I Just Hope They Meant To Spell It That Way

Last week as I stepped out of my flat, I noticed that someone had taped a photocopied flyer to the outside of the building. I paused to give it a quick once-over, figuring someone had lost their cat, the neighborhood association was holding another meeting to protest the new freeway off-ramp, or that someone was advertising their feng shui/deep-tissue massage/green tea hicolonic/aura-healing/chi-balancing/shakra-aligning services. Instead, it was a notice that a film crew would be shooting scenes for a movie titled Pursuit of Happyness on my street the following Saturday, which would involve restricted parking and partial street closures. The flyer promised that every attempt would be made to keep noise to a minimum, and that there would be no explosions or car chases/crashes. (Whew!)

I verified that the parking restrictions wouldn't affect where I parked Pudding In A Cloud (my 1987 Olds Delta 88, a.k.a. Puddin' - which, by the way, is prime material for a Pimp My Ride episode, if any of you feel like nominating me) and made a mental note to formulate a Plan B for picking up my mom and aunt at the airport that day, if the parking restrictions prohibited me from getting Puddin' out of the alley where I park her. Then I moved on, thinking no more about what I assumed was just some low budget film with questionable grammar.

Around 3:30am Saturday morning, the circus came to town - at least it seemed like it. A parade of trucks rolled in and began setting up for the following day's shoot. I have to say, they didn't try very hard to keep noise to a minimum. But most immediately obvious was the fact that this was a film with a budget. There were tents, there were early-80s period cars (even an old San Francisco Muni Bus), there were security guards, traffic cops, and there were police escorts. No question, this was Hollywood.

I looked online (God bless the Internet), and found out that Pursuit of Happyness will tell the true story of Chris Gardner, a homeless San Francisco man determined to become a stock broker, who at one time actually lived with his young son in the bathroom of a BART station. Chris Gardner will be played by Will Smith.

In Pursuit of In Pursuit of Happyness

Will Smith Pursues Happyness

I had to drive through the movie set with Puddin' to get out of my neighborhood and head to the airport, but I didn't catch a glimpse of Will. I did see one guy I thought looked like Cuba Gooding Jr., but he was dressed like a tech and as far as I know, Mr. Jr. isn't even in this film. But it was fun catching a little slice of the movie biz, and I thought I'd give you a little info on a film coming out in 2006 that you might not have heard of yet...(Bam! That's right, Captain Wow - I just scooped your ass, buddy! Do you feel a little nervous, Melia? :)

I'll be back soon with a report on the country's largest Halloween bash (complete with photos you won't want to miss). 'Til then, eat and party wisely and often.

Putting Up A Good Fright

The Silver Man - Part 2

The Silver Man followed me home and became a frequent visitor.

My memories of his visitations aren’t as vivid as the first time I saw him, which left an indelible impression on me. Seeing him ceased to terrify me because all he seemed to want to do was look at me. I would see him at night, after being put to bed. He’d peek around the corner, through my bedroom door, and look in at me as I lay in bed. Or sometimes he’d peer out at me from the closet, if I left the closet door open.

He looked the same as before, with shimmering features that reminded me of the reflections of moonlight on ripples of water. But now I could see how tall he was. He was well over six feet tall, and very thin. And when he appeared, he just looked at me. Watched me.

I always yelled for my mom when I saw him, though it became less out of fright and more out of a desire for her to see him too. But when I called her, he always quickly retreated into whatever dark folds of space or time he’d come out of. She never saw him.

When my mom became pregnant with my little brother, my bedroom was moved to the basement of our house. My old room became my brother’s nursery. And as he got older, he kept it as his bedroom. We never talked about the Silver Man, and had all but forgotten him until one day at the dinner table my little brother, who was six or seven years old by now, said something that gave us chills.

My mom was dishing out the mashed potatoes when out of the blue my brother said, “Every night when I go to bed, I have to get up and shut the closet door because there’s a shiny man in there looking at me.”

My mom dropped the spoon into the bowl of potatoes. I looked at her, and she was looking at me. I had goosebumps. I said, “Do you remember…?”

