So, I haven't blogged about my life in quite some time. No real reason, really. Just didn't feel like it.

But, I figured I'd change that a little bit. So here goes.

- Have spent the greater part of the last two months working on an indie flick. We're on break over the holidays but should resume shooting fairly soon.

- Have spent the greater part of my break from the movie working at Lowe's. A lot of people there give me crap for "never being there" but I seem to be getting 35-40 hours weekly. That's an awful lot of hours for someone who is "never there." Assholes.

- I've been finding myself longing to work on my novel more and more lately. I'm in the second draft and would really like to have it finished up before June.

- My back is out again. Argh.

- I received a ton of Best Buy gift cards and cash for Christmas. So, I bought a Playstation 3 with "Donnie Darko," "Family Guy: Something, Something, Something Darkside," and "King Kong (2005)" on Blu-Ray. Good deal.

- My New Year's resolutions are to finish my movie, my novel, and to get below the 200 lb. mark.

My Haunted Life, pt. 3

(Read previous entries in My Haunted Life: Part 1 and Part 2)

On August 6^th, 2002 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was making its first appearance on DVD. My roommate was still in Minnesota and a couple of friends came over the night before the DVD release, with our intent being to pick up the DVD at midnight from Wal-Mart. One of those friends asked to play my roommate’s guitar and since my roommate always let him, I told him to go upstairs and get it from the bedroom. Now, my roommate’s bedroom was in an obvious addition to the house: it was just off the kitchen and up some stairs in a kind of tri-level fashion, except that it had its own “basement,” which we used as a computer room, and was somewhere halfway between the main level and the regular basement. So, we basically had four stories, with one story being only a half floor up and having just my roommate’s bedroom and one other story being on the way to the basement.

Well, my friend went up the short stairs to the first and a half floor bedroom and fairly quickly came back down. I asked him where the guitar was and he said he couldn’t find it. None of the lights would work in my roommate’s bedroom. We all thought it was weird that my roommate would let the lights burn out – he had three lamps. I don’t think any of us gave it any further thought and we went and bought Fellowship of the Ring as planned.

When we arrived back at the house, one of us (I don’t remember which one) noticed that the lights were on in my roommate’s bedroom. I asked my friend if he’d been sure they were out and he said that he’d tried them all and couldn’t get them to work. I told him he could grab the guitar then, but he refused to go up there. I said it was probably a short in the wiring; he was being ridiculous and I decided to go up there myself. The other two accompanied me up the stairs and into the bedroom. All three of us entered and I pointed out the guitar in the closet. We walked into the center of the room.

All of the lights went out.

Faster than I would have reckoned was humanly possible, we ran back to the kitchen. Out of breath, the three of us tried convincing each other that it was a wiring problem, though in our minds I’m pretty sure none of us believed it. We tried faking anything other than the truth that we were three very scared college-aged guys freaking out in a kitchen. It had to be the wiring. I said I’d go up and turn the light switch off to make sure we didn’t burn the house down.

I went upstairs, alone this time, and stood in the doorway of the darkened room. I reached my hand through the door and around the corner, feeling the light switch. Sure enough, it was already turned off. I hurried back to the kitchen and assured the others that we wouldn’t be burning the house down that night and the light was off. Somehow, the three of us managed to go downstairs and forget about the event, watching Fellowship of the Ring and crashing on the couches and recliners in the basement.

The next morning, I was the first to wake up, around 8:00 AM. I headed back upstairs and into the kitchen. I just so happened to glance up towards my roommate’s bedroom.

The lights were back on.

I walked up the stairs and saw the switch in the “on” position, which was not how I left it. Turning it off, I went back downstairs and pretended nothing had happened.

