Finding stars in the sky tonight
One star I see just shines more bright
In the sky, between the trees
A small uncanny sight

Finding stars in the sky at dawn
When really all the stars are gone
A planet seen, or UFO
Know I’ll never know

Looking alone into the sky
Just pondering on what I spy
No sleep for me inside that room
No real reason why

I believe in ghosts.  God may or may not exist, but I think ghosts do, which kind of presents an interesting problem for me.  I’m not an Atheist exactly, but imagine an Atheist’s dilemma upon gaining a belief in the spirits of the dead.  If there is no God, what are ghosts?  If there is a God, do ghosts say something about the true nature of the afterlife?  It kind of scares me that this big of a mystery exists, especially one concerning the existence of Heaven or Hell.  I must say though, I’m still not very worried.  Maybe I should be.

I believe in ghosts.  I also believe my house may be haunted.  There are a bunch of things that draw me to this suspicion:

A few years ago, we used to hear creaks coming from upstairs that sounded like someone was walking around.  We would also hear noises that sounded like people walking up and down the stairs, though no one would be there.

One time, my Mom was upstairs on the computer (back when my brother had a desktop computer up there).  No one was home, yet she distinctly heard the side door open and closed.  She checked, and the side door was shut, and locked.

Back when we still had our dog Harley, he used to lay in the hallway and growl at nothing.  He also perked up at the footsteps coming down the stairs, so we know he heard them, too.

One night, I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, when in the midst of silence and darkness I heard a loud POP come from right around my dresser, and then dead silence again.  It sounded like a lightbulb popping, if I had to describe it.  I checked around.  There is no place that it could have come from, and nothing was affected by it.  I couldn’t figure it out, and I still can’t.  The next day or so, I heard another of the same kind of POPs, but it was midday, and I was sitting on the computer, so I just ignored it.  No one but me seems to have heard the pops, but everyone else was asleep by the time it happened (like 4 AM maybe?).

I have two laptops now.  I recently acquired a MacBook Pro that my college made me buy.  I love it.  It’s an awesome machine.  My older one, a Dell running Windows XP, core single processor, has encountered it’s problems over the years, and I really can’t not take the blame.  Every time it turns on, it shows me a “One of the files containing the system’s Registry data had to be recovered by use of a log or alternate copy.  The recovery was successful,” message.  I’m not sure what that means, but that was probably me, not ghosts.  What I think might, might be ghosts is the way it sporadically turns itself off and on every day at around the same time in the morning.  On, then off.  On, then off again, right away.  Then on, then off.  Maybe it’ll encounter an error message, telling me to do something, but then it’ll turn off again.  Finally it boots up a final time, and stays on, shows me the error message, connects me to AIM if it can connect to the Internet, etc.  I don’t know what it is.  I’ve thought about it being a loose switch, but I don’t think so, because I don’t think it would just turn on without provocation every morning.  I have McAfee, SUPERAntiSpyware, and Ad-Aware, so I’m very sure it’s not some problem like a virus or something.  It also did this when I went on vacation to Zook & Lyter’s, so if it is ghosts, I don’t really know how that works with the laptop leaving my house.

Most recently, last night, in fact, while lying in bed trying to sleep, I heard what sounded like someone using the bathroom (numero uno), which is right next to my room.  Minus walls, my pillow is uncomfortably close to the toilet, so yeah.  When people pee, I hear it (until I turn up the volume on the TV).  That’s why, when I heard this noise faintly but distinctly in my ear, I thought someone had snuck into the bathroom.  I wasn’t sure though, since I didn’t hear my brother coming down the stairs, or one of my parents coming out of their room.  I checked, and there was no one in the bathroom.  I kept hearing this noise (it lasted for only a few seconds each time) throughout the night.  Unsettling, kind of annoying, but mostly unsettling.  I mean, what the fuck, why that? Peeing? If ghosts exist, I don’t exactly know why they do what they do to begin with, but I really am not sure why they’re doing that.

This last one doesn’t happen in my house, thus why it’s last.  My friend Spiro has a room in his upstairs that a few of us hang out in whenever we go to his house.  It’s got a TV with an XBox 360 hooked up to it (though no XBox live…) so we can watch DVDs, play some games sometimes, whatever.  One time we heard the door shake.  We thought it might be the wind.  The windows were closed, however, and the wind that would have come from said windows would not have been enough to shake the door.  The door has done this on multiple occasions, oftentimes when we’re talking about the door, we’ve noticed.  It’s very strange, and one of the strongest confirmations to me of GHOSTS!!!!!