“Yes,” she replied quickly, and that was it. We didn’t say anything more about it. I don’t know if we didn’t want to scare my little brother, who didn’t seem too freaked out by it, but we just didn’t say anything more beyond that.

Just a week or two later, a neighbor girl knocked on our door asking if my brother could come out and play. I hollered at my brother, and while we stood waiting she asked, “Who is that man in your garage?”

“What man?”

“There’s a tall white man standing on a ladder in your garage, reaching up into the attic.”

“Show me,” I told her, and we walked around the front of the house to the garage. The garage door was open. In the middle of the floor was a ladder, directly beneath a hole in the ceiling that led into the attic. Through the hole, several boxes were visible. These boxes held items we’d salvaged from my great-grandfather’s farmhouse in Cameron when he died.

There was nobody around. “He was standing there on the ladder,” she said.

I asked her what he looked like, and she described a tall, thin man with white hair and a beard, wearing bib overalls. I showed her a photograph my dad had taken of my great grandfather and she immediately said, “Yes, that’s him!” She had no way of knowing he had died several years earlier.

From that day, the shimmering watcher - who may or may not have been the ghost of my great-grandfather - disappeared from our lives and faded into memory. I don’t know what became of the Silver Man. Perhaps he finally moved on. Or maybe he returned to Cameron, and continues to watch from the woods on the banks of Prairie Creek.

Haunted San Francisco

San Francisco is said to be full of ghosts. Given its history, this isn't surprising. But for as long as I've lived here (nearly ten years), I haven't had any unexplainable experiences. Well, actually, there was one.

I live in a rail flat, which is an apartment floorplan very common in San Francisco. It was built in the early years after the 1906 earthquake, before electricity. Added later, all the electrical wiring is on the outside of the walls. The rooms are laid end to end like boxcars on a train, with a bay window in each room. A long hallway runs all along the entire right side of my flat, the "rail" connecting all the rooms. My hallway is half a city block long.

My front room is the living room, and there's a "pocket" door that opens up into the second room, which I use as my music studio and office. Being an old building with no insulation, you can usually hear traffic going by, people in the stairwell, and the noisy neighbors upstairs who seem to enjoy dropping bocce balls onto the wood floors. But one night I was standing in the studio and it was unusually quiet for a change.

I heard a voice say, "Hi!" followed by a chuckle. It wasn't out in the stairwell, or upstairs. It was right next to my ear. I even thought I felt breath on my neck. I turned my head, but of course there was nothing there. I was standing alone, and everything fell silent once again.

I looked down at Sherman, the cat who lives with me. He was sitting in the doorway between the two rooms, looking up, with his eyes wide open and his ears perked. But he wasn't looking up at me, he was looking just a foot to the right of my head, gazing at the exact spot where I'd just heard the voice. I don't know if he could see anything there, but he definitely had heard the same thing I had - coming from the same source. It was weird - and he obviously thought so too!

Haunted Places

Here are some web sites with details of haunted places in Nebraska and San Francisco.

Haunted Nebraska
Shadowland's Haunted Places Index: Nebraska
Ghost Towns of Nebraska
San Francisco's Most Haunted
Bay Area Haunts from Haunted Bay.

The next time you're in the City by the Bay, consider a haunted walking tour! San Francisco Ghost Hunt!

Haunting Season

The Sun don’t pity you,
The rain don’t envy you,
The wind don’t follow you,
And the snow sees right through you.
-Nebraska proverb

It’s October and Halloween is coming. There’s a chill in the air and the trees are starting to look more skeletal. Winter is just around the corner, when it’s dark most of the time, and almost everything out there in the darkness is dead. In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d talk about some haunted places, here in San Francisco and in Nebraska.

THE SILVER MAN - PART 1

Years ago, a tiny town called Cameron sat along a dusty road straddling a meandering creek. An old German settlement, it was never much of a town, but it had a few businesses, a few homes, a school, and a church with a cemetery. It also had a little park right on the bank of the creek, lined with mulberry bushes and shaded by cottonwoods, that was the site of old fashioned religious revivals, snake oil sales, family picnics, at least a couple Klan rallies, and maybe even a circus or two.

