Fleeing a Haunted House

I had a nightmare on Wednesday, after I’d spent a few hours Magic Erasering the walls of my old bedroom to the point that my fingertip started bleeding. This ended the cleaning session, as the blood negated much of the erasers’ magic. It also may have planted the seeds for the bad dream. The narrative is simple: Much as I had in real life, I was standing in an empty version of my old bedroom, staring at plain white walls and rubbing the eraser in circles until every muscle in my arm ached. Unlike the actual version of events, I soon noticed that my fingers had actually started to pass through the wall itself — then wrists and then elbows. Around the time my face would have entered the now permeable drywall, I woke up. I’m not sure if dream me’s panicked yelling translated to any noise in waking life.

It stuck with me, this awful little movie that my brain invented without my permission. The next day — my last ever at the old address — I kept thinking about it, especially when I was standing in front of some vast expanse of white, sponging and essentially setting myself up for a reenactment of “Wacky Wall Washing.” Dreams don’t necessarily mean anything, I say, but that doesn’t mean that random images flashing in the night can’t be considered in the context of what happens during the daylight. For example, the night before the dream I watched TCM’s showing of The Haunting — the good 1963 version with Julie Harris. I’d seen it before, but I think I enjoyed it more the second time through, possibly because part of me related to Eleanor’s simultaneous attraction and repulsion to Hill House. Eleanor feared it because it was populated with ghosts, and I had come to hate my house for its oppressive stench of nostalgia. (Not helping the haunted house movie comparisons: The fact that my last few days cleaning it involved dodging spiders of every conceivable variety as they literally came out of the woodwork, all while the usually windy weather caused a spectral slamming of all the doors inside. Cue string section’s jump scene score.) I never thought I’d come to hate the old house: I loved it for a long time, and I have a lot of nice memories there. However, most of those memories involve people who aren’t around anymore. Just existing inside those walls had become a little painful, especially walking from one room to the next and thinking “This is where this happened. That is where that happened.” And then there’s the fact that the house itself is falling apart. In addition to being impossible to keep clean, the wood and metal that make up the house itself are decaying, almost as if collective memories were condensing inside, dripping down the walls and rotting through the walls.


Although I’m happy at the new place, where I’ve been living for almost a week, I will still miss the old one. That house had character, as everyone who visited had noted. (I imagine now that these friends used character to mean “dust,” “an odd floorplan,” “mismatched paint,” “no apparent living room,” “hardwood floors that are rapidly softening.”) The house was more of a character than anyone who ever lived in it. The day before the move, I told Aly that I felt like it wouldn’t happen — somehow, it would end up that we had to stay, because the house itself wanted us there, because the house wasn’t done with us. Just the fact that I started imagining that the old place had agency is probably a sign that it was time to get out, but I think these thoughts are especially telling when considered alongside a dream in which the house itself absorbed me into the walls.

Too many movie characters who go traipsing about in haunted houses never get out in time. Instead of running out while the front door still opens, they go deeper, into gloomy basements or dusty attics where evil things live, as we all know. I suppose I should be happy that I’m out now, sitting in a new place where all the ghosts were presumably packed up by the previous tenant. It’s an inappropriately beautiful October 31, and as I write this my bedroom is lit by a late afternoon glow the likes of which I would have never seen from my desk in my old bedroom.

I don’t care if the sentient, villainous house shows up in dreams again, because at least I know now that I’ll be waking up surrounded by new, more trustworthy walls.

Squishy Fishy, Part Two

I have a friend, whose name I’m declining to mention, who works in Washington D.C. for a member of congress, whose name I’m also declining to mention. This friend occasionally reads my blog and happened to do so this morning, when she learned of the awful squishy fishy toilet seat. The following email describes the resulting action:

I was reading your blog this morning, the post about your new toilet seat, right as [NAME OF CONGRESS PERSON] walked in and said “Is that a toilet seat with fish on it?” Not really knowing what to say, I went with “Um, yeah, it is. Uh....” Because what really do you say when your boss, a member of congress, asks about a cushioned decorated toilet seat on your screen? At this point, the office had to come over and look at what I was reading. Could have been worse, I guess?