A short time later on, those same two friends would spend the night again (there was constantly someone crashing at the house) and we would all sleep on the couches in the basement. One of them had to get up early for work and threw his shirt in the dryer to try taking out some wrinkles while I jumped in the shower. Myself and the other friend stayed in our places on the couch and recliner, respectively. After a couple of minutes, the dryer turned off. I thought it odd that my friend only set it for a couple of minutes, but I tried to go back to sleep. Then the dryer turned back on. A couple of minutes later, it turned back off. At that point, I was wide awake and lying on the couch. Something was going on with the dryer, again turning back on followed only minutes later by turning off. It repeated this five or six times before I finally jumped up and ran to it, threw open its door and turned it off for good.

“What’s going on?” my other friend asked from the recliner. I asked him if he had heard the thing turning off and on too and he said that he had and was wondering what it was doing. I checked all of the settings on the dryer – everything seemed to be normal. Yet it had been starting and stopping on its own over a period of maybe ten to fifteen minutes. It was weird and I was a little freaked out. To the best of my knowledge, the dryer had never done that before or did that since.

Another one of the weird things that happened in the house didn’t happen to me, but to my roommate that owned the house and I’ve only heard the story second hand through him and the others involved. One day, my sister and a mutual friend decided to come over. They pulled up in front of the house and started up the sidewalk towards the front door. They got halfway there when my roommate opened the door, completely white and visibly shaken. They asked him what was wrong, but he said nothing and didn’t want to talk about it. After an hour, he finally seemed to calm down and they asked again. “It was really weird,” he started. He’d been lying on the couch in the living room and was kind of half asleep when he suddenly heard the voice of an old woman say, “Get up. Your friends are here.” Of course, he’d jumped up off of the couch to find himself alone. And when he looked out the window, my sister’s car was just pulling up.

My final week in the house arrived and we were throwing a huge party. My roommate had taken half of the day off of work and the two of us were cleaning up around the house. All that was left to be cleaned was the basement and my roommate still had to run to the store to buy some of the food. While he was doing that, I went downstairs and began sweeping and vacuuming and all the fun stuff associated with cleaning. While I was down there, I suddenly began hearing footsteps upstairs. At first, I thought that maybe my roommate was home but then the footsteps turned to running back and forth and sounded like a house full of people were upstairs and in a hurry. That freaked me out, but I lied to myself and said that it was just water through the pipes. I needed to finish cleaning the basement and didn’t want to tell my roommate that I hadn’t because I’d been too scared to stay down there. Especially since he didn’t like talking about the house being haunted as it was. I continued what I was doing and the running subsided. I finished and began up the stairs.

No one can ever tell me that the paranormal isn’t real, for what happened next is the one thing that solidified me from being on the fence about it to becoming a believer in there being something more than what we normally can sense. If I had to pick one thing and one thing only from my experiences and say, “This is real. This was not imagined. This was not the product of an over-active imagination,” the following would be it.

I was going up the stairs after cleaning the basement when quite clearly I felt a hand place itself upon my shoulder and give me a push up the stairs.

That was enough. I freaked out and ran the rest of the way up the stairs, through the kitchen and into the living room. I took a seat in the corner of our sectional couch, windows on each wall next to me and a clear view of the hall to the kitchen and the hall to my bedroom and the empty bedroom. I sat there and waited until I saw my roommate’s car pull up the driveway. Once he was home, I got up, said nothing, and continued helping him out with the party.

That night, I slept in my bedroom. A few friends crashed in the basement and my sister slept on the couch in the living room. Sometime in the night, she said she was woken by what sounded like people running up and down the hallway. She too got the feeling of being unwanted and knew that she wasn’t supposed to be there at that moment. When I woke in the morning, she was asleep on my bedroom floor.

That was the last night I slept in the house, though I still had nearly a week left on the lease. I began moving my things out and opted to spend my nights at my parents’ house instead. On the last day that I moved things out, my roommate pulled me aside.

“Jesse, I suspected this place was haunted before you moved in,” he told me. He talked about one time he’d gotten out of the shower and noticed that written in the condensation on the mirror were the words, “I’m here.”