The town gradually died. The old park stopped hosting social gatherings and grew thick with weeds and rogue alfalfa. Cameron became a ghost town. There are actually a few buildings still standing there, but if you didn’t know what you were seeing, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a former town. By contrast, the old Cameron church is still in pretty good condition, roughly a mile west and a mile south of the old town site. The last time I was there, the creek had begun eating into the cemetery, and some of the older tombstones were in danger of falling into the creekbed. But the little town west of Grand Island on the banks of Prairie Creek is scarcely more than a memory now.

The land around Cameron is my ancestral home. My great-grandfather farmed it, and some of my relatives still do. When I was growing up, two of the homes in the old town of Cameron were still inhabited by my kin. One of these old farmhouses was my great-grandfather’s farmhouse and the other belonged to my uncle and his family. Both houses sat right up against the overgrown woods that lined the banks of Prairie Creek.

Back then, “going to the farm” meant a trip out to one of these two old farmhouses. The days I spent out there are among my most cherished of memories, even though the woods along the creek were thick and frightening to me. We never went into the creek – the trees were full of ticks and the water full of leeches, and my cousin once told me that Bigfoot lived under the bridge. I also never went to the overgrown field where the park had been, which was just on the other side of the creek from my uncle’s old clapboard house. In fact, I only recall crossing the bridge on foot, into what had been the bulk of the town, a couple of times. Unlike many dark places, there was a darkness there that didn’t attract me.

At night, shrouded beneath the woods of Prairie Creek, the old ghost town of Cameron is dark and creatures lurk in its shadows. We’d often hear coyotes howling from somewhere in the mist and owls hooting from the tops of the trees. From the farmhouse we could hear rustling in the bushes as nocturnal animals moved about in the darkness, and sometimes we'd even see the dark bulk of a creature wandering through the dense brush.

But even though they sat at the gateway to what seemed like a dark and mysterious place, our farmhouses were havens of light and laughter and joy. I always felt safe there – until one night – in my uncle’s house – when I came face to face with the Silver Man.

It was an old two-story farmhouse. Built long before central air and heat, there were air passages covered by metal grates between the floors, to allow air to circulate and help cool the upstairs in the Summer and heat it in the Winter. I had just plopped down on the old couch in the living room. My two cousins were on the floor in front of me, propped up on elbows and holding their chins, faces glued to the gigantic wood-paneled television console that sat in the corner of the room, larger than a china cabinet. The grown-ups were all in the next room playing pinochle at the kitchen table. I laid back and looked up at the ceiling. Directly above my head was one of those metal grates covering an air-passage to the upstairs.

As I looked up into the dark space beyond the metal grate, the clear outline of a head and shoulders suddenly appeared there, staring back down at me. It had no facial features – none that I could see – but it was clearly the image of a man, and he shimmered, like the silvery reflection of moonlight bouncing off ripples of water. Face or no face, one thing was certain, the silver apparition was looking through the floor and staring right at me.

I screamed. And when I say I screamed, I mean I let loose a blood-curdling, bone-chilling caterwaul that rattled the windows and had the adults upturning their chairs and bottlenecking at the doorway in their attempts to get to the living room and see what the hell had gotten into me. The Silver Man quickly moved away from the grate opening, and the air passage above me was once again dark.

They tried to get me to calm down, but I was hysterical. I was simultaneously sobbing and screaming and crying – and subsequently hyperventilating, too. When I finally caught my breath, I told them through my tears exactly what I had seen.

Of course this led to pointless reassurances that nothing was really there, that I hadn’t seen anything, and after much coaxing (and ultimately dragging me up the steep staircase), the final reassurance of showing me the bedroom closet that housed the air passage leading to the first floor living room above the couch – the bedroom closet where the Silver Man had been crouching and looking down at me. See, there’s nobody here.

Of course there was nobody there. This only confirmed for me what I already knew: That there was some truly scary-ass, messed up Scheisse going down in the old dead town of Cameron.