I’m just pleased to know that my blog has distracted an elected official, however briefly. Perhaps I can convince this congress member to pass anti-cushioned toilet seat legislation?

Squishy Fishy — A Short Rant About a Toilet Seat

Upon moving into our new place, Aly and I discovered that the toilet seat, which had always been up during walkthroughs, had fish embroidered into the top of the lid. This struck us as strange, as the lid and seat look fairly new while the guy who previously lived in this unit did so alone — no kids, no ichthyologist girlfriend, no halfwit brother who might see the design and clap his chubby hands saying “Fishies! Fishies!” Aly and I presume that the cleaning crew, after doing what they could with this toilet, closed the lid, like polite people do, finally allowing us new tenants to gaze upon the seat that should not be. However, the unwelcomed fish design, looking like something a six-year-old might have created with a handful of stickers and too little parental supervision, was the least of our objections, as we would soon learn.

Upon returning the lid to the up position so as to hide the stupid-looking fish, I found that the toilet seat itself was cushioned, by which I mean that component itself was not made of either porcelain or hard plastic but instead foam rubber. (I guess, then, the toilet seat itself is a cushion.) Short of a body embedded in the wall, this is one of the nastiest surprises I could imagine in a new house. The mere thought of a toilet seat with a squishy texture repulses me. Spongy textures have no place near wherever human waste is being expelled.

And although we’ve since removed the horrible thing, I can’t help thinking of a second reason to hate it: Specifically, who would be inclined to buy a cushioned toilet seat aside from somebody who spends such an inordinately long amount of time on the pot that the pressure of standard, firm seat against the rear end had apparently caused discomfort? Personally, I do what I have to do and then continue with my day, but whoever purchased Squishy Fishy clearly suffered from a digestive disorder, possibly from a parasite obtained while abroad or from some sort of voodoo curse. (I’m speculating here, but I’ll bet I’m not far off.) And now I have to wonder exactly how communicable that disease might be, for despite thee new, firm seat in place of the previous one, I am still using the same toilet, for the most part.

If you’re reading this now and I now you socially and you happen to have a seat like this one, please make every effort not to tell me.

In closing, enjoy two more pictures of the house, each fairly unrelated to this post’s topic. First, the pathetic contents of our fridge on the first night in the new place:

And, second, what Adam found in the backyard, buried in dead bamboo:

There is much to notice in this new place.

Steve Odor

Finally, now that I’m once again in the swing of posting regularly, I can offer this: a word of the week. I’ve chosen this one based on the fact that I’m currently watching The Wire, after years of hearing nothing but good things about it from everyone whose taste I trust. I’m now in the second season, which takes place largely in the Baltimore port and which makes use of a synonym for longshoreman that I’d never heard before.

stevedore (STEE-və-dohr) — noun: : one who works at or is responsible for loading and unloading ships in port

Something about this word amuses me, possibly because I imagine a lot of dock workers being named Steve. In fact, there’s probably more than a few stevedores named Steve out there, and every one of them is probably tired of people pointing out the similarity. I’d say it’s in everyone’s best interest not to point it out, because among the many things I have learned from The Wire is that you shouldn’t go around pissing off dock workers. They’ll fuck you up.


Similarities aside, the word stevedore doesn’t seem to have a direct relationship to the name Stephen, which comes from Greek and means “crown” or “garland.” Instead, stevedore comes to English from the Spanish for “one who loads cargo,” estibador — which, also happens to sounds like Estiban, the Spanish version of the name Stephen, and probably makes working life hard for a certain number of Spanish dockworkers. Estibador comes from the verb estibar, “to stow cargo,” which in turn comes from the Latin verb stipare, meaning “pack down” or “press” and related to the English word stiff.

