Elizabeth: Six feet of addictions, Dyanna: Very superstitious…, Kirsten: Hey baby, what’s your sign?. There’s something of a mini-meme regarding obsessions, superstitions, the occult, and all things that go bump in the night running around right now.
(Hrm. Random side note — not all things that go bump in the night. I’d elaborate, but I try to keep this website somewhere in the PG to PG-13 range, and it’s a bit early in the morning to go veering into R territory. But I digress [oh, boy do I digress…]…)
I figured I’d go ahead and just start tackling the subjects in order. Given my tendency to babble, however, you’ll have to click on to keep reading…
Obsession
There are two areas of my life that could easily be classified as falling into the “obsession” area — music and movies.
I’m a complete music whore. I come from a hugely musical family, and always have some sort of soundtrack going in the background. Taste-wise, I range all over the place — when I have my .mp3 player on random, it’s not at all unusual to bounce from hard industrial to gregorian chant to techno to Irish pub songs to country to bagpipes. Pretty much anything goes, and I’m always up to trying something new.
So does all that qualify for obsession status? Well, some quick statistics so you can judge for yourself: my .mp3 library currently encompasses 13,960 songs from some 1,173 albums over 75.28 GB, it would take 45.6 days to listen to all of it straight through, and roughly 98% is from CDs I own (I tend to limit my downloading to rare tracks that cannot be found otherwise). Judge for yourself. 
The closest I’ve come to obsessing over a single artist was when I was very into nine inch nails. The drive to get everything possible has faded over time, but for amusement value, I’ve dug up an old page detailing my nin collection circa 1996. Okay, so that was an obsession. I’m better now.
My love of movies comes mostly from my dad — even at times when we were butting heads and couldn’t talk about much of anything without fighting, we’ve always been able to bounce movies off each other. For a while I got a job at Suncoast to help build my movie collection, and I now have roughly 400 DVDs to my name. I also have a disturbing tendency to be able to quote random bits of most movies I’ve seen at any given moment.
Superstition
I’ve never really been overly superstitious, actually. Black cats crossing my path I try to pet, broken mirrors go in the trash, and while I do tend to walk around ladders, it’s more because that way I don’t have to duck to get under them. Besides, it’s bad luck to be superstitious.
The Occult
I have always had a fascination with the occult — however, that tends to be more of an intellectual fascination than anything, for the simple reason that I’ve yet to have any real personal experiences in that vein. Something of a frustration, to be honest.
I had a conversation with my mom a long time ago about everything ranging from ghosts to aliens and various supernatural things. Now, I come from a fairly religious background — however, thankfully enough, one that is very open and allows you to think and make decisions for yourself. The religious aspect came up in the discussion with mom, partly because so many people of a religious bent tend to condemn anything that could even remotely be labeled as “occult” as either ridiculous claptrap or the “devil’s work,” an attitude that never made sense to me. One thing that mom mentioned that I always liked was that if Christians can believe in us — mankind, as a physical being, bound by the rules of the physical world — and can also believe in God — a spiritual being, at the other end of the spectrum from mankind — why is it so difficult to believe in the possibility of beings or states all along the spectrum between mankind and God? I’ve never had an issue with believing that there is far more to this universe than we know about, or that our sciences have yet discovered.
However, despite a lifelong fascination with things like this, I’ve never really encountered anything. I’ve tried Tarot readings in the past, and have my own Rider-Waite deck, but so far, the results have been fairly random — at times it seems to give a reading that’s dead on, other times it’s so far off base as to be laughable. Astrology I’ve never been very convinced of, primarily because it doesn’t seem to apply to me. Astrologically, I’m very Taurus (born May 3rd, 1973 at 5:01pm in Indianapolis, Indiana, if anyone is curious), but the only Taurus description that ever seems to fit me is the stubborness, the rest just doesn’t ever fit. Ouija boards, quite honestly, I think are a crock — far too susceptible to conscious or unconscious manipulation to be of any use whatsoever.
Many of my friends and girlfriends over the years have also been into various areas that fall under the ‘occult’ banner, and have seemed to be far more ‘open’ to that realm of existence. It’s been hypothesised a few times — by different people, under different circumstances, with no prodding on my part — that if one subscribes to any sort of ‘past life’ theory, that it’s possible that in some past life something happened to me that I’m repressing, and have therefore blocked away any part of me that could allow me to get more in touch with the ‘spiritual realm.’ I’ve been told that they feel that I have strong untapped potential, but that for one reason or another, it’s potential that I can’t access.
