Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Red Earrings and Other Curiosities


by Daddy X

I can be pretty skeptical when it comes to New Age thought, paranormal activity, religion, miracles, etc. but I’ve had enough unexplained experiences to understand that we don’t know it all. Someday, I think most of these phenomena will be understood as simple physics. For ages, throughout the history of humankind, our greatest thinkers thought the earth was flat and that the sun orbited around us. It’s all in one’s perspective.

In a previous OGG post “The Great White Whale”, I mentioned how Momma X and I were able to keep the ice off the windshield of our ‘48 Chevy pickup on our cross-country adventure. The vehicle was never equipped with an exotic feature such as a defroster, but we were able to keep the windshield free of ice by psychic power, concentrating our energy on melting the ice when the weather turned bad.

Another experience, preceding that, occurred in our first apartment.  

The three-room flat was completely empty. Another couple had come over the Saturday before we moved to help paint the place. We’d just finished the ceiling in the kitchen, and were cleaning up to go, when our friend said, “They’re falling!”

Lo and behold, there in plain sight on the drop cloth lay a pair of large red plastic earrings, engineered for pierced ears, about three inch flat ovals. Not something we’d be likely to miss, considering the number of hours we’d been working.  None of the four of us had ever seen them before. Now, you have to imagine a completely clean, bare apartment, freshly painted. No space existed above the cupboards, which went right up to the ceiling. And we still have those earrings. Every few years we send them back to one of the folks involved; she keeps them a while then sends them back to us.

The next place we moved to was an old Victorian in Trenton, New Jersey, which had been divided into apartments years before. Our place occupied the top two floors. When we came home, no matter what time of day or season, we’d always feel a certain frigid sensation at the bottom of the stairs. Not only did Momma and I feel it, but visitors too. They’d get nervous waiting for us to buzz them up. In those years, the neighborhood wasn’t too bad, so the fear wasn’t related to anything tangible.

One day, I was speaking casually to the landlord about another matter and he mentioned that he’d lived in the house as a kid when it was a single-family residence. His mother had died in that foyer.

More recently, as an antiques dealer, I learned to pay attention to intuition. After working in the trade for a few years, I tripped over a talent I was apparently endowed with but realized only after putting two and two together. I became aware that when at a flea market or antiques store, I could almost ‘sniff’ out some esoteric bargain that I knew something about but few others would.

If I had trouble leaving someone’s booth, shop or garage sale, chances were it was because something wonderful lurked just below the surface. Sometimes, I’d try and try to leave a booth but couldn’t quite get away for some reason. A situation would hold me back, either running into someone I knew or stopping to look at a piece I had little interest in. It was like I couldn’t move. Until I found the special object. The number of times it happened removed the occurrences from the realm of coincidence.

In the trade, someone with that talent would be known as a ‘divi’. If any of you has read the “Lovejoy” mysteries, you’ll have seen the ‘divi’ in action.

But, as I’ve said before on these pages, phenomena that we hold so mysterious and strange someday will be considered simply part and parcel of physics studies. After all, not that long ago—and for quite a while, as the world twirls—everybody thought some big white guy in the sky built the universe and everything in it. Then came Copernicus. Then Galileo. Then Darwin. Then modern science.

But that’s not to say that paranormal, ghosts, goblins and other entities that go bump in the night aren’t fun to write.

To wit:

                           

                                    Playing With Dolls     by Daddy X
                                         (ERWA Treasure Chest)

Fred Grogan tucked the kids in bed and stashed the Halloween candy. Little Freddie and Kate had scored plenty of treats dressed as tiny angels. Jean, his wife, wasn’t back yet and he’d figured on that. She said she’d stay home waiting on trick-or-treaters but Fred knew better. He withdrew into his workshop to be alone.

Meanwhile, in a bedroom a block away:

“Jeanie, you’re some kinda doll. What a handful of pussy you got.”

“You bet, you big fucking hunk o’ cock you. Do me before Fred gets home with the brats.”

“He doesn’t suspect?”

“Fucking wimp. He wouldn’t say anything anyway. You're twice his size and twice the man. What’s that pencil dick gonna do?”

Jean’s neighbor stood over her tipped-up ass at the foot of the bed then entered her violently from behind. “How’s that, bitch? Want it hard?”

“Is that all? Harder, fucker! … Oh! Oh my god! Harry stop. … I’m bleeding!”