I laughed. “That was me,” I admitted. I’d written it a couple of months before moving in and was wondering if anyone had ever noticed my prank. My roommate called me a jerk but relief filled him. There’d been other odd things that happened to him before my arrival but he was glad to know that the one that scared him the most hadn’t been real. I often wonder what other weird things he’d experienced. And if they still happened after I’d left.

Costumed Avengers Coming to Cinema!

There looks to be some good superhero flicks coming up.

First, there's Watchmen on March 6. I'm jonesing to see it and I think Andy and I will be there on opening night, if they don't do a midnight show earlier.

On May 1st, X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes its way to cinemas. As a life-long X-Fan, I'm really hoping they hit this one out of the park and based on that trailer, I think they look to be keeping it true to the spirit of the comics.

That's about it for 2009. A little light in comparison to Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight, and Punisher: War Zone from 2008. But 2010 is shaping up to be a very good year for superhero enthusiasts.

Summer starts off right with the release of Iron Man 2 on May 7th, 2010. In fact, it was just announced a little bit ago that Samuel L. Jackson has signed on to reprise his role of Nick Fury from the post-credit sequence of Iron Man for its sequel and up to eight other Marvel Comic films, providing continuity in the new universe that Marvel is trying to create on film.

The Green Hornet makes his debut on June 25th, 2010. Seth Rogan will bring the masked crimefighter to life for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michael Gondry. At one point Kung Fu Hustle star/director Stephen Chow was signed on to be Rogan's Kato, but after Chow dropped out of the director chair for the flick, his status to remain on as Kato has been in question.

On July 16th, 2010 Kenneth Branagh brings us Marvel Comics' Thor. Not much else is known about the origin tale for the Norse god turned superhero.

DC Comics' western, supernatural warrior Jonah Hex will be coming on August 6th, 2010, with Oscar nominated actor Josh Brolin set to star.

And finally, on December 17th, 2010 the emerald guardian himself, The Green Lantern, will be hitting theaters with The Mask of Zorro and Casino Royale director Martin Campbell at the helm.

That's a lot of superheroes and in a good part it is probably due to the success of The Dark Knight.

2011 has a few more with the next installment of Spider-Man expected to hit, in addition to Marvel's The First Avenger: Captain America, the superhero team-up flick The Avengers, and quite possibly a third Christopher Nolan Batman (he's signed to shoot a sci-fi flick, Inception, this year and it's rumored he'll shoot his next Batman next summer).

Now, if we could only get some really good superhero chick flicks out to wash away the bad taste Catwoman and Elektra left in our mouths...

My Haunted Life, pt. 2

Last June, I wrote the first in what I intended to be a series of articles detailing my own experiences with the paranormal. As often happens, life got in the way and I forgot about my planned series of articles until recently. At long last, I present the second part (to get caught up, check out My Haunted Life, pt. 1).

In the Spring of 2002, I lived in a house in Rock Island, Illinois with two friends. The house was in a quiet neighborhood, just down the street from a grade school. Plain and unassuming, when I moved in at the beginning of April, I had no reason to suspect that anything was different about the place at all. I had spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends that lived there in the months before my own occupancy. I’d crashed on one of the couches in the basement many times instead of choosing to drive the half hour back out to the country in the dead of night. In all that time leading up to moving in, nothing had even hinted at any oddities.

The first instance came almost a month after my arrival. It was the end of April and I was home alone in the early afternoon. Both of my roommates were at work and I didn’t have to go to work at the television station where I was a studio camera operator until later on in the afternoon. I was watching TV in the basement (it was preferable over the 13” television in my small bedroom) and it got to be about the time when I needed to start getting ready for work. I got up, turned the TV off, and began walking up the stairs when I heard it.

The unmistakable giggle of children playing was coming from behind me in the basement.

Immediately, I turned around. At this point I wasn’t scared and thought that perhaps I had left the television on unintentionally. So, I went back downstairs only to find the TV was in fact turned off. Finding that odd, and not yet willing to admit that maybe something was going on, I quickly went upstairs to take a look outside.