Because I’ll probably never again discuss dockworkers on this blog, I’d also like to point out that looking into stevedore led me to the etymology of longshoreman as well. I’d always wondered exactly how that long fit into the term and why it seemed to imply that these people were long in some way. Not what it means. The word is simply a slight contraction of alongshore, as in “these guys work along the shore.”

One more thought on the second season of The Wire, though not word related: I can’t get over how rough Amy Ryan looks. Yes, she looks better than she did in Gone Baby Gone, but she’s not the ray of sunshine that is Holly Flax from The Office. Amy Ryan, stay cleaned up. We like you that way.

Previous words of the week:

• adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
  
• barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
  
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate
  
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier
  
• fabiform, fissilingual
• gallinipper, grandgore
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
  
• jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
  
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
  
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, milt, mongo
• nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
• ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
  
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople
  
• tergiversate, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby, tyro
  
• ucalegon, ultramontane
  
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
  
• williwaw, witzelsucht
• xenodocheionology, xyster
  
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
  
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang
  

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Demon Boyfriend: My Take on Paranormal Activity

A friend invited me to go see Paranormal Activity today, and I’m glad he did because had he not told me about the good reviews the film has been getting, I would have continued thinking it was just another one of the terrible, un-scary horror movies that have been passing through theaters lately. It’s not. It’s actually quite good and jarred me enough that I think it might stick with me through the night.

Walking out of the theater, I formulated a little theory about the film and have decided to share it here. However, if you have any inclination to see Paranormal Activity — and you should, if you appreciate a good scare and Blair Witch-style handheld camerawork doesn’t nauseate you — then I think you should skip this post for now, since I’ll give away much of the film’s plot.

a spooky nothing happening — and oh so effectively

Whether the writer-director intended to do so or not, he created interesting parallels between the film’s big bad — a nameless, shapeless, almost unseen demon — and Micah, one of the film’s two human characters. Essentially, the movie works like this: Katie, the heroine, has been plagued by paranormal activity most of her life, and though her boyfriend, Micah, knows this, he refuses to listen to her when the two discuss how they should remedy their situation. When Katie wants to call an exorcist, he tells her the idea is stupid. When Katie suggests that his decision to video document the strange phenomenon could be what’s angering the demon, he keeps the cameras rolling. And when a psychic explicitly forbids them to attempt to communicate with the demon through an ouija board — doing so could open up a door that can’t be closed, the psychic explains — Micah does so, even after promising Katie that he won’t. In short, Micah is a jerk who doesn’t really seem to have Katie’s best interest at heart.

Which kind of sounds like the demon itself. This entity focuses its attention on Katie — that is, it’s not attached to a particular house but to Katie herself — and like Micah it pretty much does whatever it wants to her, regardless of how she feels. If you view the film as a battle between Micah and the demon over Katie, then the demon has more of a claim to her, as it has been with her a lot longer. It’s not explicitly stated in the film, but it seems like the couple has moved in together fairly recently — and, really, that could be what prompted the recent flare-up in bumps in the night — but Katie and Micah’s relationship still feels fairly tentative; they’re only “engaged to be engaged,” as Micah tells the psychic, and Katie only seems to have recently mentioned to Micah of her invisible friend. Again, I don’t think it’s explicitly stated, but it may well be the case that Katie only told Micah about the demon because of the recent strangeness. Had they been closer or had Micah been less of a dick, Katie might have told him a lot sooner.

Perhaps because he still doesn’t believe Katie, Micah continues to taunt the demon, calling it “worthless” and daring it to show itself. This shitty attitude, in addition to the cameras, makes the demon bolder than it ever was before. It seems appropriate, then, that the film ends with an apparently possessed Katie waking up in the middle of the night and walking downstairs, beyond the view of the camera stationed in the couple’s bedroom. She screams bloody murder and then commits bloody murder when Micah races downstairs to rescue her. (How he plans to do this, given his lack of any demon removal system, is perhaps only known to Micah.) Finally, Katie trudges back up the stairs and tosses Micah’s corpse directly at the camera. We’re given only a close-up of possessed Katie’s contorted face before the screen goes black — blacker, really, since this scene takes place at night — and the non-credits roll. (There’s nothing at the end of the movie aside from copyright info and a note that the events are, despite appearances, fictional.)

