past presences

Welcome back from wherever you imagine you are!

            I don't regularly get swept up in the hallow tide — on its chosen day, anyway. It appears to be a year-round ritual judging from images on world news & its televised cast of living-caricature celebrity ghouls du jour. Even so, in the equally unreal real world, on a thirty-first excursion a few years back, there was an unavoidable personal encounter at a chain pharmacy with a zombie-accessorized cashier who rang up my prescription plus an impulse-buy processed meat stick snacker.

Trying to be a team player in life occasionally though, I used to leave a traditional bucket of candy in front of my latched gate, but no one ever took much if any & then I had to deal with the surplus haunting me just after midnight, which is known in relaxed pagan circles as the weeding hour.

You see, my cluttered porch is an uninvited step too far for T-or-T-ers of any kind: it's my personal detritus gallery — a collection of seemingly its own making with various items memorialized there like lost apparitions with no better place to be adored.

For instance, there's a weathered plaster religious icon I found on the street, chipping/eroding away like a discarded holy sphinx. I lugged it home & put on display to decoratively curate my historic impression of institutional faith's organized tricky business. To compliment the statement piece, a small animal skull was also found shortly thereafter while digging up our garden, so of course it was aesthetically placed at the feet of the statuette. But, a coupla years later, I was treated to a morning screen door tap from religion pamphlet thumpers. I nutshelled, from a half-cracked opening, my own belief that they eternally need not transgress my stoop again. When the coast was clear to go outside, I noticed that the noggin was missing from the vigil. As my sole property pilgrims, I don't doubt that the door-to-door soul savers are the ones who lifted it, thereby giving my staged installment an even deeper validity, like a self-fulfilling vigilante theology of rogue idol skullduggery . . . 

            Back in '95, an age of innocence when resorting to a word like “skullduggery'“ was inconceivable, I was living in Bellingham WA & writing what would be my second album Devotion & Doubt in a one room cabin I rented on a reserve just outside of town. There were burial mounds around the property & a strange slat shed about the size of an outhouse where the landlord had left a scythe inside hanging upside-down by its grip from a rope like a stilled pendulum. I discovered it after I first moved in & was poking around. I never had an inclination to open the shed again.

Also, seen in the darkness outside from my bedside window there, in the woods behind the place, tiny lights sometimes flickered around the treetops when it wasn't their beetle season. I mostly wrote it off as moonlight reflecting off northwestern precipitation collected on wind-sheared branch leaves, but also didn't completely abandon the idea that it was possibly just a phenomenon again enhanced by interior smoke rings hovering in the high-minded insomnia of clear nightfall.

It's where I was living the last time I wore a costume, working the door downtown at 3Bs Tavern in late October, mostly just to check IDs but also as a backup bouncer & wearing a, yes, head-to-boot bunny suit sewn from an adult-size kit by my mother during a pre-teen growth spurt & still nostalgically held onto into my thirties. I did toss a drunk out that night, so if anyone has a fuzzy recollection from their heyday of an altercation with a giant rabbit, please understand I was just doing my job. I no longer own the outfit, having left it with a drinking rascal of my own in Canada when I voluntarily moved back south as an international bestowal to all involved parties.

S & M mannequin portrayal — not actual said full-body hare getup