Now, on the north side of the house, which I was closest to when I heard the giggling, our neighbors were other college-aged guys. The neighbors on the other side were older people and we didn’t actually have any children directly on either side of the house. This didn’t stop me from taking a look to see if there were any kids outside, and so I walked out the front door.

No children were anywhere to be seen on the school day, during school hours. In fact, no one was outside at all. I went back inside and thought to myself, “Well, isn’t that weird?” but didn’t consider it paranormal at that point. At that point in my life, I didn’t yet believe in paranormal activity. It was a bunch of nonsense and my religious beliefs didn’t seem to allow for it, though it did leave room for angels and demons. And surely, there weren’t demons in a house with three, devoutly Christian guys living in it. I was stumped.

Had that been the only instance, I’d have forgotten about it, or at least, filed it under “random oddities” and moved on. Yet, over the next couple months, other weird things would happen. Foot steps would be heard going down the hall or up the stairs when no one was around. What sounded like a cupboard or two opening and closing could be heard from other rooms, but when investigated, nothing would be out of place. Still, I went about my life. There were weird things and I was beginning to think that maybe there might be something going on, but what that could be, I wasn’t sure of yet.

One of the weirdest things to me was that we always got a ton of mail for the house with the correct address but with different residents’ names. At least a half dozen people had called that place home before my friend had bought that house. I always found that odd and occasionally wonder if the weirdness had anything to do with a rotating cast of tenants – whether the cause of their leaving or caused by it.

A couple months after first hearing the giggling in the basement, I heard it again. I was in the kitchen on an afternoon much like the previous, and heard the children from the staircase that branched off of the room. Instead of going downstairs first, I took a look outside. There weren’t any kids that I could see. I decided to go and check the television. As before, it was definitely off. I started to feel eerie at that point and promptly got out of the basement.

Something was going on. I’d heard the giggling twice while myself and others had heard the footsteps and cupboards. For the first time, I thought, “Maybe this place is haunted.”

At some point shortly after that, I finally told some of my friends what I was beginning to suspect. A few of them actually spoke up and said that they would occasionally get really uneasy in the basement; that at times it was fine and other times they would get the feeling that they were unwanted and shouldn’t be there. I could relate: I frequently hung out in the basement and more often than not, found it comfortable, with its two recliners, two couches, dart board, TV and surround sound system. But every now and then, I too would get the weirdest sensation from that part of the house. It was kind of heavy, like a pressure mixed with emotions of sadness and gloom. I can’t really explain it other than that, but on those nights or days when I’d start to feel that while going downstairs, I’d turn around and just avoid that area for awhile. It wasn’t a constant fear of the basement. It’d just come and go and I hadn’t connected it to possible paranormal activity until that point.

At the beginning of August, one of my roommates moved out and I knew that at the end of August, I would be leaving too, not because of any paranormal activity but simply because I wasn’t making any money at work and needed to get on better financial footing before living outside of my parents’ house. The home owner went on a business trip to Minnesota, something he frequently did in those days. I ended up having a couple of friends over to hang out and at the end of the night, we all crashed upstairs on the three couches in the living room. As we were lying there, suddenly a noise came from the kitchen.

It sounded like the faucet had turned itself on.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered. My friends answered that they did and asked what it was. They both knew the stories of the house and the suspicion that the place was haunted. They asked me what the noise was and I replied, “The faucet turned on by itself.”

Immediately, they both wanted to leave and one of my buddies suggested that we go crash at his house five minutes away. I began laughing: it’d been the ice maker kicking on. I’d heard the noise long before and discovered that it sounded like the kitchen sink after I’d investigated it. I explained to them what it was and eventually they calmed down, but for a while there, they’d been pretty scared (what can I say? Sometimes, I’m a jerk, haha). Despite my faking that one, there were other legit instances that would happen that month.

I'll Call You Back

A couple of posts back, I wrote a piece exaggerating my hatred for green beans. And while it’s true that I do hate green beans – which are one of the few foods that I can say taste truly repulsive to me – there are plenty of other things I hate more.