It seems especially appropriate that dead Micah gets tossed directly into the thing that pissed the demon off in the first place. The fact that Katie does it — possessed Katie is still Katie, after all — is a nice touch: Even if she’s been completely consumed by this dark entity, she’s finally able to put Micah in his place and punish him for steamrolling her every effort at agency.

Katie had managed to survive her demon-infused life so far on her own. It’s Micah who screwed everything up. Moving in with him made everything worse, but even if she didn’t have to contend with demonic forces pushing and pulling her — sometimes literally — she’d still be an oppressed, suppressed, repressed person if she continued to live with Micah. He’s no demon, but he is a shitty boyfriend, who didn’t hesitate to shove a camera in her face when she asked him not to or infuriated her demon to the point that it completely overwhelmed her. I guess the demon won the fight, in every way possible, but by taking Katie and making her and it one, it totally triumphed over his feeble promise of “engaged to be engaged.” Demon says, “Dude, now I’m in her all the time. Beat that.”

Some women just have bad taste in men.

Who Gives a Fig About Sydelle Pulaski?

Two points of verbal interest for your Friday.

First, a new term that, much in the manner of cranberry morpheme and kangaroo word, strikes me as funny and oddly informal even though it is the correct way to refer to a particular linguistic concept: false friend. It refers to words in different languages that don’t mean the same thing but resemble each other to the point that they look like they should mean the same thing. Wikipedia offers a few examples of these verbal frenemies, the one most familiar to me being the English embarrass and the Spanish embarazada. The latter sounds like it should mean what the former does, but, as anyone who’s taken introductory Spanish knows, it actually means “pregnant.” Hilarity ensues. There’s a whole list of them, but I’m far less interested in the examples than I am in the term itself, which calls to mind two words who act all nice in person but then send defamatory text messages about each other to their cognates and synonyms.

The other bit involves a thing that I assumed had been invented by my father and was unique to my family: the phrase a wigwam for a goose’s bridle. This nonsensical string of words was used often in my house as a response to any question centered around the word what. For example: What are you looking for? What are we having for dinner? What did you get me for my birthday? In retrospect, I don’t know why we weren’t more forthright in answering each other’s questions. It turns out it that the phrase has been used in all English-speaking countries, especially Australia and New Zealand. And my dad is from New Zealand, so the story checks out. According to Wikipedia, the second word in the phrase at one point was not wigwam but whim-wham, an obsolete bit of vocabulary meaning “whimsical object” or “trinket.” (Curious, then, that the word would have been made more whimsical by attaching it to a headgear for a goose.) As whim-wham fell out of use, the phrase replaced it with wigwam. This substitution strikes me as an odd one, given that the phrase was most popular in nations whose residents had little reason to know the name of a Native American dwelling unit. But that’s the story nonetheless. Over at World Wide Words, Michael Quinion has collected a few other nonsense responses used to deflect questions by nosy passersby and inquisitive children. Among them:

• a whim-wham for ducks to perch on
• a whim-wham for a treacle mill
• a whim-wham to wind the sun up
• layovers to catch meddlers
• a silver new nothing to put on your shoe
• airlos to catch medlos
• a whipple for a dooses poke
• a pair of kitty britches
• a wigwam for a goose’s bridle and a crutch for a lame duck
• a whim-whom for grinding smoke

Now please go enjoy your Friday.

Bubbles Go In, Bubbles Come Out

Found and photographed at a thrift store in Ventura: something that clearly comes from an era when people cared less about child abuse.

My only reason to regret not purchasing this miniature model of a crime is that I can’t explain to you where the bubbles actually come out, though I feel like any of the potential bubble escape holes should make everyone uncomfortable. Also: Why two pumps? One for air and one for…? Perhaps we’re better off not wondering.

