gone fliffin'.

PS - Off to Wordpress (melancholick.wordpress.com). If not back, avenge deaths.

despookery ii.

On the quick and nasty, a few words in advance of our Manresa visit:

Manresa Castle—located in the gorgeous and quaint little by-sea hamlet of Port Townsend—isn’t really a castle in any quantifiable sense. Its parapets are mostly plaster and the only thing remotely medieval about what lies within is the quality of its continental breakfast… however, with those Tripadvisor-type caveats safely notched into the wood of the discussion, it has to be said that the place is also a fucking marvel, and well worth the price of an overnight stay or day-trip.

a "castle" as imagined as a kid who was working with all Town System LEGOS (R)

The place—hotel? Resort? Oubliette?—boasts a couple of hundred rooms, many of which evoke a sort of Dashiell Hammet-esque aesthetic with their brass-poster beds, heavy old wooden furnishings and frosted-glass charms; the Pacific Northwest’s finest in throwback flophouse ambiance. The grounds are fairly small, but soak in summertime and late-spring blooms during the warm seasons, and provide at least one sitting area that beckons weary travelers and weekenders inward for a smoke or a spot to enjoy that latest Kindle download in an unmolested fashion. The rates are decent, the off-day traffic is practically spectral, and—considering that there really isn’t a hell of a lot to do in Port Townsend proper—the charms of the castle are enough to justify that sticky itch to get the hell away from anything resembling urban civilization for a couple of days.

not pictured: the palette-crushing food that exists just within that door

There’s also the matter of the castle’s absolutely drop-dead in-house restaurant—the Castle Key—and the fact that it’s supposedly haunted by the unruly spirits of a pissed-off monk and the equally dead (though eminently less agitated) apparition of Kate Eisenbeis, the wife of the one-time owner, Charles Eisenbeis. In the case of the former, the seafood and steak fixings are nothing short of exquisite—by far the finest early-evening dining experience in the entire city—while in the case of the latter… eh. Well.

Alright, brass tacks. Here’s what I believe is a fairly accurate formula for describing the average experience of an individual who’s marinating in surroundings of an allegedly haunted nature:

Personal beliefs on the afterlife + pre-visitation priming and orientation / variable circumstances x actual presence of anything remotely supernatural = what you’ll wind up telling your friends

but it looks mad creepy on paper

The sum of such an experience is hardly an exact science. A two-second flip-flick through the guts of Google will turn up roughly ten thousand different accounts of what goes on in Room 202 at Manresa Castle—supposedly the epicenter of Kate’s activities—from believers and debunkers alike. In the case of what Jynx, Exene and I have seen and felt while staying in that particular room… eh. As noted in the rambling manifesto below, my default position tends to be one of tentative openness to weirdness of all tints and tones… the potential for something otherworldly to tug at my sheets or appear briefly in the shadows included. As such, I’ve found myself in some pretty bizarre situations in our myriad travels… my beliefs have been tested, steeled, and denied, sometimes in equal measure.

But. I can’t say that I’ve seen anything at Manresa Castle that suggests the presence of anything other than the good vibrations and mellow feelings left behind by other guests after a good night’s sleep; there’s a certain kind of warmth that begins to encompass a place when it’s brought an unexpected joy to a number of people. New Orleans is absolutely soaking in it; the scattered bed and breakfasts of Sonoma have a similar kind of low-hertz hum in the people who work there and the charms of the rooms and greater grounds.

and they do have this

So. To summarize: things that trip along at the edges of the eye and the light? Paranormal presences and that unsettling feeling that ties one's lower intestine into a hitch-knot when they're in the company of the otherworldly? Nah. Not so much.

A place that’s worth making a stop at, whether with family, friends, or just your main squeeze? Oh, yeah.

And they’ve also got one hell of an annual masquerade ball for their Halloween/Dia de los Muertos festivities… but that’s a load of twaddle for another post.

despookery i.

It’s odd that my belief in the afterlife has gotten progressively foggier as the years have cranked past. I used to be a devout believer in the week-a-day agnostic school of thought—generally subscribing to the Church of the Great Unknown Magnet, and its pervasive glories—but as I ebb steadily through my thirties, I find that I’m losing my grip on even that mildly-spicy state of faith. It’s not to say that my hope is waning or that I’m unhappy with the things I see in the everyday… quite the merry fuckin’ contrary, actually… all things said, I feel closer to being a man in full at this point in my life than I ever have before.

Anyway. What I’m trying to get at here—amidst the waxing states of a midlife mind soaking in the shitty burned-rubber stench of our goddamned neighbors and their late-night Somali potluck of what might be stewed diapers and cow-paddy turnovers, based on a blind sniff-test—is this: even as I tick steadily away from the grace of a possibly denominational god, I find myself becoming more and more fascinated by the hokey allure of the paranormal.

