ghost stories

last night was super windy and stormy. i don't like going to work when it's all stormy out because it will almost certainly be dead in the club. last night was no exception. i didn't sell even one dance all night. but i had an okay time anyway. i just sat at the bar chatting with my co-workers and bar regulars. i tried not to look at the clock, because whenever i thought it was almost time for me to get off, about 15 minutes would have passed, which can feel disheartening.

finally i was done working and i went next door to eat a taco. i think i've told you the club is attached to a mexican restaurant and the basement is shared with them.

i sat at the counter, eating my taco and talking with the guy who was working. he looked a little bedraggled. i was like, "you look tired, how you doing?" he told me he'd been up since six AM and that he and his partner had done a spirtual cleansing of the basement that morning. for five hours. then he told he all about the different spirits they came in contact with. he said he learned a lot about the shanghai tunnels from talking with these spirits.

of course, i KNOW it's a bad idea to listen to detailed ghost stories at 3am, especially when you live alone, but i was fascinated. i'm sensitive to spirits and i can sometimes feel that there's a lady down in the dressing room of the club. i didn't know who she was and i tried not to think about it. i mentioned this to the guy, he said the lady had been shanghaied, and sold as a sex slave, and was down there in a holding cell waiting for her ship she was gonna work on to set sail when she died. causes unclear. but he helped her find a light that morning and she was gone now. he said i wouldn't feel her down there anymore, but if i did i should let him know because sometimes they think they've helped someone into the light, but the spirit has just tricked them and is still holding their ground. oh great.

then we traded some more ghost stories. i told him about the hundred+ year-old house i lived in in oregon city when i was a kid, how my sister and brother and i would always see and hear this one scary ghost, and how our mom was so super scared of it that she just stopped coming home for a while. and i told him about the man-ghost who used to wedge himself into the bed with me and an ex-girlfriend in san francisco and we'd both wake up and exclaim to each other that there was a man in the bed. he told me about some little kid ghosts he'd met. finally when all the hair follicles on my body felt tickly and sore from my hair standing straight up on end, i had to go home. i didn't like driving through the wind after that, it sounded like the world was howling at me. and when i got home, i took a shower and the gusts of wind were so strong, they were pulling to roof off of my porch but it sounded like someone was trying to break in.

then i crawled into bed and couldn't sleep, though i was very very tired. so i obsessively googled the shanghai tunnels, there isn't that much online about them but i probably read it all. wild dreams after all that, i'll tell you what.