Well, I know that Clark had a worse Saturday than I did....but mine was kind of crappy in the very daily way that life gets crappy.

Here's an overview: I didn't fall asleep until 4:30 in the morning because there were three drunks having an argument right outside my window. I got woken up at 9:30 by The Hub who, accidentally, sat on my bad ankle while telling me that I was "oversleeping". After having a roaring quarrell with him, I went up to make sure my mom was okay after she had a tooth extracted. But she wasn't having a good day either & the site of the extraction was giving her some trouble. I came home and made up with The Hub and we decided to go to Gettysburg, where I managed to have some kind of paranormal expreience. So then we went to the outlets where I attempted to buy some underwear, but even that was fraught with difficulty. Now, after having checked back in on my mom, who's doing better, I think I'm going to take a break and go have a drink....

...O.k....had a margertita and feeling much better now, though, I must admit this one was not as good as the one I used to get on Friday nights sometimes in MA. We had good southwestern and Mexican food in our area, as weird as that sounds. There's still a lot of manufacturing in that area, and there were a lot of recent immigrents from Latin American countries who came to work in the factories. Like the Italian-American's who came before them, they were in no mood to be away from the old country AND put up with crappy food. So as a result there were no shortage of authentic Mexican, and "Latin" style food - which the WASP's went for with gusto on account of there is nothing like really good jalepeno corn bread when it's snowing....and it freaking snowed all the time up there!

But, as usual, I digress.

I don't know what was up with the drunks. My street doesn't usually have those kinds of problems. This was a long and heated argument though, with rapidly changing alliences and people falling into my phlox until I put down the magazine I had been reading at about 2:30 a.m. and hollared out the window, "Gentlemen! You're not exactly having a private conversation out there, ya know! Keep it down, why not?" This apparently struck them as the voice of the "Goddess" since they looked all around but never did spot the lit window. They did move on down the street to continue their discussion, and did make an effort to keep it down, relative to the noise they had been producing. They left at about 3:30 then came back with happy music playing, possibly from a car radio just as I was drifting off to sleep to the early morning sounds of squabbling birds...which meant it was about 4:30 or so.

Why are birds so quarellsome in the morning, anyway? Perhaps the drunks were keeping them up to. God, I can picture all these little birds, fluffed up in their nests, heads under wings, when all the sudden "Oh yeah, well F*** you!" errupts under their tree. The birds, bleary eyed, would peer out over their nests thinking "Don't you people have any respect. I'm sittin' on an egg here!"

Then, the poor Hub came in to wake me up and accidentally sat down on my ankle which has the 6" metal plate in it. It doesn't usually give me trouble, but having a 250lb guy sit on it is sorta painful. Instead of sitting up and saying something direct like, "Hey, you idiot! Move! You're sitting on my bad leg!" I sat up and said something acerbic like, "Who invited you?" which, while convaying annoyance, was another example of me not communicating clearly. We had to have a two hour fight about everything we could remotely think of before it was clear to the poor guy that I was mad at him because he sat on my bad leg. Sometimes Ginga Cool Cat is just too cool for her own good.

Anyway, we got that cleared up ( he promised to look where my feet are the next time) and I went up to check on my poor mom, who is horrified by dentists in general and was not looking forward to having this tooth pulled in particular. She had a lot of bleeding from the site, and had been advised not to talk, so I sat around telling her bizarre stories for a little while to cheer her up. I was kind of worried about her, because she looked so pale when I came in, but she got better as the day went on, and was later able to eat a little something.

It was such a beautiful day, we decided to go the Gettysburg and take the cameras. We wanted to take the bikes, but, when I woke up, in addition to having a 250 lb Hub on my bad leg, I also had a low fever and swelling in my wrists, hands, and neck....and yes, I know this probably means I have somekind of rheumetoid artheritis / fybromyalgia/ something- something. I've had my blood tested for all the scarey stuff, so no MD really believes me, and I have other battles to fight, especailly on account of all anybody can really do for any of that stuff any way is give you high grade aspirin. But, I felt well enough to walk.....it was just that when we got to town, I was hungry since I had forgotten to eat lunch. And, it was, by now about 4:00.

Well, for those of you just tuning in here's the story with me and Gettysburg. To be inclusive of my international guests, such as the charming members of the al-Sharif family, I should mention that Gettysburg, PA is the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. The area around the town was a battlefield on which fighting of almost unimaginable intensity took place, and many areas of the town were used at hospitals. It is from this town that Lincoln made the famous Gettysburg address.

You'd think people would have more respect for the dead....but sometimes I wonder who has done more harm to the town: the Union and Confederate troops who met to kill one another there about 150 years ago, or the "tourist traps" that have gone up to capitalize on the towns historical signifigance since then. This is not a dignified, park-like setting like Anteitem, but place where development has run harem scarum over battlefields relatively recently soaked in blood and where places like Boyd's TeddyBear Factory and outlet malls compete for vistors with places of granduer and dignity such as the Peace Memorial and the site where Lincoln gave his somber, soul stirring speech.

And, into the this mix of chaos and commerce, here I come. A person with a noted "sensativity" to things not everybody sees, hears, or experiences in a place where, if you are of a mind to, it is easy to imagine that a soul attempting to make passage from one world to another became lost in the gunsmoke and confusion of battle, and has remained lost trying to figure out why the hell there a place like McDonalds so close to the graves of his countrymen. I used to be very reticent to talk about this "sensativity" - but I'm not writing under my real name, and, besides, everybody who knows me in real life probably suspects I haven't got both of my oars in the water anyway.

