So this is the week of stories that haunt, and what better day for stories that haunt then Halloween. A misappropriated misunderstood pagan holiday, turned Christian fright fest, then morphed into a reason to dress up like a Transformer great extremely drunk and if your lucky make out with somebody dressed up as a pirate. (Please note if your Bill O’Riley then this is just another Wednesday night).

It’s also the day Houdini died; magic and ghosts do go together like rum and coke. What is weird about Houdini if you ask most Americans to name a magician that is likely to be the one they name, yet he’s been dead most of the average Americans lives, his only film work is silent so its mostly people who have heard about rather then seen.

Halloween is all about ghosts, not to get all Wikki on you but it’s worth noting that the first incarnation of it “Samhain” was according to Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion: “The Eve and day of Samhain were characterized as a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken.” In other words: ghosts will walk; druids will dance about Stonehenge and be all druidy.

Halloween itself comes from this same idea: ghosts will walk. However in Christianity that’s not a good thing unless it’s the Holy Ghost in which case it’s cool. Here the idea is if we dress up like ghosts and zombies them maybe they won’t notice us. How this evolved into dressing up as Sponge Bob Squarepants – I haven’t the foggiest. Basically the day is supposed to be a precursor to All-Saints day or in Mexico Día de los Muertos that in turn gave an aesthetic for Oingo Boingo to borrow for all their artwork.

So the basic premise: if we dress as ghost we won’t be messed with by actual ghosts. The thing is, we tend to do that as an every day tactic, we just have different definitions of what ghosts are. Anyone anywhere who has ever worked at fitting in can back this up. Even while hanging out with reprehensible people we can still disguise our nature, even if its just to avoid being hassled; I spent part of my youth trying to lay the tough guy, unsuccessfully I may add. 6’0, 130 pounds and all of it skeleton ensconced in nerd finery, still I would meet any dare given to me by people I didn’t like simply in the hope of being accepted. Of course it never worked that sort of acceptance always has way too high a price tag, and you’re not buying it, your renting.

For me this is a day of memories: Seventh grade when I was in a production of Macbeth, a 12 week run at a theater in Downtown St. Paul. Macbeth is already a cursed show and Halloween is the double whammy hex, I might not believe in curses but I did get Bronchitis that night, a chronic version I have had ever since. The Halloween Blizzard of ’90, all costumes were hidden under snowsuits. The Halloween of three years ago where I saw literally thousands of crows in a tree, cawing, and flying in a figure eight pattern to another tree half a block away where a smaller number stood perched and cawing as well. (Which is doubly eerie if you have read the previous spook story) That served as an omen to a very bad chapter of my life, oh dear and gentle reader.

One that got repaired and made infinitely better, think bionic, only without the whole mechanized implant thing. Then of course was last year, if the crow day broke the heart of my personal life, then that broke the heart of my professional one. A year later and from a different vantage point I can see that this too has made me stronger, faster and still willing to call foul, even if it costs. It didn’t break me after all, a little scuffed certainly.

William Blake said, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, and I have had my share of excess but not of the hedonistic variety. Instead to quote the great American thinker Willie Nelson “It’s been rough and rocky travelin’, but I’m finally standin’ upright on the ground. After takin’ several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind`s still fairly sound. I guess Nashville was the roughest, But I know I said the same about them all.”

Or to put it in a slightly less abstract way: it’s by facing our ghosts, our demons, and meeting them head on, we make them powerless. Every children’s story about magic has the villain comes undone when the clever child says the witch’s name (Rumplestiltzken, Baba Yaga, etc). Its never the easy way, but if we don’t face up to our demons we wind up dressing like them… or you know like Optimus Prime.

I had a dream….er well I had a dream, not the Martin Luther King kind, rather a dream of a dead friend coming to say hi. Before I explain the dream a little background. About three years ago my life got very weird; within a period of four months three very influential people in my life died. The second one was Sonia; in a different life a universe away we were partners, she owned a salon called Hair Police, I ran the gallery and organized giant parties/openings. Together we helped build a cool scene for late night dancing and helped to usher in techno and house culture to Mpls. She took me under her wing when I was 20 or 21, under her tutelage I learned a great many life lessons about business, and being a human. I learned an open mind is a better one, that you can make your life whatever you want, a lesson that sadly I often forget to apply. When she died we hadn’t spoken for three years, not out of anger-well not really. More just out of being human. You’re not in someone’s life everyday and space happens. She missed my wedding; I missed a reunion party; time and distance and alakazam you don’t talk for a while.When she died it was all of sudden, lung cancer had attacked her body, and she kept it very quiet. The first most of us knew she was sick was the funeral. Sonia was an effervescent life force, she had a way of sweeping you up in her universe, and it was a universe always in expansion. She had a way that made the simplest task seem revolutionary; there is a line in a Dave Clark5 song that I really hope to live up to “they were young with all of their mite’, Sonia lived that to the fullest. She was the same age as my mom, but you would never guess that, hell it was hard enough to imagine that they lived on the same planet.
When she died I was shaken to my core, the wake up call that no one lives forever…well, except for Dick Clark.

Her death followed by another started a series of events that eventually led me to separating from my wife and spending a year pretty much eating ice cream. It was more complicated then that but if I was to pick one event that was a catalyst t was that spring summer of deaths. My wife and I did get back together, and then went through a period of work hell, followed by my getting diagnosed with Kidney Disease, and a lot of heavy Zen contemplation, followed by some serious lifestyle changes.

Then last night I had a dream, one of those its definitely a dream, where Uptown Mpls, merges with Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I am having dinner with Sonia. We are at a booth, just having a conversation and eating French fries. The room seems to be filled with people I know: my musical partner smoking a cigarette, a mid 70’s Jack Nicholson (ok I don’t know him) and a hand full of real waiters and service people. Most commenting that I seemed to be talking to that and myself they couldn’t see her, like a device from some schlock film.

I ignored that when I realized that she was wearing the clothes she had on in her casket, and right as I realized that I saw her as she used to look. The only difference was that her eyes looked dead, big and black- somewhere between a Keene painting and a zombie. What really freaked me out was that today as I was walking through Costco I saw a woman with those eyes. She was pushing a shopping trolley filled with Toilet paper and candy. Some sort of ghost consumer at thee big box superstore.

In the dream I got to tell my friend I missed her, she got to tell me she missed me too. No great message from beyond the veil, save to say hi to a mutual friend and tell her that another friend who passed on had been in her “chair”, apparently you still need haircuts in the afterlife. We walked out to the street and I woke up, because the dream was over.

I don’t know that I believe in ghosts, I don’t know that I don’t. I believe in energy because it has to go somewhere. So there I lay at 5:43 in the morning, staring in the darkness at the unfocused blobs of stuff in my room. When my wife’s old boss, died I swear he came to visit her that night, and we had a conversation-again as a dream. He was surprised I saw him; I was surprised that there was a presence in our room. He was there to see her and say goodbye. He thanked me for a smile kindness I had performed for some of the mourners, and then was gone.

It seems like all of my dead friends and family show up in my dreams, maybe its because like all somewhat neurotic people closer to 40 then they are 30 tend to have it on the brain. Or maybe its real and you do get to make peace in the end. I felt better, if not for feeling weirder: I got to tell my friend I missed her, and at the end of the day that is something.