Ghosts and Robbers

There haven't been many blogs lately because my life hasn't been too exciting. I've either had my nose in a book or my fingers on the keyboard in an attempt to see my silly little thesis finished. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I've gotten rather attached to it. It's gone from a silly little thesis to something much greater in my meagre intellectual consciousness, as though it's taken on a life of its own and I want to see it grow up big and strong. Now, I haven't reached the point of total anthropomorphism by naming my thesis as kimananda did and I hope I never will - I don't have her gift for schedule and balance and would end up a total hermit - but I do feel invested in a way that I wasn't expecting. A curious development indeed.

But even more curious is that the old interest in academic inquiry, particularly philosophical inquiry, is stirring its head. There I was thinking that I was done with all those useless intellectual pursuits only to find myself being drawn to the old staples again. A sudden desire to re-read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kant, Wittgenstein, Zizek - all the old favourites - has caught me off-guard. And then I've continued to shock myself by seeking out the classics that slipped through the cracks of my past education. I've even browsed through Amazon's catalogue for new works of interest. My Amazon wish-list would fill a small, but respectable, library.

What has happened to me? I look back at the last few years and realize that I've been saying one thing and yet doing another. I said I was tired of theory; I wanted more focus on practice. I was tired of academics; education was over-rated and out of touch. But what have I done? I've created a monster of a thesis topic steeped in theory. And not just any theory. The theories I thought I'd put away for good, the ghosts of my past. I realize now that no matter what I say, or how far I run from academic institutions where we first met, my ghosts will always follow me, forever faithful friends, as dependable as one's shadow. And I've come to accept that no matter what I may say by day, when night begins to fall I will always leave the light on for them.

Now that's a metaphorical light, that is, because I don't sleep with the light on. I'm not afraid of the dark and I never have been. I'm afraid of the night. Because it's night when the robbers, murderers, and general evil-doers go creeping around your house. And I should know, I watched enough episodes of Unsolved Mysterious as a kid to be an expert in the matter. Boy, did I love that show. And if that wasn't enough I had Rescue 911 to drive home the gore.

The result of all this television violence - the original reality TV - was that I used to sleep with my windows shut and locked, laying so that I faced the door (also shut and locked), with three or four blankets pulled up over my shoulders for protection, even in the dead heat and humidity of mid-summer. And I didn't want the fan running because then I wouldn't be able to hear the footsteps sneaking up on me. There were never monsters under my bed, only robbers and serial killers outside my window and - you guessed it - spiders crawling on my ceiling (some things never change...).

But the point of all this, actually the point of this entire post, was to relate a little story about what was, for me, a terrifying occurrence last weekend. It happened late Saturday night, or early Sunday morning, depending on how you look at it. I was all alone in the flat because T was in Paris for the weekend taking a psychology exam so that he can add a B.A. in psychology to his already long list of degrees and become the single most over-educated person I know.

So I was all alone when I woke up around 6.00 in the morning to a chorus of footsteps, muffled voices and squeaking doors. It was still very dark outside, but the hard rain and strong winds that had beat against the window only hours before had ceased. After such a storm, the most intense storm I have seen here yet, the stillness and silence outside was eerie. And it was even eerier when contrasted to the very human noises echoing through the room. Yes, echoing. We have almost nothing on any of our walls; all the floors are cold tile; furniture is sparse; we live in an echo-box. So I couldn't tell where the sound was coming from. Was it from our new neighbours, just moved in above us? Or was it coming from inside the flat? - our flat, the flat I was currently occupying all alone...

As I sat there, still as stone, listening for every step, bump and creek, I thought about the stubborn lock on the balcony door and the guards that were quite positively asleep outside. And I thought about a story I'd recently heard. A story about some people sleeping in a house in our neighbourhood, just a couple of weeks ago, who were beaten up by startled burglars. The rumour goes that they were still in their bed when the robber's bat came down upon them. So I was scared, really scared.

I summoned up some courage, from where, I have no idea . But I was going to get out of bed, take the flash-light from the night-stand, and investigate. No sooner had I pulled the mosquito net back than I went straight from scared to literally petrified.

Something liquid had splashed on me - on my t-shirt, on my arm, on my face. Liquid, an unidentified liquid of unidentified origin, was in my bedroom, in my bed, on me. Instantly, I thought of blood. A severed horse's head, dripping above me or an injured robber gushing blood from a wound as he readied to pounce. Then I noticed the net was soaked, dripping wet... dripping with blood! And I saw the same severed horse's head only now placed under the bed instead of above, the same robber but now crawling my direction on hands and knees through a puddle of blood. Or maybe it was a corpse - a neighbour? - chopped to pieces on the floor.

It is astonishing how many thoughts one can hold in one's head in a single terrified moment. Somehow, part of my brain must have been working on convincing myself to turn on the light, because, as I thought these things, I reached over and flicked on the light hardly realizing what I was doing.

It was nothing but water. The hard rain had been too much for the bedroom window. Water had leaked through a gape in the frame, leaving the shadow of a large stream on the wall and a miniture lake on the floor as evidence.

My subsequent stealthy dash through the apartment was based on equally fantastic fears. The noise was only our neighbours above who must have invited the whole safari home from the clubs instead of just the usual mere herd of elephants. Boy did I feel ridiculous. Clearly a classic case of too much Unsolved Mysteries as a child, and perhaps a recent viewing of The Godfather had an influence as well...

So that's it. That's the most exciting thing that's happened to me in awhile. There you have it: theoretical ghosts and phantom robbers.