Previous documentation of thrift store merchandise I did not buy:

• Lonesome, Even With All That Red Hair
• Shrine of the Sea Monkey
  

Sega’s Less-Than-Groovy Heart

Another from that “cloudbush” thread — and one that gets to reference “Groove Is in the Heart,” so it’s inherently extra special. You remember the song, of course.

Apparently sometime after this song by Deee-Lite hit it big, the singer, Lady Miss Kier got word of the existence of Space Channel 5, a music-based video game released by Sega in 1999. Kier concluded the game’s mascot, Ulala, bore more than a passing resemblance to her own stage persona — specifically by being a dancing girl sporting knee-high boots, a short skirt, a pink ponytail — and sued Sega. There is a similarity, I have to admit.


And according to Kier, Sega offered $16,000 to use her likeness in the game. When she declined, Sega used it anyway. Sega maintains that Ulala was different enough that they could legally use the character. Ultimately, a judge ruled in Sega’s favor and Kier was forced to pay the video game company $608,000 in legal fees, which surely took a big chunk out of any money Kier would have made with the success of “Grove Is in the Heart,” the band’s only real hit. (I mean, they had a cover of “You Sexy Thing” on the Dumb & Dumber soundtrack, but how many other songs by Deee-Lite have you ever heard?) And so ends the strange and acrimonious intersection of these two pop culture elements that I wouldn’t have imagined had a shared history.

That is, except for an even more curious epilogue: “Groove Is in the Heart” is featured in the 2008 Wii game Samba de Amigo — another Sega-produced music-based game — and notably the song appears in a stage that also features a cameo by Ulala. And that’s either an ironic little coincidence or a very purposeful fuck-you from the video game giant and to Kier.

Less-than-groovy indeed.

Charades Submissions From a Party Attended by Dicks

The first Thanksgiving

Kate and Allie

Elasmosaurus

A ghost pirate ship

Feigned reluctance

A flock of 23 horned sheep

That generic brand of vodka you can get at Vons

The first season Thanksgiving episode of Kate and Allie, but specifically the scene where Allie drinks an entire bottle of that generic brand vodka you can get at Vons

Deadly microbes

Linoleum

(Please note: Several of the items on the above list could also feasibly be Pictionary submissions from a party attended by dicks.)

Reading Peepee

Earlier this month, a blog I read, Pain in the English, wondered how we arrived at pp as an abbreviation for pages. A good question: Really, what the hell? And while I still don’t really understand why, I can at least give a little bit of info on the practice. Way back in freshman high school Latin, I saw a photo in the textbook of a Roman coin. On the coin was the face of some monarch or political official, and he or she was noted as being the rule of the British Isles. However, the coin referred to this area specifically as Brittania or something thereabouts, with a double “T.” The textbook noted that doubling the letter somehow made the word plural, in the same way as English-speakers today use pp to mean pages. Didn’t make sense, but that’s what the book said.

According to Wikipedia, this way of pluralizing abbreviations — by doubling the letter, without using periods — isn’t exactly common but nonetheless exists in English, Latin, and the languages that descended from Latin. It seems to be particularly prevalent in the world of writing and publishing — vv for volumes, ss for sections, MSS for manuscripts, dd for didots and opp for opera in the sense of that word being the plural of opus. The two that didn’t have anything to do with the written word were hh, for hands, as in the units used to measure the height of a horse, and PP for popes. I can’t imagine why only these seemed to have survived — or at least made it to Wikipedia — or why only pp seems to be widely understood, especially since I can imagine teachers would specifically avoid using it so as to prevent an opportunity for little kids to make the exact kind of joke I made in this blog post’s title.

I guess this style is an easy way to show plurality while still keeping the abbreviation as short as it possibly could be, but I can’t help myself from thinking that it’s a little strange. But then again, I may be spoiled by English, whose letter “S” makes pluralizing a lot easier than it is in, say, Latin. In fact, as far as letter abbreviations go, it’s very easy — CDs, DVDs, SATs, BMs, SOBs. The only problem our style of plural abbreviations poses is one that anyone having to write about report cards knows: “I got two Bs, two Cs, and two As,” with the last one being hard to distinguish from the word as, especially if you have a hatred of the grocer’s apostrophe ground in your head.