One of those things is the telephone. While it is a great tool for communication and I cannot fault its role in the development of information sharing technologies, I find it intrusive and annoying. There have been too many times when I’ve sat back to relax for the evening and had the shrill ring of a telephone interrupt whatever I’ve thrown on the television to watch. Or take a couple of minutes ago, for example. I had a vlog playing on my laptop in the dining room (which is where I prefer to make camp and write) and I had gone into the kitchen to get something to drink when what should begin its overly loud and piercing shriek but the phone. Suddenly, I can’t listen to what I’m trying to listen to and someone else is trying to make a demand upon my time over a device that I’m already irritated by in the first place.

Now, this wasn’t so bad when I lived on my own. Often, I would turn my cell phone down to a low volume, or if I particularly didn’t want to be disturbed, I’d set it to vibrate only. If it was on but quiet, I could hear it go off but it wasn’t so annoying that I couldn’t continue doing whatever it was that I saw more important than chatting on the phone. The other benefit of the cell phone was that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis have individual ring tones so I can tell by sound who is calling me, thus making the determination on whether or not I want to talk back. Caller ID does the same function, I suppose, but considerably more effort goes into finding the phone and having to physically check to see who it is on the other end.

However, here at my parents’ house, only one phone has Caller ID and that is the phone in the basement. Also, instead of being at a low volume, all of the phones (with the exception of the one in my bedroom) have their volume turned to high so that the ringing phone can be heard throughout the entire house. That’s right: four telephones ringing loudly every time some church lady, family member, or telemarketer decides they want a moment of my parents’ time.

For the life of me, I don’t understand how they can take it. I mean, despite having an answering machine and allowing whoever it is to leave a message so that they have the vaguest inkling of whether or not the phone call is worth their time, they actually answer the phone more often than not. Some of the times, they even have the gall to complain afterwards about how often they talk on the phone and how they had other things they needed to be doing. The simple solution: don’t answer your phone then. Give up being a slave to calls and let ‘em leave a message on the machine. If it is important (and so often it isn’t) then call them back.

Okay, perhaps this makes me sound selfish. Maybe even “elitist.” But I’m a firm believer that when it comes to my time, I need to be selfish and do with it what I want. We each only live once (that we know of), so we should make the most of it. In order to do that, sometimes we have to forget that other people exist for awhile. Then, when we come back and someone else has something where they’d really like my attention and they get some of my time, hopefully it has more meaning to them. I know for myself, that when I do that, it makes the times where other people enter my world that much more meaningful too.

I had a really odd dream last night.

In it, I saw our country coming to ruin and it was all because of our political institutions. Both Democrats and Republicans were bringing our country to its end, though the dream specified that the Democrats were bringing things to the end faster. In it, the Dems were loud-mouthed, angry, and stupid; the Reps were narrow-minded and ignorant. One Democrat saw me and began accusing me of being a Republican and bringing about the end of our once great nation.

"It is the Republican's fault," I agreed. "And also the Democrats. You've all ruined us." The man then asked how I wasn't responsible myself. "I'm a Libertarian," I said.

"Ah," said the Democrat. "The right path. If only we'd listened."

Really odd indeed.

The Greatest Menace to our Planet

I hate green beans. Hate them. I hate them with such a fiery passion that if it were up to me, all traces of this vile veggie would be eradicated from the face of the Earth.

Of course, that concerns me: what if green beans exist beyond this world? The last thing I'd want/need would be space green beans coming to this planet to wreak vengeance for the extermination of their terrestrial cousin. The cosmic, radioactive, colossal green beans would walk the streets destroying all in their path. Mankind would fight back, but let's admit it: we have no known armaments to annihilate the angry agriculture of alien asteroids once they have arrived in our arena. Alarming, isn't it?

No, I fear that as much as I would like to crusade against Earth green beans, the threat of a veggie menace from beyond the stars is too great. And so, as much as I despise them - they taste like feet! - for the good of my species and the love of my planet, I will allow them to exist. For now...