I think The Doors made an excellent point: human behavior is altogether an odd thing. True, the lyrics to the song I am referencing were a tad more basic, but it’s the same concept. As I write this, I am sitting on my patio watching the slow, Sunday hustle and bustle of my neighborhood unfold. The longer I observe other people, the more I come to understand why the cemetery beckons me so.
People in the cemetery never destroyed any of my hope for humanity. I suppose the idea of a ghost doesn’t actually bother me, even though I have never seen a full apparition before. Ghosts are just souls with a story to tell. They aren’t trying to hurt anyone. I admit, location is important, though. Would I be terrified if I saw a ghost while out in the cemetery doing photography? No. Would I lose my collective shit if I saw an apparition standing at the foot of my bed at 3am? Goddamn right.
Okay, so maybe I am a bit of a pussy. I have had a nearly lifelong fear of waking up to find something or someone at the foot of my bed in the dark. This is due to two things, really. One is a really creepy short story I read when I was a child called, aptly enough, The Thing at the Foot of the Bed. It was also the title of the book of which it was part. It permanently scarred me. Not even gonna lie.
Next, I suffer from sleep paralysis. It’s an exciting condition in which you wake up while your entire body is still paralyzed by GABA and glycine in your brain. These chemicals are meant to keep us from hurting ourselves or others while we dream. (Just google it, you will learn fascinating things.) For folks like me, our brains malfunction and we wake up while still paralyzed, and the combination of chemicals and fading dreams causes us to see and hear things that are not really there. Often scary things, for some reason. I personally have felt like I am being pinned to the bed, I have heard evil laughter and voices, and I have seen dark shapes coming towards me. Yeah, it was pretty terrifying until I learned what it was.
Now I just roll with it. When I wake up and cannot move, and something is in the room, I just remind myself that it will be over soon enough. “Oh, look. There’s a demon on the ceiling.” No big deal. This actually inspired one of the stories from my first book. However, if I woke up fully able to move and speak and saw something in my room…I would probably just straight up die. Seriously.
The point I was initially making is, most days the flaws of humanity are just too much for me. People make noise, cause pollution, treat each other like complete crap…I get so tired of seeing this day after day. We really need to do better, folks. People need to quit acting like spoiled little shits and start putting some good back into the world. Do it now, before you become a spectre in the graveyard. All you will be able to do then is float around and scare people like me.
Dancing Among the Remains 