The Hand That Rocks the Sitcom

So Seinfeld did meta. This is not debatable. The best example would be the show eating itself in the fourth season story arc involving Jerry’s production of Jerry, a sitcom that parodied Seinfeld. You could and should even argue that this blurring of real-life and TV show fiction continued with last Sunday’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Reunion,” which brought the four leads from Seinfeld back together. The tendency for Seinfeld to draw from real life resulted in some more subtle bits, too — some that weren’t apparently intended as “ha ha” jokes as much as in-jokes existing only to tie the Seinfeldverse to something more concrete. Today, I remembered a good example: the other Rebecca Demornay. I’ve been unable to explain her existence since the character first appeared in the episode “The Muffin Tops” back in 1997.

In the episode, Elaine and Mr. Lippman, her old boss at Pendant Publishing, open a bakery called Top of the Muffin To You!, which serves only the tops of muffins. In order to make the products taste good, however, the whole muffin must be cooked and the stump discarded. Elaine decides to drop off the stumps at a homeless shelter, which prompts a visit from an angry volunteer, played by character actress Sonya Eddy.

YouTube, of course, has the specific clip at the ready:

Even as a kid, having seen only Risky Business and Backdraft, I knew about the actress Rebecca De Mornay and thought it was weird that this character would identify herself with the same name. (Or close to it, anyway. IMDb spells the character’s name Rebecca DeMorne, while most other sources list it as Rebecca Demornay, like the actress but without the space.) The clip above features the extent of the character’s appearance in the episode, and she could have easily just not been named and not introduced herself. But she does — and elicits the faintest of chuckles from the audience, even though there’s nothing really funny about her having the name aside from the fact that the real Rebecca De Mornay is blonde and pretty and relatively young and this soundalike is African-American, heavyset and middle-aged. Is that supposed to be the joke?

The matter gets weirder when you consider that Rebecca Demornay — the character, not the actress — appears again in the following season’s episode “The Bookstore,” as a clerk at thrift shop. (IMDb lists the character’s name as Rebecca Demornay and not Rebecca Demorne.) This time she interacts with George and makes a point of clarifying her name. From the episode script, per this website:

REBECCA: What’s the value of the book?

GEORGE: Uh, about two hundred dollars, Miss Demooney.

REBECCA: It’s Demornay. Rebecca Demornay.

GEORGE: Oh.

REBECCA: (Opens the cover of the book) Oh, wait a second. This book has been in the bathroom.

GEORGE: Wh-what are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.

REBECCA: It’s been flagged. I know. I used to work in a Brentano’s. Mister, we’re trying to help the homeless here — it’s bad enough that we have some nut out there trying to strap ‘em to a rickshaw!

GEORGE: Alright, I’ll just take fifty. Do we have a deal?

REBECCA: Yeah, and here it is: You get your toilet book out of here, and I won’t jump over this counter and punch you in the brain!

No clue on this one, folks. Why take the name of a known person and attach it to an angry bit character with a propensity for helping the homeless? A Google search turned up fairly little, aside from the fact that at least one other person thinks this is strange and bothered to say so online. Most websites just note — often in bios of Rebecca De Mornay the actress — that an almost identically named character appeared on Seinfeld without pressing the matter any further. Admittedly, when the episodes aired, the real De Mornay wasn’t exactly at the height of her career, but she still would have been familiar enough to anyone with an awareness of films from the previous ten years. I mean, this is like if I wrote a TV show today and decided to name an incidental but recurring character Neve Campbell — or, ten years from now, Evangeline Lilly. And it’s not like De Mornay is a common last name, by any stretch.

Anyone? Friends? Pop culture sponges? Helpful people Googling their way here?

EDIT: Years later, I finally asked the writer and got the answer.