Things out of Place

     I finally sat down to watch "The Innkeepers" today.  I've been meaning to start watching Ti West's films for a while now and I had planned on starting with "House of the Devil" but this one just came out and I had the house to myself so the timing was perfect.  "The Innkeepers" is a ghost story in case you're not familiar with it, and it scared the shit out of me and I'm wonderfully happy about it.  So this is a post about ghosts.

   
     If, like me, you're an adult and a horror connoisseur, you may share the exhilaration felt when finding a film or a book that actually makes you wish you weren't sitting alone in an empty house at that precise moment.  The hunt for true terror is why we do it.  I shouldn't say true terror because I don't mean real terror, like losing a child or facing imminent murder or anything like that.  Those are real terrors and real fears and sure, people do sometimes seek those things out when watching horror films but as an adult, it's exceptionally hard to experience vicarious horror when watching real life scenarios play out on the screen.  We know it's not real and all we have to do is look away and it's not a part of our reality anymore.  But ghost stories, see, ghost stories hide their strength in the fact that even if you look away, you could just be looking at the ghost standing beside the screen.
   
     I think I need to clarify one thing; I don't believe in ghosts.  I've never seen one and I don't think I ever will but they are still absolutely terrifying to me.  Just the thought of ghosts can get me sweating in no time flat and nothing that exists in real life can spook me quite like ghosts.  After watching "The Innkeepers", I sat there, alone in my house, during the brightness of late morning and admitted to myself that if my dog Napoleon wasn't calmly curled up beside me, I'd have to leave the house just to start feeling safe.  Again, this feeling is what I strive for but seldom hope to achieve when watching a horror film, but I had to wonder why something as completely fictional as a ghost story could get me crapping my pants.  So I went for a walk to think about it.
   
     I started thinking about what ghosts represent.  It's always the idea of something that's more terrifying than the actual thing itself, so what's the idea of a ghost?  To me, a ghost represents the idea of something being out-of-place.  Now, I'm a little OCD.  Not so much, but just enough so that everything in my house has an arbitrarily assigned place and for me to be fully happy with my surroundings, everything has to be in its place.   I think about what scares me and if I where alone in my home and I opened the cupboard where we keep the glasses and found a dinner plate right there, among the glasses... that would freak me out.  I have to admit that even the thought of the plate in there with the glasses kind of makes me shiver, just a little bit.  Granted, that's just me and it's a tad bit crazy but again, it's the representation of something being out of place that hits some primal fight-or-flight nerve in me.

Terrifying.

    As humans, we like to think that we control reality and everything it it and even when we know that's not true, we still like to try.  Having control of your surroundings and knowing where things belong gives us a sense of reassurance that everything is okay.  Something being out of place is a warning that things are not right, someone else has control and we need to be alert to something different impacting our reality.  The scale of how out of place something is is a direct reflection of how alarmed we should be.  If I come home and find a plate in the glass cupboard, I'm alerted to the fact that there could be somebody in my house,or that someone is playing with me, or has early-onset-Alzheimer's.  If I'm in my house alone,and I know I'm alone and I close the pantry door and see the figure of a man walking towards me out of the darkness of the foyer, well, that figure is out-of-place.  It shouldn't be there so I immediately go into fight-or-shit-my-pants mode (probably both) because that figure being out of place sends a warning to my consciousness that someone probably wants to do me harm.  Now, if I where to look up from my computer right now and see my dog sitting on his bed, with a human's head instead of a dog's, then that's an altogether different sort of panic.  Something's definitely out of place and so much so that the fabric of reality itself must be drawn in to question.  This is what ghosts are to me; something so out of place that if you see one, you have to start questioning the very fundamentals of our existence and our perceived reality.
   

Macbeth knows
what I'm talking about.

     As I said, I don't believe in ghosts but I do believe that some people have seen what they take to be ghosts.  People see strange shit all the time, it's the nature of the world we live in.  So what are these people seeing?  I'm of the belief that the human mind is strong enough to imprint extreme fears or hopes into our reality in the form of mirages or hallucinations.  If someone is terrified just enough, the chemical balance of their brain can shift so that they think they are seeing what they fear.  If you had any sort of imagination as a child, you'll know what I'm talking about.  The thing is, as we grow older and reality's concrete nature is drilled into us over decades of mundane life and work, we lose the ability to project imagination onto our field of vision.  But if we had the ability as young children, then there must be some small part of us that has retained the "skill" and it is lying dormant, waiting for the perfect time, a time when we have scared ourselves silly from watching some ghost story, a time after we have been completely indoctrinated in the solidity of our reality to spring back and project an image of fear on the focal point of our mind's eye and appear as the manifestation of something horribly out-of-place.  The figure of a person.  A person who can't be there, but is.  I cant think of anything more frightening.

