Tag Archives: coffee

The Smell of Coffee Attracts the Dead

16 Wednesday Dec 2009

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Being away from everything is like being dead.

Not in a morbid or melodramatic light…just in the sense of being inaccessible and not accessing.

I had this vivid dream, years ago—I was dead. The afterlife was just my parents home. Only for the dead, like me, the ceilings were exceptionally high—small cathedral high, with a sort of inner balcony running a square around the house. And I (and occasional other wayward spirits), existed solely (souly?) in that square.

I walked around the square.

And again.

And existence was looking down—gigantically down—at my family and friends, doing day to day stuff. I am close. But I cannot interact. Cannot quite see it at their level or angle either, just looked down through my square.

And every stupid, little thing has the kind nostalgia that makes it hard to remain standing. They’d brew some coffee, and I’d be like, “Ye Gods! They’re brewing coffee. I used to brew coffee with them like that. I used to drink it out on the deck, with them, like that.”

And this went on. I occasionally took a break to comment on something with a random, wandering spirit, share a few jokes, make a few new Plutonian acquaintances—because I can be a funny-self-depreciating-charming bastard when I’m not stuck in my head—and it’s a few laughs between spooks. But they move on and by the time I turn my head again, for another comment, it’s a different face, or none at all and just me on my little inner balcony.

It was an emotionally engaging dream, that stretched through quite a bit of dreamtime, and was, oddly, very realistic. I really thought I was dead.

But I woke up.

Breakfast probably tasted very good that morning.

Well. Let’s be honest. It was lunch.

It wasn’t a horrifying dream. It was just funny, sad, and nostalgic at turns. There are some BNL songs that feel like that dream.

Anyway, where was I…

Oh yeah…Norway.

I’m away from everything and everyone. And I find myself getting little glimpses of what all my family and friends are doing…but not from the ground angle, and not really interacting. Emails and posts and Skype video—I’m looking down through my little square and saying, “Ye Gods! I used to have coffee with them like that.” Occasionally, at work, I turn away and make a comment or a joke with one of the new faces. And I wave the severed hand I keep at my desk. And I explain that, no, not all Americans have severed hands lying around (just us patriotic ones).

I’m gone. But I haven’t been forgotten (always flattering). And occasionally, my loved ones perform these odd seance rituals involving click-clacking on lettered keys, and they conjure a little, ethereal image of me or sometimes just my disembodied voice or just cryptic textual messages manifesting on the Ouija board computer screens.

The inverse perspective is a sort of post-apocalyptic plotline where I’m the only one left alive, contacting the dead with my own rituals (only in my inner movie, I don’t fuck up Richard Matheson’s book).

And then… My God! Are you having coffee?

So I thought of that dream (on the off chance that I wasn’t laying the parallels on thick). Again, I’m not invoking a death comparison for a sense of macabre angst…but more for the Weirdness of the experience. It’s been Weird.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this.

Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin Song!

21 Saturday Oct 2006

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Alright, I can’t sleep.  This is happening too much lately.  I think I need to start running regularly again.  Something.  Some form of . . .er, um, exertion.  My brain just isn’t shutting off and the extra time awake never turns out very productive.  So I might as well update…

 

And so it’s October and my inner landscape is aligning with the outerscape.  It’s that time of the year when everywhere begins to look more like my room…

 

Last weekend I was a reverend and I married a couple.  Strange.  Surreal.  I’m touched that Dave and Adrienne asked me to do this.  I could tell that some of the family/friends, at the wedding rehearsal were thinking, “OK…what is this guy doing here?”  But both D. and A. said they heard nothing but good comments after the actual ceremony.  So…I think I done did OK.  CONGRATS, you two!

I now have my coffee machine set up in my room, saving trips to the kitchen when I’m working.  I keep my coffee in a jar I picked up in Disney.  It says “Deadly Nightshade” and resembles the urn Sally used in Nightmare Before Christmas.  I also got a nifty mug…

 

And speaking of that…

 

With several other folks, I went, Thursday night to the midnight showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D.  Awesome.  I brought along a flask of rum to mix with my cherry coke and it was a lot of extra dimensional October dreaming goodness.  I was especially excited because I never saw Nightmare in the theater, the first time around.

 

Wednesday night I took my laptop out on the deck and set up a fire in the new iron pit and played spooky music on the outside speakers and wrote out there for most of the night.  Splendid autumn fun.  Our yard runs into forests and lately, the deer have been coming out in droves and walking around in the neighborhood.  I’d wonder why, but, staying outside, late at night, I can hear the coyotes, many of them, howling and yipping in the woods.  Over the last several years, their numbers have been increasing and now, instead of scattered single hunters, I think they are starting to hunt in groups.  I imagine it’s because, surviving in a suburban environment, their food sources are not optimal . . . but there are plenty of deer and deer go along way and hunting something that big . . . it’s safer to hunt in a group.

 

Some folk are frightful about the multiplying coyotes and their increasing boldness (more than a few pets have ended up on the dinner plate in my area).  I say cool.  Not that those pets go eaten but that he have a large predator surviving and thriving in this place, in a suburban place (granted, we have a lot of scattered forests)…a lot of places can’t say that, certainly fewer and fewer as time goes on.  The cats in my neighborhood have pretty much killed everything that used to live at the edge of the forests where the neighborhood runs into it (we used to have all sorts of things scurrying around back there).  If the forest comes out, howling at night, and takes a few of them…well…it’s not entirely unfair.

 

(Special Note:  I like cats.  I don’t hate cats.  I likely don’t wish anything nasty to befall YOUR cat.)

 

The howl if a single coyote sounds kind of lonely, and not particularly scary (nothing like a wolf).  But, a group of coyotes sounds roughly like insanity and I heard them while I wrote outside.  So…while the experience of writing by firelight was fun, the writing itself was frustrating.  I could not get that story to work (and I’ve attempted it in the past).  It’s called “Eye, Heart, You” and it retells three Poe stories and connects them and gives a new twist.  I’ll get it to work someday.

 

Last night (Friday Night) I wrote a story called “The Cure,” for a contest.

 

Speaking of contests, the WHITE WOLF NOVEL CONTEST is still undecided, for those wondering.  But I did hear a rumor that they will announce the winner during a convention in Milwaukee that takes place on the 27th through 29th of this month.  Keep your extremities crossed.

 

And finally, it’s that time of year to get some spooky coffee.  I just ordered some from THE COFFEE SHOP OF HORRORS.

 

I got a bag of Graveyard Shift (a dark roast).

 

And a bag of  Sundown Blend (a medium roast).

 

And, if you’ve ever seen the movie Dead Alive (I’m thinking of you, Alex), you might get a kick out of what’s written on the bottom of this bag of Skull Island (a dark roast).