-alcoholic drinks, too. Joe M sac­ri­ficed some of his work­out Gatorade for the cause.

I for­got who was rolling, but I got picked to drink the mix of 151 and orange Gatorade. It was, of course, not the great­est feel­ing in the world. Every­one in the room was watch­ing, and I would like to think that I kept a straight face. I want to think that I had every­one fooled. Until some­one asked how it tasted. I tried to say, “It’s great,” but my voice cracked.

… then every­one knew. Except maybe Clay­ton L. He wanted to go next.

Hal­loween is almost upon us, so here’s a lit­tle some­thing to help peo­ple get into the spirit.

That first link is a pretty cool site. It lists all the ghost sto­ries sub­mit­ted by read­ings, and they are orga­nized by loca­tion, so that you can go check them out. It doesn’t seem to get updated too often, but I guess we don’t get new ghost sto­ries too often, either. I think it was Jeremy who showed it to me back when we lived in Suntree.

Like I’ve said before, I con­sider myself a healthy skep­tic, but there’s part of me that wants to believe. So when Leena told us about the Freeport Fac­tory and we looked it up on the Shad­ow­lands, a bunch of us were down to go check it out on Halloween.

Now, the way Leena told the story was that if you down Freeport around the part where it fol­lows the on a dark night, sup­pos­edly if the spir­its wanted you to find them, the fog would part enough for you to find the entrance to the fac­tory. As you approach the fac­tory, there should be lights or sounds as if chil­dren were play­ing inside. If you can find an open door to go inside, you’re sup­posed to hold onto it tightly, or the door will slam shut and you’ll be stuck inside with the ghosts until morning.

A bunch of us — all of our apart­ment and Genie’s apart­ment, plus friends, armed our­selves with Mag-Lites and packed up into our cars and set out. We wan­dered up and down Freeport, but we could never find the fac­tory. After a while, we gave up, and some­one came up with the bright idea of crash­ing a ceme­tery instead. We rolled up to the near­est one, hopped the fence, and wan­dered around. The scari­est thing I saw that night was a huge crow that fol­lowed us around and watched as we walked around the cemetery.

After­wards, though, I heard some weird stuff. The girls had dis­cov­ered a grave for a lit­tle girl that died when she was only two, buried next to her mother. After we came home, Kitty said that she started to hear a girl’s voice, and she would wake up with weird bruises on her body that looked like lit­tle hand prints. Mikey was sup­pos­edly a psy­chic, and he said that he doesn’t like to talk about or use his abil­i­ties, but he talked to the lit­tle girl, who had fol­lowed Kitty home from the ceme­tery, and they went back to the ceme­tery and got her to stay there.

Doesn’t that sound a lot more fun than that lame Hal­loween party you’re going to this year? You don’t even need to get a cos­tume! Any­ways, maybe I’ll post some more ghost sto­ries as we get closer to the 31st.

So the other day, I was talk­ing with Alice H, and she was telling me about the life of Chuck Palah­niuk. After hear­ing about it, I kinda under­stand why his books are so nihilis­tic. But one story in par­tic­u­lar is very inter­est­ing to me.

Like Chuck, I con­sider myself a healthy skep­tic. I acknowl­edge that there are things in the world beyond my com­pre­hen­sion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to or try to under­stand. Or at least expe­ri­ence. That’s why I say I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m always down for vis­it­ing “super­nat­ural” places. I guess I want to be proven wrong.

If you were to sud­denly die, who would your ghost go visit?

What does it mean at the end of the story, where Chuck’s father vis­its his mother and his sis­ter, but not him? Does the lack of words mean they lacked a bond? Or maybe it’s like in Ken­shin, when he doesn’t say good-bye to Kaoru because as the strongest bond, she was the only one could get him to not leave.

I ask because I’m going to be leav­ing in the next week to go to Min­nesota for a while to help out with a fam­ily emer­gency. Don’t worry, it’s not a mat­ter of life and death or any­thing. But yeah, I’ll be qui­etly mak­ing my rounds to say good-bye. If you have free time this week­end, I’d love to hang out with you. And if we don’t hang out, it’s not like I’m actu­ally dead. There’s always our dreams. Or IMs.