SONG OF THE DAY: Footsteps in the Dark (screwed)

It is cold now but also I do not live in a country house with woodpile and stove this year, but instead in a city basement apartment, the shameful existence of a separated male lacking in financial security net, living in someone else’s mother’s basement. It is not as cold because I bought an $8 blanket from Roses the other week, a salmon pink color to challenge masculinity stereotypes, but my city basement apartment has gas heater, hooked up unseen connectors to city supply, and it will be silence in the apartment, and cold, and then the machine will start snortling with preparations and finally roar to life, filling my humble rented partial home with warmth.

I often feel the presence of footsteps in the hallway at night, and my children are horribly afraid of the laundry room door being open when they are with me. It is obviously some sort of portal, or there are spirits afoot. I have burned sage, and spoken the “THERE’S NOTHING LEFT FOR YOU HERE!” mantra of supernatural release, but unfortunately it looks like I have a bureaucratic ghost. Most ghosts in popular culture are malevolent or heavily involved in interfering with your life in some bizarre and reality-challenging way. I apparently am affected by a mundane ghost, one who just walks around the hall, looks around, and doesn’t really do shit. In fact, usually when I have said the mantra of supernatural release, which normally works, I can tell they just hide in the laundry room, pretending to not be there, until I forget, and then they start walking around in the hallway at night again.

With winter comes the roar of the furnace, which drowns out these ghostly footsteps in the dark, and it means I sleep better. Except I don’t, because it goes from cold and cuddled under blankets to painfully hot, and it seems difficult to find the sweet spot in between with the clunky gas furnace and decades-old thermostat. Also, I am haunted internally by my own ghosts, and failure demons, and worries and fears. So I will wake up, not sleep, pace to the kitchen down the hall, then back to bed, then back to the bathroom, then back to the kitchen, then bedroom again. I sometimes wonder if I am not already dead and I am the ghost pattering down someone else’s hallway, someone who is living an actual life, full of realized dreams and ambitions that are achievable. I’m probably not but it’s impossible to tell. Reality is never as real as people try to make you believe it is.