Monkey Diaries Archive

Nothing is lonelier than a zero (0) next to the word "comments"... I'm pouring out a little bit of my soul each and every time I post something... Like a tap dancer on the street or a bum begging change, I need acknowledgement that, hey, I'm doing a good job and well, people like me... Really I'm just an attention whore. Show my commenting system love please. My old roommate Lori will be coming to town this weekend. We shared this creepy 100-year old house in the Kensington district of San Diego back in the early 90s. While it was definitely cool to host Halloween parties there, living in a haunted house wasn't at all as fun as I thought it might be. This house had six bedrooms, two baths, a good-sized kitchen, two dining rooms, a laundry/mud room... it was just huge. Like all old houses, it liked to creak and had settled to the point that the house was sitting on an uneven foundation, which caused some really weird things to happen. One night, after a long day of making morons miserable, I came home to an empty house and began making dinner. Both Lori and my other roommate were out of the house so I have no way of corroborating this story but since I'm known for my veracity, I can tell it like it is... They don’t make houses like this anymore, which is to say that the house was real… nothing in the house could be described as “faux.” If it was in the house, it was real. Real teak paneling, real marble trim around the fireplace and mantle, real dead people buried in the base… er, I’m getting ahead of myself. The kitchen opened up into the dining room but the light could barely penetrate the dark. The teak paneling really prevented light from taking hold in that room. Even in broad daylight, with sunlight pouring in from the double French doors that led out to the patio, the dining room had deep shadows concealing the corners. At night, light literally ran out of that room like it was being chased. So, I’m in the kitchen and grab a coke out of the fridge and place it on the kitchen table and walk to the cupboard to grab a glass. As I reach the cupboard, I hear the coke can rolling. I turn and rush over to the table and grab the coke before it falls off the edge. I look at the can and set it down on the table again, daring it to fall over and roll. Of course it doesn’t but I half expected it to. I laughed at myself and returned to the cupboard… guess what? The coke can fell over and began rolling off the edge of the table. I didn’t see it though… I just heard it. Mostly because I was too busy shitting myself to make the effort to focus. It took the can crashing into the floor, bursting open and shooting fizzy lifting gas all over me before I would turn around. When I did, I caught something out of the corner of my eye, standing in the gaping maw of blackness that was the doorway to the dining room. It wasn’t a person, nor was it the traditional “white sheet” dancing in the dark. It was more like mist that just seemed to slink away into the darkness. I stayed in the kitchen for a long time that night, drinking cokes and acknowledging that everything that had just happened hadn’t really happened.