I do want to say this before going on: I make no claim to understand what I sometimes experience in places like Antietem, Gettysburg, and (the worst one, when I was a child) Jamestown, VA, the site of a Colonial Era "die-off" I make no claim to have any "gift", "extarordinary powers" or any of that other mumbo jumbo. I'm not even sure if I believe in the "ghosts" the town is so willing to advertise: "Take a tour on a dark night! Our docents are trained to tell scarey stories guarenteed to chill" There are three things that you can get me wildly riled up about and one of them are these "psychics" who claim to "experience" the world between the living and the dead with as much aplomb as a teenager ordering a latte. Maybe they do engage in some kind of casual conversation with The Others, but my own experience and their tendancy to charge-to-share makes me think not. These are not experiences any rational person would seek out. At the very best they are "neutral" but more often unpleasant, unsettling, and macabre. An average "getting over it" time is hours to days, and in some cases, months. For many, many years I actively avoided Gettysburg and would drive for miles out of my way to avoid the place. Only lately have I decided not to let anything, not even "phenomena" run my life.

So. Now that my internal Philadelphia lawyer has given the disclaimer, we're back to me trying to find someplace open for an early dinner, late lunch. We found a place to park near a tea room, which we investigated and found that they were closing. Further on down the street we saw a place called the "Blue Parrot Bistro." I like birds, I like bistros. The sign said the dining room was in the rear, and we went in. It looked interesting to me because there was some lovely artwork on the walls which, it turned out, was for sale.

It was clear that the dining room was not open, and I was just about to voice the possibility of being served at the bar when I was hit by a blast of cold air as if I had stepped into New England winter. I was hearing a very unusual "whirring" sound and tried to get the perfectly rational explanation of low blood sugar plus over air conditioning to match what was happening. In fact, the cold was blasting up from the concrete floor, creating a deep chill. But it wasn't moving air....it was "seeping". The Hub clearly, was not experiencing anything other then wondering when we were going to eat. As I looked around I had a strong sense of dislocation, as if the edges of things were not matching up. "Ok, your fever must have gone up. Ok, you haven't eaten lunch" I told myself, trying to talk myself out of whatever was happening. I felt like frost was coelcing over my eyes and like I was freezing from the inside out. The whirring sound, though still soft, barely perceptable, became, somehow more intense. I had the aweful sensation that it was, in fact, a voice, and that if I could either slow down or speed up the way in which I percieved reality I would understand what it was saying perfectly....an anathama to me....since it was attached to the feeling that this "change of perception" would seperate me from The Hub, who was only standing a foot away from me. Then came the unmistakeable feeling of having been "hit" on some level in the solar plexis. It seemed to take me five minutes to turn my head an inch to focus on The Hub, which I felt I desperately needed to do, and when I did, it was like looking through the flimsiest of veils.

"What the hell?! What the hell is wrong with this place?!" I burst out.

"Oh-oh" said, The Hub, who has seen this phenomenon before. He headed for the door, trying to indicate a perfect willingness to leave, not knowing that I could have stood for him to pull me with him. Because, by now, I was getting the feeling that I had stepped a situation where some thing outside of control was trying to slow down/speed up/ change the "blur" at which I experienced things so that I could experience some other reality. And I have enough problem experiencing the reality we're all supposed to be experiencing. I was not volunteering to experience some other reality. I just came in to eat lunch.

Anyway, that was not happening. On leaden feet I made it through the door and was grateful to see a bench in the hallway over which I maneuvered my rear end as my legs gave way, causing me to land with a thud as I was saying, "I got to sit down." God bless The Hub, he dutifully sat there beside me, while I closed my eyes and tried to shake off the feeling like I'd been punched in the gut and refrigerated.

Finally, I literally staggered out onto the street where everything seemed twice as bright and three times as loud as it had before I crossed the doorsill of the Blue Parrott. My balance, sense of direction, and ability to walk normally were gone - and my main emmotion was anger because I had run across some weird field of energy thing and I was afraid it had undone all of Dr. BackCrackers work. And how the hell was I going to explain THIS to him. "I'll tell him I fell down the stairs" I thought as The Hub guided me into a newly built restaurant up the street in the other direction. I went into the ladies room to splash some water on my face. The Hub kept asking me what had happened to me back there, but I was just freaked out. I ordered food but couldn't eat it. I had some cheese sticks and two bites of my sandwhich and was now REALLY pissed off since I had wasted money on an inedible meal!

The anger gave me energy to go back to the place and see if there were any historical markers nearby. Past experience taught me to suspect I had been near the site of a hospital. It's really hard to describe the frame of mind I was in. It was like I had encountered something and I was mad at it. I wanted to show it that it couldn't intimadate me, that I wasn't going to let it bend my perception all out of proportion. The Hub said he didn't even think the building we'd been in was standing at the time of the war....but we did find a marker that seemed to indicate that part of it, at least was, and that the adjacent building had in fact, been used as a hospital. Still, this was intense even for that kind of site. I insisted on going back into the building, where there was much more activity and the dining room was clearly getting ready to start serving. Weirdly, no body spoke to me, or asked me what I was doing there. I crossed the threshold and determinedly examined the artwork above the fireplace, deliberately picking up a business card. I realized that I had not seen the artwork displayed....I had seen something else, but could not now remember what. I stepped backwards, close to the area where I'd been standing ( still in front of the fireplace) to look at the artwork from a distance and try to evaluate the idea of a "trick of lighting" Damn if I didn't start with the cold seep up through the feet again! This time I said, loudly in my mind, softly, but firmly under my breath "NO!" and walked out.

"Do you think I could petetion the city to put a 'warning: haunted' sign on some of these buildings?" I asked The Hub

"Probably. These people love their ghosts." The Hub answered mildly.

Then, in my opinion, they don't know them very well.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll ask Friend Will, whose knowlege about the local battlefields is almost encyclopedic if he knows what might have gone on there. Meanwhile my nerves are much more settled after that drink. What a waste of a good Saturday!