Well, I was just a kid and that meant whatever I saw could be easily explained away by adults. And as it turned out, that was the only time I saw the Silver Man in my uncle’s old farmhouse. In fact, the whole incident would have been forgotten completely, except the Silver Man began following me. And eventually, I wasn’t the only one who saw him.

To be continued...

When Frisco Does Bluegrass

I sometimes think that I’m emotionally distant. That’s probably a typical guy thing, though I suppose typical guys don’t think about it. I’m simply not one to become overwhelmed with emotion, nor to let my emotions control my behavior. But now I’m going to tell you about seeing Dolly Parton.

Last weekend, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park hosted the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. It was a 3-day long event, with over sixty bands playing on five separate stages throughout the park, topped off with a performance by Dolly Parton Sunday evening.

I would expect that the crowd at a bluegrass festival in Nebraska would probably look like a crowd you’d expect to see at, say… a bluegrass festival. Judging the look of the crowd in GG Park, however, you might have concluded they were in town for a Phish concert – or maybe a gay rodeo – or, possibly, a Star Trek convention.

You had your hippies with miles of dreds tucked into colossal knit caps and women in patchwork frocks, spinning in circles Lillith Fair-style. And there were men with handlebar moustaches wearing hats that looked like gigantic toads. And people dressed as pink cowboys – feet crammed into pink gator-skin boots, shoulders draped in jackets studded with pink rhinestones, necks wrapped in pink feather boas, and heads capped with pink cowboy hats that covered pink hair – clutching matching pink poodles.

And the Galactic Sign Guy was there too. His name is Frank Chiu, and he’s a truly iconic San Franciscan (there's even a local nightclub inspired by him) – though most people know him only as the Galactic Sign Guy.

He protests. Many would say he doth protest too much, because protest is all he does. On the other hand, very few (if any) know just what it is he is protesting. He carries a sign, but it’s hardly any help, and he changes the magnetic-lettered wording every day. For today’s festivities, his sign read, "Stevens 12 Galaxies Quintrozenikulled Suppression Fox: Sydropenicalled Coverage Xekrojenikulled Repudiations Mobilizations Pediatrics." Now do you understand?

You may think the message arcane, but I assure you, it's completely incoherent. I do know that the CIA owes his family a large sum of money for casting them as lead roles in a CIA-produced documentary about an extraterrestrial invasion of the United States back in the 90s. That’s according to him.

So basically, it was your typical San Francisco crowd. And aside from the Galactic Sign Guy, it was no secret why we were there. We were all there to see Dolly Parton – for free.

But before I get to Dolly, I need to briefly mention Split Lip Rayfield. Split Lip Rayfield isn’t another crazy San Francisco character, but three crazy Lawrence, Kansas characters who can spit out bluegrass better than my granny can spit tobacky. With a banjo, guitar, and a bass made out of an old gas tank, they knocked out some bluegrass so hard, it was no surprise that strings were snapping off their instruments.

My favorite song was “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?” which gave me a serious case of the munchies. At least, I think it was the song – the park air was getting somewhat thick with some rather wacky smelling smoke at this point. But I'm sure it was the song, possibly combined with the fact that I’d been sitting in the sun drinking bourbon for an entire Sunday afternoon.

Anyways, Split Lip Rayfield was worth seeing – and you can. They’re playing at Knickerbockers in Lincoln on November 2. (Whoa! Snap! That’s right Touring Tonya, I just scooped you, baby!) Go see them – you will not be disappointed.

And then she emerged. A sparkling, double-E goddess with piles of blonde, Dolly Parton entered the stage. After a brief comment that we must all be in a good mood, judging by the smell, she opened with 9 to 5. I actually phoned my mom, who was having supper with my grammy in Grand Island, so she could hear for herself. Dolly continued with old favorites (I Will Always Love You, In My Tennessee Mountain Home) and songs from her new CD, Those Were The Days (Imagine, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, and Crimson and Clover among others). The CD's release date is October 11, 2005.

