I’m here. I’m alive. And I’m scared.

So, yeah. I haven’t written in a long time. Too long. Sorry. My creative energy has been totally nonexistent lately.

I’ve lost my mojo.

In the writing department, anyway. I lost my job with Charm and… Kapoof. It was gone. A million little things have happened in the last few months that made me think, hey, that would make a great blog post. But then I never get around to writing it because I know that the whole thing would come out flaccid and boring. (Kinda like this one so far?)

So to catch everyone up: I’m looking for a new job. I taught myself how to crochet. The childling formerly known as Boo has blossomed into a freaking person, all verbal and talky and shit. I’m in the process of launching a new website–details to follow.

And the fucking ghost is still here.

I’ve been trying to ignore it, but things have been really ramping up since I last aired my complaints in public. I’ve done the whole Catholic juju thing–there’s a crucifix blessed by an honest-to-God priest hanging above our front door now (which we fondly refer to as the ‘crooked Christ’ due to the fact that I failed to center the damn thing when I nailed it up there) but it doesn’t seem to have helped at all.

Case in point: my kid’s musical fucking potty. Go ahead, laugh. But that thing is a singing instrument of Satan. Or whatever.

Late one night after we had all gone to bed, something–some noise–woke me from a deep sleep. Since I’m a card-carrying member of the don’t-move-don’t-look-stay-covered-up-and-the-Raptors-won’t-get-you school of thought, I lay there, paralyzed with fear while I tried to figure out what (if anything) was making all that racket. After a second, I recognized the words:

I’m so big! Look at me! I can use my own pot-ty! And it makes me feel so very big and proud! When everybody SINGS OUT LOUD! Now, let’s flush the potty!

Squinting through the darkness without my glasses on, I could tell that Boo was soundly asleep in his room because his door was still closed. It wasn’t Red. Besides the fact he was laying beside me at that very moment, he’s not exactly the type of grown-ass adult voluntarily uses a technicolor musical toilet that sits four feet below the big one in the guest bathroom, ya know?

And the cat? The day that animal uses a toilet is the day I paint my fat ass red and run around the town square naked.

Not effing likely.

But I didn’t get out of bed to see what it might have been. I’m a scaredy-pants chickenshit. And I didn’t wake Red to tell him what I had heard. Sometimes I think he thinks I’m crazy. But I’m not, I swear. As my heart rate slowed to below 200, I rationalized that it might have been some random gust of air blowing across the toilet’s (covered) moisture-sensing elements.

It took a while, but I finally fell back to sleep while I concentrated on Red’s soft snoring. An hour later, it started again.

Toilet paper! Toilet paper! On the roll! Next to me! I can use a few squares, maybe one or two squares? How ’bout three? Hooray for me!

This time, I knew what it was. I found my glasses and fell rather inelegantly out of bed, heart pumping near-stroke range. Again. Much more of that and I would have been greasy puddle beside the bed.

I sprinted to Boo’s room across the hall. Thankfully, he was still curled up in the corner of his crib, showing no indication that the noises from the bathroom had bothered him. I knew this time I needed to man-up and check the bathroom.

So I said a little prayer to myself, one that had become a mantra over the last few months:

“Lord, let your light shine upon us in all Your glory. Let no unwelcome spirit enter this home. Let only those of light and good cross the threshold, so that we may be bathed in your love.”

I touched Boo’s chest, trying to detect its gentle rise and fall. He sighed sleepily and muttered something about his bunny, then rolled over. All good.

My child was safe, there was no doubt about it. But the fucking potty still sang on. So I took a deep breath, flicked the hall light on, and threw myself into the doorway to the bathroom.

Of course nothing was there waiting for me. There was no pulsating light or mystical smoke, or whatever else the hell you would expect from an unwelcome visitor of the ectoplasmic variety. Just an empty room that looked exactly the same as it did during full daylight. I leaned over the potty–from a few feet away, of course–looking for a fly or a trail of ants or a beetle bug or something else that had gotten caught in the little bowl. But  there was nothing. Nothing to indicate that anything, um, supernatural, had occurred.

So I went back to bed.

Then it happened four more times that night. Every hour, on the hour. With each alternating song, I grew less scared and more annoyed. I mean, come on! If you were going to haunt a family, wouldn’t you choose to do it via something a little more frightening than a child’s singing shit receptacle?

YES. YES, YOU WOULD.

So I dismissed it from my mind and moved on. Weird stuff follows me around, right?

Then one day while Boo was down for a nap, I went back to my bedroom to indulge in the silence and read for a bit. Not even fifteen minutes later, I heard something. Under the bed.

At first, I thought the cat was under our bed rubbing against the multitude of charger and power cords that crisscross the bottom of the baseboards. The logical explanation, right? Because it was ungodly annoying. Like fingers on a chalkboard annoying. So I went to drag him out.

There was nothing there.

Story of my life, right? I shrugged it off and chalked it up to the wind. But every day since then, I’ve heard that sound. Daylight or dark, even when the cat is sprawled out by my feet, I can hear something in the wall. Or under our bed.

If our house was older than the five years it has been occupying this property, I might say it was rats or possums or something chewing our wires. Or maybe the wind. But we can’t find an explanation for it, and it never bothers the cat. I figure he’s got more sensitive… senses than I’ve got.

Sometimes… Sometimes, though, he sits up during the night out of the blue and stares at noises I can’t hear. And sometimes, I feel like something is watching me.

Scratch that. I know something is watching me. At night, while I try to sleep, something is there.

Even with Red, my protector and bug squasher extraordinaire sitting in the living room a few meters away from me, this still freaks me out.

Believe what you want, I guess. I don’t watch horror movies. I despise them.  And although my imagination is a little wild–in the writerly sense, at least–I’m not one to make shit up. This stuff scares me. Honestly. I believe in the afterlife, the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, and the idea that there are some–things–that slip through the cracks.

I just hope that our thing is something friendly.