HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me!

Ironically, this is FIRE PREVENTION DAY

Since my home burned down some years back.

It is also CURIOUS EVENT DAY

Which meshes in a strange way with

COLUMBUS DAY

since when he landed in the New World,

he believed he had reached the Indies!

Hence his calling the people he met

 INDIANS

Another Irony.

Today is also NATIVE AMERICAN DAY

Post-Columbus diseases killed 1 to 5 million

natives in the 50 years following his landing.

Talk about

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

GOOD NEWS

It is also BEER AND PIZZA DAY!

While I don't drink beer

(I get into enough trouble sober)

Guess what I treated myself to today?

Anyone want to buy
one of my 2 latest
Kindle books?

WHAT HOLIDAYS

SHARE YOUR BIRTHDAY?

ARE WE HEADED TO A DARK AGE TECHNOLOGICALLY?

Makes you think, right?

And does our culture even

believe in Evil anymore? 

 

After all only the uneducated and old-fashioned believe in evil anymore, right?

There is only what works and what doesn't.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder.  

What you call evil, I might call emotional free thinking.

God is not dead, for He never existed.

To be adult is to put away childish things,

to shrug off superstitious nonsense,

to embrace the thrill that comes from 

living life fully

unfettered by the dusty restraints of last century.

Have you noticed that the longer you sit in a dark restaurant, the better you can see?  

The room has not become brighter ...

Your eyes have just become accustomed to the dark.

 I still prefer CASABLANCA 

 to 50 SHADES OF GREY.  

I believe I have become a dinosaur

Do you think our culture's eyes have become

accustomed to the dark?

Becoming LOST

Ghost of Gertrude Stein here

I was a den mother of sorts to the most famous of the lost generation writers,

who excelled in their prose and failed in life.

Perhaps it was because they stumbled so badly in the war 

or in their struggle to get published that they grew too focused on their steps.

Everybody knows if you are too careful.

 You are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

One must dare to be happy, 

knowing that we are always the same age on the inside but must learn to be wiser than that.

 After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes

is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. 

That is why writers have to have two countries, 

the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. 

The second one is romantic, is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Your truth will come to you if you but let it come.

 If the communication is perfect, 

the words have life, 

and that is all there is to good writing, 

putting down on the paper words 

which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

And while you pursue your dream, 

learn from my Lost Generation 

and do not let it become the nightmare of those closest to you. 

TALES TO PUSH BACK THE DARKNESS_IWSG post

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1725721945/

Some of you are here because my friend, 

C. Lee McKenzie, 

pointed the way

in her IWSG post. 

http://www.cleemckenziebooks.com/blog/

Good friends make all the difference 

in life, don't they?

When the nights grow long, and the year is coming to a close, 

it's only natural that people feel an urge to gather together.

At the edge of the year, it also makes sense to think of people and places that are no longer with us.

Samhain is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season 

and the beginning of winter or the "darker half" of the year.

We now call Samhain Halloween, 

but the old darkness, the old fears are still lurking in the shadows just past the light of our illusory faith in science. 

Why do we like scary stories?

When you read one that becomes frost down your spine, 

you are hit with the feeling to read another one.  

You have to love dopamine! 

It's not the believing them that is the crux, but the disbelieving them 

though they breathe winter through your veins.

You step out of the prose haunted house pumped by adrenaline 

but comforted by the knowledge that such things can't happen ... that you are safe.

'Or are you?' 

whispers the eternal child who awakens whenever the shadows draw close.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HM8ZS5Q/

Take a ride on my twin ghost trains.

(Only $1.99 each on Kindle) 

Who knows?

 You may win one of the 20 prizes offered 

on Lee's blog.

Oops!

This was supposed to
go up at midnight. 

DON'T BE SO SURE

Everyone knows that there is no such thing 

as the supernatural, right?

The brains of even young babies 

organize sensory information, 

supply what is missing 

and use the information 

to generate theories about the world.

As adults we continue to do that.

That process has led, not only to treasure,

but to new discoveries in science.

MY LATEST BOOK 

& THE GOD HELMET

A theory I proposed in my latest book to explain why we feel a presence in a haunted house was actually explored by science.

A Canadian neuroscientist named Michael Persinger 

has been studying the effects of electromagnetic fields on people’s perceptions of ghosts, 

hypothesizing that pulsed magnetic fields, imperceptible on a conscious level, 

can make people feel as if there is a “presence” in the room with them 

by causing unusual activity patterns in the brain’s temporal lobes. 

He created what he christened the "God Helmet."  

Wearing a helmet, generating a weak magnetic field, can cause a person to sense an unseen presence in the room.

Is it an illusion 

or merely the brain being amplified to sense what has been there all along?

Shades of hats made of tin foil!  

Maybe those poor people were actually onto something. 

SCIENCE HAS LIMITS

Questions that deal with supernatural explanations are, by definition, beyond the realm of nature: 

Hence, beyond the realm of what can be studied by science.

PATROLMEN HAVE TO DEAL 

WITH WHAT IS

There is actually a surprisingly vast number of paranormal encounters reported by law enforcement.

A young officer responding to a 5150 (a psychiatric disturbance) 

arrived to find an elderly woman who said  her son had taken drugs and was convinced 

that when he entered his room he could see an old man in a WWII uniform hanging on a noose from the ceiling. 

When the officer spoke to the son directly, 

the strung-out man claimed that he had been told not to enter the room by the spirit dwelling within

because it was the angry spirit’s father who was supposedly hanging from the ceiling.

The officer entered, finding no body.

At that moment, a veteran officer purportedly arrived on the scene, 

who told the other officer that he had been called to that very same residence years before 

to investigate a case of an older man who had hung himself there in that exact same bedroom. 

Apparently the victim had been a WWII veteran 

and had fully decked himself out in his old uniform before ending his own life on the noose.

It does make you wonder, doesn't it?  

Oh, has your dog ever stared into a corner 

in which you cannot see a thing?

What does it see do you imagine?