And as she sang, as I watched and took pictures, the oddest feeling came over me. My eyes started watering and I felt a lump forming in my throat. What’s going on? Am I having an allergic reaction to something? Oh my god, I’m getting emotional!

I’m not wowed by celebrities, but the realization that this person has been, in some way, a part of my life for my entire life and after all these years I was finally seeing her for the first time kind of overwhelmed me. I didn’t sob, or scream, or flash my chest at her, but I admit I got a little misty. It was truly amazing to see such a paragon of American music. And she was fantastic.

From our seats, I could really only see her boobs and her hair – and the flashes of rhinestones. But my camera did a pretty decent job of getting me closer. Girl’s had some work done, but her voice was the same as always – wonderful and sincere. Thank you Dolly. I never realized what a part of my life you’ve been.

Nebraska to San Francisco

I hate hellos. I think they’re harder than goodbyes. With goodbyes, at least you can turn your head away if the tears are coming. With a hello, you’re kind of obliged to make eye contact and it’s bound to be awkward no matter how hard you try not to look like a dork.

Anyways… hi.

I’ve been mulling and mulling over this first post for days now. And here I am, only on the seventh damn sentence (I actually counted, yeah).

I’m a Nebraskan. I’m from Nebraska. That might seem redundant, but I think some people all-too-eagerly give up being a Nebraskan as soon as they move away, and I haven’t. And I can't imagine that I ever will.

But I did move away. After a childhood in Grand Island, and a much older but no less childish young-adulthood in Lincoln, I developed wanderlust. I wanted to find out what it was like living someplace different.

Careful what you wish for, as they say.

In August 1997, I had a yard sale. It’s really too bad if you missed it. This was an unnecessarily desperate liquidation of everything I had. I sold VCRs for a dollar, my guitar for three bucks, and antique furniture for pennies. I mean, there were some incredible steals. Literally. I felt really ripped off after the dust settled. What an idiot I was. But I made $250 and got rid of most of my stuff, which was my goal.

And in September 1997, I loaded what I had left onto a truck and hit the road with my oversized feline pal, Sherman. We started driving west. We slept in the back of the truck when we needed to sleep. And sung out loud to crappy AM radio, when we could get a signal, while on the move. Sherman was pretty damn good company (and he has a better singing voice). Four days later, there was no more west for us to drive. We were in San Francisco.

I was looking for someplace different and I gotta tell you, I found it in spades.

Looking back, I was really dumb. Naïve. The greenest of greenhorns. With no job, no place to live, and less than 2 Gs in the bank – but wearing the biggest stupid grin you’ve ever seen – I had just rolled into the most expensive frigging place on the continent, where a studio apartment was renting for $1800 a month, and the vacancy rate was point-one-percent. (Point!) I was now poised to learn a big lesson in survival (I’ll save the story of my first San Francisco “apartment” for later).

So, fast-forward eight years and Sherman and I are still here. It’s amazing what a fool can accomplish when he doesn’t know the odds. Over the years I have grown, matured, struggled, and questioned a lot of things. I’ve had some of my beliefs tested and some reinforced. On occasion, I’ve had my mind blown. Throughout this process, I’ve gradually become a San Franciscan, fully embracing everything that it entails.

I would expect a San Franciscan who moves to Nebraska with an open heart and mind to undergo a similar transformation. In many ways they are truly different worlds. And though I’m here now, I’m still a Nebraskan, and that is how we will achieve parallaxis.

The term parallax pertains to the viewing of something from two or more perspectives – particularly how differently a thing can appear simply depending on where you’re sitting. I find that I have a parallax view on a lot of things in my life, now that I see them as a Nebraskan, but also as a San Franciscan. It’s actually a really nice view.

So that’s what I hope I can provide with this blog – along with some laughs, and maybe a few things that make us all think a little – a parallax view on our worlds, San Francisco and Nebraska. And that, my new friends, concludes my first post.

Now that I’ve gotten my awkward “hello” out of the way and laid the ground-work for where this thing is – maybe – going to go, I promise a much more interesting post next time – all about drugs and sex (including lots of nudie pictures)! OK? I’ll see you then.