Ok, so we all agree to certain things, right? It's how civilization works. We agree that money can be exchanged for goods and services, so our economy works. We agree that shares of IBM are worth a certain amount of money on any given day, so the stock market works. A whole bunch of stuff only works because we all sit down and agree that it's going to work. No rocket science there, right? So where I think this gets interesting is, sometimes we agree to stuff that we don't really agree with. It being October, let's take spooks for example. Most of us agree that they don't exist. I know they don't exist, you know they don't exist, we tell it to our kids until they finally agree that ghosts don't exist, and we're all happy because nothing is creeping around our houses in the dark of night, banging doors, touching necks and making weird moaning sounds. Drunken roommates excepted. The problem is, a lot of us don't really believe this.
Oh don't deny it - that's your public voice talking - it's just the two of us now. You know that you have your doubts. In fact, I'm here to tell you that there is a huge undercurrent of unacknowledged belief in things that go bump in the night. Inches beneath our neat, clean, civilized lives there is a raging river of privately held belief and doubt that completely contradicts everything that we've publicly agreed to be true. It's downright uncivilized and every one of you should be ashamed. If you've already thrown up your hands and publicly admitted that you believe in this stuff, then I guess you're exempt. So how do I know this? Well, let me tell you how I accidentally uncovered this odd little secret. It all started out when a group of friends and I moved into a rented house. The house had, at the time, been standing vacant for a year, ever since the owners had died. Sounds like the premise for a horror movie doesn't it? I'm not kidding. This is what happened. Anyway, the son of the previous owners rented us the house, we moved in, and after a little while we began to notice that the house had… well, it had issues. Let me give you an example. It's midnight and I've just been woken out of a sound sleep by crashing, banging and bumping around coming from my roommate Tyson's room, right next to mine. I know that my other roommates are out of town for the weekend, and Tyson had been out at the bar when I went to sleep, so I assume that he has come home drunk and is having navigational difficulties. I'd have gone straight back to sleep if I didn't have to go to the bathroom. So I wander out into the hallway. Tyson's bedroom door is closed but I can see that his light is on, and he seems to have stopped crashing around, so I go to the washroom and… well, I do what you'd expect me to do. Then I go back to bed. I'm in bed for about five minutes, not quite making it back to sleep, when I hear someone come in the front door. It isn't the sound of someone breaking in, but there shouldn't really be anyone coming in, so I decide to go look into it. I wander into the hallway and encounter Tyson, still in his winter jacket, standing in the hallway checking the answering machine. |
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