Thinking about 2012 today. . .

     So it looks like it is 2012.  Right now.  I understand that a great many people can't wait for this year to be over and for a great many reasons, not the least of which being the chance to clutch their bellies and bellow huge waves of laughter toward anyone who actually thought this year meant something.  I was thinking about this today and it made me a little sad, to be honest.
     First and foremost, let's clear the air a bit and get something straight once and for all; 2012 is not, nor has it ever been the prophesied date of the end of the world.  No culture on the planet (save our own) has ever put in writing, glyph or folk tale that this year would bring about the annihilation of mankind.  Surprised?  Don't believe me?  Hey, I understand, and really, it's not like I can just tell you "go look it up" because looking it up will just prove me wrong.  Not because I'm wrong mind you, but because "looking it up" these days can "prove" anyone wrong.  Evolutionists are well aware of this.  Also, I work in television and let me tell you, the people who have the power and the will to speak to the public are rarely (if ever) the ones who know what they're speaking about.  (Your's truly excluded, kindly)
     People think 2012 is a doomsday prophesy because it's what people want to think.  It's easy to think that and it's easy to dismiss it as another relic of primitive man and his superstitions that we are all much too smart to fall for.  2012 has become an easy, soft piece of marketing and ignorance and any serious intellectual reading this is probably doing so against their better judgement.  I'm writing this to say one thing: 2012 is important and it should be taken seriously and everyone needs to forget everything they've heard through media or most books on the subject. (exception: book pictured.  Essentially a doctoral thesis of Mayan glyphs and mythology.  Read it.)   Why?  Why should you give a damn, my dear?  Simply, because the Mayans are dead.  Well, not technically I suppose, they are living in a dispersed state throughout Guatemala and other countries, but their society died  because they killed it, or rather, they let it die.  Their's was a death due to arrogance, a different sort of arrogance than ours, but arrogance none the less.  The reason this matters is because they looked to the sky, the stars, the galactic centre and wished upon it that people would continue to grow, evolve and change into something great and beautiful.  I'm taking some liberties here but the point I'm making is that for the Maya, 2012 marked a shift in human consciousness, an evolution, more succinctly, a revolution of consciousness.  It was a date, far-off and distant.  A date that could hold promise for all mankind, a promise of elevated thinking, solutions to the problems, the struggles of life.  The Maya suffered because they couldn't find a way to feed themselves efficiently.  How heartbroken would they be if they could see the world today, in their sacred year, the year that all people where supposed to see with evolved eyes, a world that chooses not to feed all its people even though it has the means to do so?
     Now, I'm not saying that we've made no advances since the Maya.  Sure we have this wonderful, magical technology that lets us live long, fat, lazy lives.  It's wonderful really.  We have the previously unfathomable ability to become sick and die en-masse solely because of inactivity and eating synthetic food.  What a glorious future we live in.  This is how I know the Mayans could not see into the future, because if they could see us right now, they would have prophesied doomsday.
  I was thinking of my country today.  I realized that I can't think about Canada without two images popping into my head; oil and Harper.  It's a personal fixation, I'm sure, but these two things cause me the fanciful urge  to go back in time and say to the Mayan: "I'm sorry.  There was no awakening of consciousness, no god-like realization of the Universe.  We just kept sucking the planet dry."
     For the first time in my life, I feel like leaving Canada.  Not because I don't like it and not because I think I could do better somewhere else, but because I seemingly don't represent any relevant number of the populace.  I feel like Canada is a drug dealer living in my neighbourhood and he's getting everyone addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle.  I know the comparison has probably been made a thousand times, but it is an apt one;  Canada (or the whole of western society) is Tony Montana.  Do I need to explain the coke/oil metaphor?  Probably not, but I walk around every day, holding that thought in my head and it's hilariously perfect.  Oooh, ooh.  And the Mayans are that Colombian drug lord on the phone in that scene, and they're saying "I told you a long time ago, you @#$^%," etc. etc.  Anyway, you all know how it ends.  Oh,wait . . . do you?  Come to think of it, do any of our leaders know how it ends?  Do they think the oil keeps flowing and technology keeps pumping along, extending our synthetic lives into eternity?
     That's my biggest question to the world right now, and I'll leave it here as this is getting kind of long.
     Where are we going?  Does anyone think about this?  Is there an end to the means?  We are all taught to have goals for ourselves in our own little lives.  They help us achieve things and stay on track.  Ultimately, we know we're going to die so our goals only have to take us to the end of our lives, but it doesn't work the same for entire races of people.  Human kind won't die.  Not for millions, conceivably billions of years, if we do the right things.  Can we think in terms like that?  Can we live our lives conscious of the reality that billions of people after us will have to keep going, walking on the embers of whatever we've destroyed?  It seems to me that as a whole, people are too locked into their own mortality to realize that, in a sense, we are all immortal.  Humans can keep living until the sun explodes if we have the desire to.  Maybe we can't get our heads around it so we live like the world ends once our own, individual life does.  If this continues, then no, human kind won't go on.  Isn't it all just a big waste of time then?  Isn't each generation, each epoch living for themselves just the same as a person spending their entire life on the couch?
     The Mayans didn't live on the couch.  They sacrificed their own lives to give the future a glimpse of what we could become.  They thought in terms of forever and we remember them for it.  But we certainly don't honour them.

