This morning, after being awoken by kittens at 4 AM after spending my first night alone while my wife was away on business and my children skiing with their grandparents and aunt, and kicking them out into the hall and ignoring their scratching at the door and then falling back to sleep and getting up at 5.30 to feed them and the big cats and then eat breakfast and feed the birds and clean litter boxes and take a shower and shave, I went upstairs to get dressed and standing there in the walk-in closet found the phrase “The Sense of Being Stared at by Zombies” in my head at the same time that I heard something scratching in the walls, much like the sounds taken to be rats in the ceiling or attic, I forget which, at the start of the novel “The Exorcist” (after reading that as a kid I lost any interest in watching the movie), and so stood there, wondering on the one hand what new resident this was I was hearing, a nest of martens, perhaps, or rats or birds or demons (when I thought of demons, another phrase entered my head: “The bad thing about slicing open demons is more demons come out”) and on the other what would differentiate the sense of being stared at by zombies from the sense of being stared at in general, and if it was humorous to imagine Rupert Sheldrake discussing the first draft of his book ultimately published as “The Sense of Being Stared At” with his agent, and his agent advising him to take out the zombies then it might be okay, or if I was one of those people who should not live alone for an extended time.
I hear my upstairs neighbors a lot but I’ve never met them and never wanted to meet them by saying, hello – you’re way loud… So instead I just imagine that the apartment above me has been empty for years and that I’m just hearing ghosts. I don’t know why that’s so much more acceptable to me.
No, it sounds to me like you are – much like myself – a person who should not under any circumstances get up at 5:30 in the morning. If I get up that early, I start hearing and seeing all sorts of things and making all sorts of random assosciations too. Though I do like the thing about slicing open demons. That made me smile.
yes, me too (demons).
the reason i got up at 5.30 is that i was sleeping in a half hour.
Yeah, see… if I see a sunrise I know one of two things has gone horribly wrong. Either I’ve stayed up WAY too late (this is the more likely scenario) or I’ve gotten up much too early.
I seem biologically wired to function best between noon and 4 a.m.
Pingback: Blithe » A few things; Ciamar a tha sibh?
A lot of talk about zombies here; this is not usually a subject of interest to me. But then I had the feeling, when I finally went to bed late last night, that there might be some in my bedroom staring at me. Then I remembered a zombie movie (my kids had it on), that I kinda liked. “Night of the Creeps.”