Ghost Stories pt. 2

yuh yuh yuh get ready

Alright ya Goblinheadz, get grateful - Goblin is about to don the garb of Flaubert and share a tasty encounter with the paranormal. I know u patient kind goblinheadz have been desperate for the next installment of Ghost Stories. 

As with before, rumor and hearsay - second hand telling and its kin - serve to enrich the tale. The goblin sees rumor as capacious, capable of exhibiting narrative with the grandeur it deserves. 

And I want you to sit with last weeks manifesto. Sublime Brain-Rot builds worlds and embroils the theorizer in the thick of things. With no outside, not pure space to jot down objective field notes, one must muck about. Finding himself perpetually within, yours truly - the goblin - wants to share his encounter with the paranormal 

Lets break it down. 

To tell the story, we have to start with K. Within five minutes of meeting her,  K told me that Harvard Law offered her admission, making the radical decision to waive their B.A requirement as the first high schooler to matriculate directly into the J.D program. How did she earn such accolades? According to K, she had impressed the admission committee of Harvard law by using psychic powers to prove that Courtney Love had killed Kurt Cobain. 

 A red flag so vibrant Michael Taussig might crave some of those subdued tones lauded by Goethe. 

But, Young Goblin, just now exiting the ragged shitstorm of puberty, found himself so enthralled by her looks that he felt calling bullshit posed too great a risk.Instead, he offered an enthusiastic: “That’s sick!”

And besides that, K owned a Gibson guitar, and consistent access to such an instrument made young Goblin want to extend the olive branch of comradaery. I spent nights in her dorm, improvising songs on her Gibson as she rambled on about her psychic abilities and ongoing battle with the dark forces of the world. She described cryptids with encyclopedic acuity, teaching me about the various malignant entities haunting the campus. Most derived from popular classics: ghosts, wendigos, and shadow people - the usual eerie entities common to creepy-pastas. 

K documented species of cryptids in a magisterial compendium of the cryptic.  Her most compelling encounter was a  hatted man that peeked from behind doorframes. She showed me photos taken from the Simon's Rock website as proof that the lore ran deep. The photo she cited as the most damning evidence was a black and white portrait of an old and gaunt man covered by a wide brimmed hat. The picture did provoke unease; a growing chill, seizing me like a febrile portent, imbricated her story with malignant credulity. I ran back to my dorm that night, piss scared about what phantom eyes watched from the forest. 

Spooky shit. 

Goblin eschews cynicism with tactful grace; where some may load it with a negative charge - ie… liar, schizo, delusional - the goblin feels a titillating enchantment. The goblin, briefly adopting a binary - tho he hates to do so - sees it either emerging from her true experience as a seer; or, the product of an imagination that rivals the weird grotesques of Gogol.

All truth, no hyperbole; life picks through fictions garbage. One’s surrealism is another's realism. 

II.

Anyways, through luck and psychic prowess I avoided any malignant specters. I was depressed, yes, but being a teenager in the Berkshires does a good job of precluding the possibility of being anything other than a little morose. To that point, farmers markets and kombucha bottles still trigger me. 

Love turns us into bad psychoanalysts. analyzing the most minute signs, rapt in a kafkaesque “do they/don’t they.” They owned a car and I would accompany them on long twilight drives as they photographed stars. After periods of romantic desiccation, an invitation to accompany them would reinvigorate my infatuation, nourishing the delusion for another stint of disappointment. It all seemed to converge when they invited me to a local spot called “Lover’s Lane.” 

We parked on the side of a dirt road, leaned back our seats and looked up at the stars. I felt the frenetic anticipation antecedent to the moment before making a move.

It was time to rizz.

 Ambient pop shuffled from the speakers; stars popping out, white-heads on a celestial sea. A buzzkill call shut off the music. The junior picked up and I could hear two voices. Mangled by static, the anxiety seemed relayed through spectral highways. The junior nodded and made a low affirmative “mhmm,” before saying “I’m on my way” and hanging up. 

And, ya goblinheadz, what nefarious conspiracies took place on that call? K and her friend Z had regaled the junior with a frightening encounter. According to K, that same hatted gentlemen (the one she so emphatically warned me about) tried to grab hold of her. They begged the junior to come pick them up. The junior obliged, turned on their car, and pulled out of Lovers Lane, leaving me shit out of luck. 

We pulled up Railroad St and spotted them huddled together on the curb. They piled into the car and we started to drive. Driving with no destination, those languid loops mapped on cracked country roads, I studied the junior in the glow of the dashboard. I searched - in vain - for some sign urging me to be patient, assuring me this posed no substantial problem to our night, asking me to be patient, promising we’d mack before the sun peeked its blonde head through the copses and hills. No such gesture articulated any residual desire. An intimate two became a crowded four, and the magic absconded. 

We spent another hour driving before the junior pulled off the road and into a field. They got out and set up their camera, hiding underneath an attached blanket, searching for the correct aperture. I stewed in the passenger seat, melodramatic and mourning the lost moment. K and Z whispered indiscernible phrases, conspiratorial and giggling, lost in their own world. 

…

Cooked and jaded; ya goblinheadz, I do this for you. You’re my special ones - parts of the collective; you spread my message far and wide and I need y'all like the stars need the sky; or maybe I’m the sky and ya goblinheadz light me up - the stars imparting some dimension, bits of brilliance flourishing in something endless, nameless. 

 I luv u and as always: 

STAY GRATEFUL, YA GOBLINHEADZ!!!!!