Could they be right? Or is it just mystical mumbo-jumbo? I don’t really know, and don’t expect that I will. I believe the possibility exists that there is far more to the world than what we know of, or is commonly accepted. On an intellectual/emotional level, I believe that the possibilities are there, and because of that, I don’t _dis_believe people who claim to be in touch with that particular area of the unknown. However, on a personal, experience-based level, I just don’t have any evidence or knowledge of anything but what I can see, touch, feel, taste, or hear in the everyday world around me. I think there is, or at least could be, ‘more’ out there — but if it’s there, I’ll likely have to settle for dealing with it on a purely theoretical basis.
The end
So that’s it — my own little contribution to this particular conversation. Nifty, eh? Make of it what you will…
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Late 60s I was maybe 13-14 my parents have friends visiting from Teaxs they are sleeping in their trailer in our driveway. The middle of the night the wife starts screaming, she’s standing in the middle of the trailer screaming at the top of her lungs. The husband is shaking her trying to ” snap her out of it ” He grabs his gun and fires shots staright up through the roof of the trailer. Waking all of us in the house. He brings his wife into the house… she’s shaking and in tears she’s talking about everything falling, falling.. people dying. She’s white as a sheet ! She calms down, we all settle down and go back to bed. The next day at school everybody is talking about the big earthquake Japan had last night, lot of buildings fall and thousands of people are killed. I was there I saw the woman and I know she saw what was happing in Japan, Can I prove it, not a chance. At this point I can’t even pinpoint the year it happened but happen it did.
Come to think of it, I did have a very thing happen to me, I just hadn’t thought of it in years.
Summer of ‘91, I was in Germany with the Bartlett High School German Club. One night, I woke up absolutely terrified — I’d just had an incredibly vivid dream where my brother had died in a car accident. Now I don’t normally remember my dreams, let along something as real as this one was, so I was in a good panic when I woke up. Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t have the right change to make a pay phone call home, so I just went back to sleep after I calmed down. After I got up, the memory wasn’t as stong, and it faded as the day went by.
When I got back to Anchorage, I found out that right about the time I was having that dream, my brother was riding his bike home. As he crossed a street, a car almost clipped him in the intersection, and as he swerved and braked to get out of the way, he ended up flipping forward over the bike and breaking his collarbone. Not death, thank goodness, but a definite trauma, which I apparently picked up on on the other side of the globe.
So, I guess I have had one bizarro occurrence.
Wudi I think you’re actually delving into the paranormal as opposed to the occult - now you have your own thread.
I haven’t had an incredible amount of paranormal stuff happen to me or seen it either. I know my grandma used to have dreams, but i don’t know how accurate they were. I once fell asleep on a car ride back from alyeska with a boyfriend driving - dreamt same boyfriend was hit by a car while running across the street - and woke up to find him falling asleep at the wheel, but that’s pretty immediate. I do think siblings can have a really strong bond that will give them a sort of link to each other no matter where they are. My sister and I used to guess the songs in each other’s heads as a game when we were children - we’d usually get it in one to two tries. But I do think dreams are incredibly important, as are sudden urges you can’t explain (no, not for ice cream or anything like that). That sixth sense that keeps you from jumping in your car for ten minutes, then when you do you drive past a horrible accident that just happened - that sort of thing.
I also believe everyone has a sixth sense that helps them in their interactions with other people. Maybe it’s biological, but I usually think that when you immediately dislike someone it’s partially the way they hold themselves, and partially just how their energies affect you. My grandma had a friend who said she saw auras all the time. I was about eight when I met her - and did a really stupid thing too. We all went to one of the street fairs they used to have in Anchorage often, and I made them both ride the tilt-a-whirl with me. Oh, my grandma’s friend was seriously ill after that - not only from the spinning, but also from the whirling auras all around us. Ooops.
I guess paranormal gifts have their drawbacks.
Occult, paranormal…it’s so easy to get them all lumped together. All lumpy-like, like bad oatmeal. Oatmeal made with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” playing in the background.
Magic oatmeal, where if you spillled it on the ground, you’d wake up in the morning to find a giant oatmeal tree in your back yard, branches reaching up into the sky, leaves shaped like giant oatmeal flakes shading the ground. Climbing up, you wouldn’t find sap oozing from the bark, but milk and buttery syrup. You could break the oatmeal-leaves off of the branches, soak them in the syrup-sap, and have a snack to refresh you during the climb.
Finally, up at the top, you break through the canopy, and look out over the world from the top of your oatmeal tree…
…right before a giant spoon scoops you up for breakfast. Yum.
What the fuck