What I've been working on today.

How did I not know about this guy?

http://youtu.be/wvO68CC0lV8

Pearl Jam Cover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DflEfK7CQ3w

Ghost stories as told by Dad, Part 3: "The Job Interview"

It was probably around 1965.  I was at a job interview at Carpenter and Patterson interviewing for the job of expediter.  I had talked with the manager before, and I came in and he said he wanted me to work for the company.
Just as he was saying this, I heard a male voice speak authoritatively:  "This will last but two years."
The manager was talking right along as this voice overrode him.
I looked around at him and said, "What?"
It didn't phase him.  It was as if he hadn't heard the voice.
I took the job, and had kind of forgotten about that, until there was a point when I left the company.  After thinking about the time I was with them, it came out to just about two years, and then I remembered about the voice at the interview.

Ghost stories as told by Dad, Part 2

My mother, Grace Winnifred Rowe.  She was a Foster.  Her aunt was our aunt Amy.    So anyway, it was the calling hours before Aunt Amy's funeral.  As we were going up the street, it was almost completely empty except for a couple getting into their car to leave, and we were up ahead of them near the building where she was lying in her casket.  Then this voice that was characteristic of her, kind of a high-pitched voice called out:  "Grace, Grace!" with great urgency to us.

I started winding my window down and slowing to see if I could hear anything more.  The first thing my mother said was, "That's Aunt Amy!"

She couldn't hardly believe it.  On the way home, I said, "This is strange!"  But she didn't say very much.  It just wasn't something in her experience, having a dead person talk to her.  She was a bible-believing woman, and this was outside of anything she had ever experienced.

I've always remembered it.

Probably, she was just hovering over, seeing people she knew.

Ghost stories as told by Dad

Nancy the Dog

Grammy Grace's dog must have been around 20 lbs.  She used to let it out to do its business.  This was in the wintertime.  There was some snow on the ground.  People say some big bird must have come down and grabbed her.  But there were no marks in the snow where a bird of prey would have swooped down.  Just the dog's tracks that went out in the snow and stopped.

It was starting to get a little darker.  I summoned my friend Roger Bowles up there, and we went all around the buildings of that farm.  We went all the way around in several circles, but there was no sign or tracks except for where the little dog's tracks stopped.

It's like you said, the Virgin Mary ascended bodily to heaven.

We never saw that dog again.

Strange synchronicity and Jean Cocteau

For reasons I do not understand, I was searching for images of leaning smokestacks.  I had been looking at pictures of derelict buildings.  It seemed to me that there ought to be images of large smokestacks leaning in a threatening way.  I suppose it was through the magical spiderworks of Google that I came upon a Jean Cocteau film, "Le Sang d'un poete", which purports to show show the journey within a poets mind during the time it takes a large smokestack to fall to the ground.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4

How to catch monsters.

Dreamed about a book that (I think) was about how to catch monsters.  I saw a red monster on a red raft in a red ocean.  I think a good way to catch them would be to put out piles of stinky gym socks, with some sort of a lasso buried in the middle.  When they came out of the dark to feast on the stinky socks, you pull the rope from within your fortress of pillows and blankets.  Something like that.