Zomg it’s ghosts :O

I feel like I missed something
Like you said it all
But I didn’t think it
And now will I fall

Down, down away from you
Into four years’ abyss
I dreamed of a goodbye
I dreamed of a kiss

I know that I loved you
And love doesn’t fade
It only hides away
Then comes out from the shade

But I just feel wrong now
Even kinda pissed
And now I am dying
‘Cause I feel like I missed

I kinda sang this to myself as I wrote it, so reading it like prose doesn’t sound quite right.  If you stress the “ven” in “Even” when you say it it sounds better.

Oh yeah, and I’ve been back from vacation for a few days.  Maybe I’ll post about it.  I’m not really thinking about it too much though.

One of my friends described the place she’ll be going to for college as “Cow Town”, implying a rural area.  I like that.  I’m going to Cow Town myself, in five or six or seven hours.  Oh God.  I need to sleep!  The trip out to somewhere in Pennsylvania takes around three hours, and the place we stay is a little hideaway we call Zook & Lyter’s.  It’s far enough off the main road to be secluded, and it’s gorgeous.  The most peaceful place I’ve ever been.  Right next to the Juniata River, beyond that some tree-covered mountains the name of which escape me.  A train runs through them, somewhere.  This place even neighbors an Amish settlement-place.  When it gets dark there, it gets DARK.  You can see all the stars.  It would be a great romantic place.

I can’t really describe the feeling it gives me.  There’s no Internet, though there is electricity and plumbing (well, septic tanks).  I like how it gets me away from TV and shit like that.  Just for a week.  Zook & Lyter’s is one of my favorite places.  It’s not like the beach or a boardwalk, or someplace you’d go to for entertainment (thus it’s generally a bad place to bring friends), but I still love it.  I’ve gone there every year since I was born, every year that I can remember.  It’s one of really just a few things that I dearly love and will miss one day.

I leave in even fewer hours than when I started this post.  I get back in around seven days.  Maybe I’ll fish when I get there.

How was your weekend?  Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t answer me intelligently, you’re a spam bot.  Riiiight.  Anyway, this past Saturday, we at the card shop had a large task to accomplish.  We hosted a regional tournament for Yu-Gi-Oh! at the Philadelphia convention center.

Now, regionals are nothing new to us.  I and my Dad have vended at a million of them.  But this time, one of the companies that was in charge of running these sorts of tournaments (Upper Deck Entertainment) was out of the picture after a lawsuit for producing counterfeit cards without their partner’s (Konami’s) permission (more about that).  UDE is the one that sanctioned the tournaments before, and hired people to run them.  Now, with Konami in charge of all of that, we had the opportunity to host our own tournament, which we did.  They approved us, and a tournament we had.

I haven’t slept in over 24 hours, so if I say things more than once, or a thought doesn’t seem like it came out right, that’s why.

Usually we have to pay whoever’s running the tournament in order to be there.  This time, since we were running the show, we not only got to vend as per the usual, but we also got to keep all the sweet cash that the hosts usually make from the tournament registration fees.  Sweeet.  Yeah, this regional definitely stood out from others.  Usually, the sales will trail off throughout the day.  Most of our business will be nearer to the tournament’s beginning.  But this time it kept pumping.  We were doing business throughout the whole day, which is awesome.  I was filling our bucket with the twenties that customers kept giving me to buy Special Edition packs or boxes or whatever of cards.  It was pretty great.

Konami’s never done this shit before.  They’ve never sanctioned balonie.  As a result, they suck at it.  They didn’t send us tournament policy info until around two days before the tournament was scheduled.  That’s stuff that we’re supposed to have weeks ahead of time.  What was worse was the tournament software they made us use.  It fucking sucked hard.  From what I gleaned of one conversation, I think they tested it on like 16 players?  Well, we had around 250 players at our event.  Round 6 or so didn’t happen.  The software was simply a piece of shit incapable of running the tournament after a certain point.  What ended up happening instead was the top 64 players all getting invites to Nationals, which is fucking unheard of.  What’s more, we did a top 64, which is when the tournament switches from Swiss-style to single-elimination playoffs.  That’s also unheard of.  I mean, we did a great day businesswise, but it was so prolonged.  We had to rush to get out before the janitors killed us or something.  At any rate, I made more money than I’ve ever made doing one of these things, and I think the card shop did too.  It worked out well in the end.