Go ahead; I can’t type it with a straight face, and hell if I’ll begrudge anybody happening upon this lost corner of the internet for having a similar reaction.

All done? Excellent.

As I was saying, I’ve started to develop a bush-league fascination with hauntings. In a pop/schlock sense, this is best-realized by laughing through episodes of Ghost Adventures and that damned Animal Planet series with the cats and dogs and domesticated muskrats getting their shit freaked out by alleged “other-planar-ly appartionata.*”

the patron saint of hilariously misguided conviction

This really hit its stride over the arching indulgences of 2K11, which officially marked the first year wherein my wife and I wound up actually making something over minimum wage. Those of us who routinely traverse the blogosphere are well-versed in the tragic yammering of unappreciated academics whose students can’t fathom the glory of their intellect and whose vernacular consists of bullshit deference to the omega art of Murakami and whoever the fuck else college idiots are big on reading these days… so let’s cut that trend (and this sentence) off at the C5 and get this thing rolling on a different note.

Here stands an academic—lecturer and administrator—who works for for-profit institutions, plays headhunter games with his services and whose primary interest is in teaching traditionally undesirable student populations (see: low-income adult learners, including prisoners and veterans) and who loves his goddamned job with the verve and enthusiasm of a flop-street junky. I make a living wage, I get to better the lives of others, and I get to hitch my step all over the country in pursuit of conventions, conferences and presentation possibilities… while wedging random acts of touristy indulgence and other oddities in-between the Russian rye of my potential pursuits.

Yes. Which—coming all the way around on the merry-go-round of my generally apoplectic stream of dribbly consciousness—means the recreational pursuit of spooks.

ACT BREAK – READERS WHO HAPPENED UPON THIS POST DUE TO THE BAITING OF THE POST-TAGS CAN OFFICIALLY SCROLL UPWARD, AND FIND THE ACTUAL ACCOUNT OF OUR ADVENTURES AT MANRESA CASTLE ABOVE.

distillation of the fifth day.

It’s at these fragile moments that I realize just how much of my life has been spent in the midst of forced conflicts. I can count no less than fifteen good years spent at war with the frailty of various addictions, chasing the light of selfish daydreams in various tints and tones of delusion, and competing with the shadows stretching out from the feet of those around me. I’ve been foolish in epic quantities; I have a bulging disc in my neck that causes crippling migraines, patchworking of self-inflicted scars on my thighs and forearms, and the quiet emptiness of a man who feels as though he’s coming off of the high of his personal peak.

This is, of course, the sum of the week speaking though me; crisis reduces even the surest mind into a sock-puppet state, where you’re left flapping and babbling about your latest affliction and fascination. These last few days have been an unkind reminder of consequences, and a kind of crude experimentation in feeling the things that you’ve lost, while leaping at the flickers of what you’re likely to lose… in this case, swimming eyesight and brief bouts of nervous shutdown. Mornings filled with the flexing of numb fingertips, the gauging of whether or not to head back to the emergency room, and the specters of the yet another Hauser family legacy—the loss of the mind, the paper crumpling of one’s mental functions, exploding arteries and collapsing faculties—riding shotgun on the passing of time, while you set the weight of one moment against the one that preceded it.

Am I seeing double, or just imagining that I am?

Has the pain in my neck migrated upward?

Is the lack of memory or trigger-tug mental response a splinter effect of fatigue, or am I really losing my fucking mind?

I don’t know. Despite growing up in a household of healers, we’ve never done well in contending with medical realities. The recognition of what a lifetime of half-a-pack puffery and an outright rejection of anything resembling a commitment to personal longevity might as well be emblazoned on the family crest; the violence and suddenness with which our previous generations have succumbed to their ailments a constant in the ongoing storytime of our lives.

And for the sake of the record, even writing this feels like the extrication of something cruel and barbed from beneath flesh. I’ve never done well at admitting weakness, and at the times that I feel like I’ve taken on the complexion of something that’s been folded out of old newspaper, it’s the fear of being afraid that really takes the heat out of my guts. I look forward to a firmer tomorrow, but in the interim… being able to bleed a bit of this out of my system is quite a blessing. It feels like these words allow me to take something back for myself, amidst the ups and downs of the mood: feeling as though I've got it in me to lay waste to another world one moment, and then quietly wishing that I was sifting through some dire diagnosis of having six weeks' worth of life left, just to take the bullshit uncertainty out of the equation.

Anyway.

I guarantee amusement for the next entry, coincidentally. The travelogue—this waste of bandwith’s ultimate purpose—isn’t far off, and my fingers feel as though they’re sharpening up already.