Gay Ghost Party

My answers to a quiz yesterday revealed I'm probably a psychopath. The bad news is there's nothing I can do about it. The good news is I went to a party last night and heard truly fantastic ghost stories from a ghost survivor. Have you heard the one about a ghost climbing into an attractive man's bed and situating himself inside the man's body like the man is a condom? I have. The man tries to escape the ghost by sitting up, but the ghost pins the man back down. Just then, a heroic cat leaps onto the man's chest and scratches the spirit out. We should all have such cats, but most of us don't.

I would trade a lot of my memories for a few solid ghost stories. The ones I have are frustrating, like a piece of paper I chase down the street because I don't remember the phone number written on it. Stretch that out into years. The phone number becomes obsolete. I no longer pursue it. I pursue the paper itself. The artifact, not the details. The more and more I look at my own ghost stories (a woman in a fancy dress reflected in the marble floor during the pre-opening hour of an art museum, or a phantom pulling the sheets off me in a new apartment with ceilings high and dark enough to hide any multitude of idle hands), the more translucent they become. Ghostlike, of course. I isolate each experience. To link them in any way starts a conversation I'd rather not have.

I could compare the stories I heard last night to the stories of my seizures. Similar conclusions. Why does this keep happening? Answer: sensitivity. For whatever reason.

The electricity in my brain has kept stable for two months. Fingers crossed. Legs crossed. Eyes crossed like when I've captured a spider in a cigar tube and I hold it close trying to identify it by eye arrangement and the absence or presence of leg hairs.

My mother has her own ghost stories she refuses to tell. The last time I asked her about them, she said, "I've closed my mind to those possibilities." The man at the party last night said the same thing. He flipped the switch, and now he sees nothing specific. Every once in a while he'll get a feeling, but he'll go out of his way to avoid turning that feeling tangible.

I doubt the well on the stories had dried, but our glasses had gone empty. The party grew beyond the porch. More guys arrived. More conversations. Eyeglasses. Nudism. Microwaves shaped like spacecraft. Nothing much, but just enough. The quiz I took told me that even though I was a psychopath, I could still be a good person. Be more social. Go to parties.

HA. HA. HA. Three HAs.

Well, I know I'm not a psychopath, and you know I'm not a psychopath, but the quiz had no idea. It asked all the wrong questions. Not even once did it ask about ghosts. It couldn't have handled the answer.