Okay, so the reason I’ve been awake for 25-26 hours now is that, well, I’ve been going to bed at a certain time, say 3 or 4 AM, and just lying in bed, thinking instead of falling asleep.  Just the other day, before I decided to do this, I went to bed at like 1 or so and woke up at 4 PM the next day!  How does that happen?  So, to try and fix this, I’ve just been staying awake, to give myself far better control of when I go to bed and fall asleep tonight.  It’s been rough, but I’m pretty stable right now.  No dozing or delerium at the moment, no drunken loss of control due to fatigue.  Mostly a general tiredness behind everything I do.  I’m also drinking a Bawls right now, so that might contribute to that.  Now, I wonder what time I should actually go to sleep tonight…

Last week was full of things.  Here they are! *throws*

The day after my last post, a Saturday, was the day of the grad party of my best friend Paul.  I had been to a few grad parties a couple weeks beforehand, each taking place at the respective graduatee’s house.  The first was the best of them.  The next was just alright, and the one after that (same day even) was short for me, since I had to work.  But this last one, Paul’s, took the cake.  First of all, his wasn’t at his house, it was at a local ballroom.  Waiters and everything, even a bartender who looked like he just hated being there.  Awesome!  It was awesome, actually.  The other attendants were people of varying closeness to me, from pretty-good-friend to someone-I-might-have-never-seen-before.  At any rate, this party eventually deteriorated into leaving and getting another friend, opening helium balloons, and three of us ending up back at my house to play Rock Band 2.  It was fun.  The best of the parties, imo.

Wednesday I and eventually around eleven others went to see Transformers 2.  I didn’t really expect so many people to be going.  I just got a call one day from Paul asking if I wanted to see Transformers 2 on opening night, which I agreed to, since we hardly get out to see movies anyway, and I wasn’t about to decline a trip on opening night.  Tuesday at around 9 PM I got another call from Paul, telling me to be at his house.  It turned out that another friend of mine, Mike, was picking us up.  A third friend, Clinton, was waiting for us in the car as well.  That’s four.  Then we went to Mike’s house, where we met up with the rest of who would fill up nearly an entire row in the theatre.  No names.  Too many (plus I don’t exactly remember them all).  At any rate, we were met with even more friends after we got our seats.

Then we waited.  For an hour.  Actually, after I switched from one end of the row to the other, waiting around became good fun.  What was also fun was a delay in the previews, followed by a problem with the audio/video sync during the previews, and some of the beginning of the movie.  But they fixed it, so it was good.  The movie itself was pretty fucking awesome, aside from the unnecessarily high rate of penis jokes and humor like that.  But that stuff couldn’t ruin the awesome that the movie had.  Optimus kicked ASS!  And face!  And I was reminded of why I like premieres so much: the fans!  The clapping when something exciting happens!  One thing I hate most is when a movie has been out for two weeks and I’m just seeing it for the first time, and the other people there don’t give any shits.  I almost always feel like applauding a movie after I see it.

The night I had after Transformers was pretty great as well.  I need to end this post, so I won’t go into very much detail, but basically I sat around with some people I’ve only sort of met before and we hung out until it was daytime again, when those of us who were left went to Denny’s.  Denny Wednesdays!  Sounds good to me.

Oh yeah, I also got a new Xbox 360, it’s a graduation present, it might be broken and need returning, that’s it.  Really.

Ahhh, it feels…well, I don’t really know how it feels to be back yet.  I didn’t really leave, per se, so much as just stop posting things.  Apologies for that Terry thing I started.  Just messing around.  I honestly thought I had something there, but it kind of petered out as I wrote more.  Oh well.

So, I graduated high school.  Pretty sweet.  I thought it would hit me more, the whole being done with school, the not having to worry about anything for a while, but it hasn’t really.  What I have noticed is that without school, I’ve pretty much lost direction.  I got out of bed at 3:00 in the afternoon today.  I don’t think there’s been a single day this week when I’ve actually gotten up before noon, at least not to go back to sleep again.  However, my work schedule is changing soon, requiring me to be at work AT noon most days, so that should fix me up.

When was my last post?  March?  That’s a good three months.  Whenever I get back to posting after a while, I always want to clean up things.  Like right now, it feels like I have too many categories.  Most of them don’t get used at all.  It seems like there are too many to choose from.  It’s just kind of annoying.  Do I even need categories?  I wonder how many I could just delete…

Oh shit, and how do I label this post?  D :

On Sunday a man came to Terry’s house.  His visit wasn’t unprovoked, or unexpected.  More so, there was nothing Terry could do about it.  Anything Terry did would just give the man’s coming more urgency.  Terry had been sitting in the sofa, arms stretched over the arms, back straight upright against the back.  He had watched as the owner of the house, a tall middle-aged brunette named Louise, pressed the phone against her frizzed hair, staring straight at Terry with her weary, worried eyes.  “It’s gotten worse.  I…I don’t feel safe any…yes…yes, that’s fine…as soon as possible, please…oh, thank you. Thank you.”