A morning walk in the 'burbs.

Yes, I finally got an iPhone and I'm taking "vintage" pictures just like everyone else.  Everyone does it because it's cool.  So now I'm cool too.
Anyway, let's get on with it.

I took my dog, Napoleon, for a walk this morning and it was cold and the sun was bright and yellow and the air stung as it passed into my lungs and I really enjoyed all of it.  What I enjoy most about taking walks is the solitude and the time to daydream.

This last year I read a book with the goal of developing some coping mechanisms for dealing with life's hard-to-deal-with moments.  The book is called "Quiet Your Mind", written by John Selby and I highly recommend  it for anyone whom, like myself, somehow managed to make it to adulthood without any coping skills.

The book lays down a series of exercises which anyone can do to stop the constant murmur of thoughts and worries from polluting their happiness.  This was a problem I was having, and am still working on.  Now, there's some advice in the book that I was reluctant to accept.  See, when I go for a walk, or when anyone who fancies themselves a writer or a creative person of any sort goes for a walk, bike ride, kayak or whatever, we tend to take advantage of the peace and do some thinking, brainstorming, internal monologuing or what-have-you.  Selby, over there, tells you to turn off any chatty part of your brain while doing any of these activities and just experience the moments as they drift through you and let your physical senses relish in the now without the cumbersome intrusion of conscious thought.  I was against the idea right away because I have some of my best ideas on walks, who doesn't?  Then, this morning I finally understood what Selby was trying to get through to me.

The relinquishment of all thought is not the goal here.  Rather, it is the controlled decision of what thoughts to have and the discernment between beneficial and detrimental thought.  I always find myself, during my walks, pinballing back and forth between Selby's method of physical, open experience and my own brand of neurotic, baseless worry.  This morning was no different but it was a stunningly beautiful morning and so I relinquished all thought as often as I could and had my eyes raised to the point directly ahead of me and focused only on what sound entered my ears and what sights entered my field of vision.  Brain off.

The sun was low over the rooftops ahead, and on the right drew close a roofer's truck blaring "Barbara Ann" from an open door.  Ice crystals flitted across the lone ray of sun rising from the center of my field of view and   "Barbara Ann" decreased in pitch and then rose again as I passed the truck and then faded away behind me.

It was a simple moment but one that filled me with a great positive wonder.  It felt so filmic, so literary, the sort of moment you bask in if it's on screen or in a book but it wasn't, it is life right now.  I knew right away that if I had been enraptured in one of my regular day-dreamy thought cycles I would have missed the moment entirely.  So that's what it took to get me to understand the benefit of Selby's technique and how keeping a clear mind and remaining physically open to your surroundings can lead to more inspiration and more to life than walking around in a critical mode or lost in supposedly creative thinking.

So now that I'm part of the smartphone crowd, I at least have this moment to remind me of what there is to miss if I (heaven forbid) find myself walking, nose down, eyes planted in that glossy little screen, thinking how great life is because I have a neat phone.