I'm at my mom's house in Denver for the rest of the week, and you know what? This house is fucking spooky. Not in a big Amityville Horror kind of way, it's more like a mildly creepy, watchful stillness settles over the house at night. And, being who I am, I talk to it. In my head! Because that's where you talk to spooky things that can READ YOUR MIND.
Me: Well, it's bedtime and I've turned off the light. That must mean it's time for me to open the portal of my spiritual unconscious and be visited by any old insistent spirit that floats by!
Insistent Spirit: It's about time.
Me: I'm really not in the mood for this.
Insistent Spirit: But I have something to tell you.
Me: Make it snappy, I've got to get busy worrying about the horrible edema in my mom's right arm and whether the home-made pressure sleeve I made out of a knee-high sock from Target is going to cut off her circulation and give her gangrene.
Insistent Spirit: Oh, uh, right. Shit, now what I've got to tell you doesn't seem that important.
Me: No, go ahead.
Insistent Spirit: No, it's fine. I'm just going to float back to the Indian burial ground for awhile, I'll catch you later.
My brother, Tim, and I were talking yesterday about this house, and whether he might want to move his family over to this part of town and take it over after my mom dies. And I was all, "If I came into that property and half a million dollars, I would raze that house to the ground. There's always been something weird about it. Since we moved in there when I was 13 I could never fall asleep without having a mild panic attack first. So many mornings I'd wake up with all my clothes still on and the TV blaring because I hadn't wanted to go to sleep. My room was always freezing cold. And it's still the same, and every time I come visit and have all these plans to do stuff and clean up, I always just end up at the kitchen table playing solitaire. There's like a giant force of inertia here that sucks you into it."
Tim: "I know! The first thing you want to do when you walk in that house is sit down. Maybe the house is on top of an old indian burial ground!"
Me: "Believe me, I've been thinking that for thirty years."
Tim: "Chief Sits-a-lot!"
So, yeah, I'm sitting here at the kitchen table not mopping the floor or cleaning out the closets or packing books, just channeling the spirit of Princess Blogs-a-lot. Not that that's a bad thing. It's kind of nice, actually. WoooOOOOooooo.
JUST DON'T SHUT YOUR EYES!!!