Mere days after the call, the man arrived.  He and the woman had made arrangements for the man to stay in the house for a week, during which time Louise would stay at a cousin’s house.  The man had with him a crew as well.  Terry stood by the wall and watched them bring in equipment: laptops, bundles of cable, cameras of all sorts, various other devices too.  They set up computers in the kitchen, and by the time they were finished there were cables and wires running through each room of the house.  There was a camera for almost every corner.  Terry stood, and the men walked by him without a passing glance, moving through him as he passed along through the kitchen, into the hallway, into the living room.  He stood before a camera as they set it up on a tripod.  It looked very expensive, top-of-the-line.  Terry tried to touch it, but it was too difficult.  Instead he put his arm back down and continued to stand, going unnoticed still.

Terry had lived in the house for decades.  He and his wife had lived there.  He and his wife, until his wife had a tragic, fatal accident with a truck while out on a walk.  The truck was going much too fast, and her death warranted the town borough to put up a restriction on trucks driving through the backstreets at all.  Her body was cremated, and left as an urn on the mantelpiece that later served as the living room’s main decor, around which the coffee table and sofas and chairs were now placed.  The rooms of the house had been changed since Terry lived there with his wife, furniture rearranged and finally replaced when it got too old.  The urn was gone now, in its place a gaudy, plastic vase containing fake yellow flowers.  Terry stood staring at this vase, in the place where his wife’s urn once stood.  He never got to spread his wife’s ashes.  He had still been going through the feeling of his wife’s presence, and just couldn’t part with her at the time.  Terry tried to see the urn again, but the plastic vase was in the way.  It was all he saw there.  He strode silently over to the obstruction; with a surge of energy through himself and a chill in the air, he lifted it up and threw it with all his might at the opposing wall.  The men in the room jumped and yelled at the event, one man darting out of the room.

“Yo, man!”
“What was that?”
“Fuckin’ crazy, man.  Jesus!”

Terry, calm again, looked at the spot once more.  There his wife’s urn stood, just as he remembered it.  He gazed at it lovingly, again standing still in the room.  The chill vanished.

“Man, lady was right.  Crazy shit goin’ down in here.”

(to be continued)

I’ve set up almost this list or line-up of graphic novels I’m interested in purchasing and then reading.  I keep hearing about The War At Ellsmere by Faith Erin Hicks.  Rather, I keep reading things about it or seeing something on SLG Publishing’s website.  Somehow I automatically simultaneously became aware of Zombies Calling, Hicks’ first published work.  Zombies Calling appealed to me more than The War At Ellsmere when I read up on them both, and it seemed like a good starting point for some reason, so I went and ordered myself a copy.

I was surprised at how short it was.  I guess I just expected something that takes a while to read, but maybe I have to get that idea out of my head.  With my first looks inside at the pages, I wasn’t sure of the art style.  It’s unique.  After re-reading the beginning twice, her style really started to appeal to me.  I breezed through half the book without realizing it.  Tonight I finished the rest of the book in similar fashion, though I was more aware of where I was in relation to the total number of pages.

What I like most about Zombies Calling, I think, is the style in which the characters like Joss are done.  Their expressions, with those big eyes, and their lips.  Fine lines creating detail within bold outlines that are everywhere.  What I thought was strange at first I soon came to love.  As well, at first I thought the writing was going to get to me.  It was something about the way Joss (the protagonist) talked about zombie movies, I don’t know.  Well, it turns out the writing didn’t get to me, and in fact I really enjoyed some exchanges, such as Joss and Sonnet in bed.  The art really helped, though.  As for the actual zombies, I think the comedic style of the zombies works well, though they didn’t make me laugh so much, personally.  They were more than enough to portray “Zombie!” however, and they certainly don’t look like something you want clambering all over you.

I think that the book really is held together well, with just this really nice arc of story, intro to action to ending.  By the end, I felt like Joss was an excellent character with her own world.  I like the ending given to the book.  I felt the little epilogue was a nice way to treat Joss.

Next on my list: Whistles Volume One: The Starlight Calliope.

http://www.faitherinhicks.com/

Child you hurt your parents
When you flew away
Up beyond the atmosphere
Into stars that day
They’re sorry that they yelled at you
They wished that you would stay
Once you swept the window shade
When you flew away

Child you hurt your shuttle
Soaring into sky
Shown flight by a human girl
But not quite how to fly
She skewed the way you looked at life
And took you up too high
Poisoned was the air you breathed
Soaring into sky

Child you hurt your body
Sniffing evil foam
Drinking poisonous alcohol
Damaging your chrome
You’re sorry that you blasted-off
And now you can’t go home
Man lost in the endless void
Starboy all alone

I wrote the original version of this five or six months ago.  With the recent announcement of a poetry contest in my school, however, I took a look at the poem again, and decided it wasn’t perfected.  So I fixed it.  Now it has an entirely new second stanza, and modified third stanza.  Now I’m ready to enter it in the contest, which I could win $100 in if I win.  Pretty sweet.