“Fuck. What’s wrong? Me too!”

An hour later, Fred’s phone rang.

“Mr. Grogan?”
  
“Yes?”

“County hospital, sir. It’s your wife. Massive hemorrhaging I’m afraid.”

Fred grinned and hung up. He brushed the ground glass from his worktable and placed the simply tied straw dolls in a drawer.



14 comments:

  1. Daddy X:
    What's that old saw? The world is more curious than we imagine because the world is more curious than we can imagine.

    I mentioned a book in a previous post by Lisabet but I'll mention it again: "With Love & Light: True Story" by Jamie Butler. She is a medium. In the beginning of the book she describes the path to discovering her gift. Its fascinating and chilling, just like the foyer of your apartment.

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    1. Momma X took psychic classes back in the 70's, working with some heavyweights in the field.

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  2. Some fascinating little tidbits here, Daddy. But the flasher? Creepy in the extreme.

    I just read your story "Halloween", about the slut ghosts. Much more to my tastes!

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    1. Sorry to squick you, but glad you liked the other one.

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    2. Broken or even worse ground glass is definitely a squick for me, in any context.. I guess that's one reason for my visceral reaction.

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    3. Broken glass is a real squick for me too. I remember all those hippies, back in the day, running around barefoot in the city. On thinking back, my mental vision of those people is digging glass out of their feet. I'm a real pussy about my feet. My father would say, "If your feet are miserable, you're miserable."

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  3. Ooooh, ouch! Ground glass on his wiener and up her you know. Daddy X that's plain evil! LOL
    "you big fucking hunk o’ cock you!" Hilarious.

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  4. Sharp story, Daddy X. Shirt and sharp. Keen!

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  5. I've had episodes like you mention, feeling the cold, sensing a "presence". Me late faither would make fun of me, telling me I should "use the brain I was given", to realize that I was just imagining things. But I'd quote him one of Will's old lines: "There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Since he liked Shakespeare, that usually shut him up.

    As for the story? Ouch! Kind of reminds me of those vignettes from "Night Gallery", where there was always a "gotcha" moment at the end. Only yours has sex in it too...at least for a while.

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  6. I like the story a lot, as creepy as it is. Thanks for posting it. I also like your tradition with the earrings—it's cool that you've kept it up all this time.

    Since I seem to have gotten myself into science lecture mode, I'll say that while your point is taken (and I agree with you that there should ultimately be scientific explanations for these common paranormal phenomena), the narrative about everyone thinking the sun revolved around the earth and the earth being flat is too simplistic as commonly understood.

    There were Greek mathematicians who calculated the diameter and circumference of the earth, and I'm sure they weren't the only ones (I'd put money on there also being Arabic and/or Chinese mathematicians who had done the same). I'd also be interested to know what the Mayans thought about these things, since they had such sophisticated star charts (not something I've researched).

    As far as the idea of the sun and planets revolving around the earth, there were people who thought otherwise for quite some time, but the math that for a long time best explained the movements people saw in the sky was done by Ptolemy, who did it according to the idea that everything revolved around the earth. I worked my way through various writings by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, and Copernicus just doesn't seem very convincing when you come straight from Ptolemy because his math doesn't work very well and he uses odd techniques to try to fix things that seem pretty cheat-y and implausible. Kepler, who just seems hot as hell from his writing, is the one who makes it make sense by using the mathematics of ellipses, which is a sophisticated development that was far from intuitive.

    That's not to discount the persecution of scientists by the Church. The Church certainly made itself an enemy of knowledge, and I can get teary thinking about Galileo. I just don't like narratives of science that oversimplify a) the difficulty of figuring some of these things out and b) the amount to which people accepted certain theories.

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    1. You are absolutely right, Annabeth. But that knowledge never reached the common person. I should have qualified that, just that it sounded good as a generalization. :>) Most intelligent European seafarers could also contemplate a round earth. Just that it wasn't accepted by the powers that be (the church) until it couldn't be denied. The concept of a flat earth worked well with the concept of heaven/up hell/down.

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    2. So- called Westerners lost a lot of knowledge during the "Dark Ages". Due, I think to the church as well. (I'm pretty bitter about those guys). They claim they held "knowledge" during that time, 'preserving it for mankind', when they were the ones that suppressed knowledge, not allowing it to reach their minions. It's just like always. Control.

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