So heres the basic idea. I've been wanting to create a blog for awhile now. I've even been practicing in private. The only problem is: my personal life is pretty mundane for the most part. I've decided, to make things more interesting for myself and for any possible readers, I'd come up with a gimmick. Gimmicks always win, right? Every post/story/musing/photo/doodle/joke/rant I make in this blog will be inspired/influenced/directly/indirectly related to a word I pick at random out of the Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary sitting on my desk at work. There's no cheating, I swear.

Ironically enough, I picked my first word yesterday for my first blog ever and it's farewell. It does give me hope though that this will be a cool project and I'm psyched to have landed on such a provocative word on my first go around. Thanks, finger!

Anyhoo, the following is a short story of sorts. Yesterday on my day off, since it was so rainy and muggy, I spent most of the day on the couch flipping through Big B's copy of

Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion : An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural
by Arthur Lehmann, James Myers, Pamela Moro.

It's a textbook he had on the bookshelf at home from an anthropology class he took in college. I was reading this article about death rituals and how different cultures treat their newly dead as opposed to their ancestral dead. One tidbit I was especially tickled by (well, I guess tickled isn't the right word but it got my creative juices flowing) was a paragraph on this mother and daughter in a native African culture (I'll have to look it up again to be more specific) who's father/husband had died and instead of burying his body, they took his skull and hung it over the doorway in their kitchen. They would talk to the skull, ask for advice, all the while addressing it as "Sir Ghost."

Farewell, And Please Pass the Butter, Sir Ghost

Sir Ghost died 6 months and 8 days ago. He was 58 when he died. First he had Stroke #1 and lived. Then he had Stroke #2. Stroke #2 was the end of Sir Ghost. We found him on the kitchen floor by the sink. He had been chopping onions and a thin layer of onion tears covered his closed eyes. Ms. Ghost and I had been out in the garden picking peppers for dinner. She was holding the peppers in a bunch, using the front of her purple apron as a sack. I tiptoed in behind her with the rest of the peppers, careful not to let the kitchen door smack me in the face. When she saw him laying there, Ms. Ghost gave a yelp that sounded like our dog when you accidentally step on one of his paws. She dropped the corners of her apron and let the peppers fly. She grabbed onto Sir Ghost's face and her pepper tears fell and mixed with his onion tears.

His name is not really Sir Ghost. Ms. Ghost and I started calling him that soon after that day in the kitchen. We had a small ceremony and buried him out in the backyard next to the garden so as to avoid any fuss. After five months of pensive waiting, we dug him up again, carefully removed his head and hung it on the wall above the swinging door in our kitchen. Ms. Ghost told me this is what sonless mothers should do when their husbands die, to protect the household and her daughters from harm and neurosis.

Yesterday morning, I was at the sink and I heard a soft rustling sound. I looked up at Sir Ghost and he was struggling to move his jaw. I ran over to the kitchen door to his skull and looked up. He kept rustling and struggling to move his jaw. Nervously, I put my left hand over the doorknob of the kitchen door and held it shut, fearing that Ms. Ghost would walk in at any moment and start yelping again at the sight of me communicating with an assumed dead Sir Ghost.

I heard a creak like a pair of rusty scissors opening up and a soft voice coming from the cracking jaw in Sir Ghost's skull.

“Farewell,” he said.
“Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell.”

He just kept saying it over and over, waiting for something. My response?

"What is it, Sir Ghost?" I said.

"It is lonely," he said.

"What is?"

"Being dead."

"What does it feel like?"

"You just hang there and watch them eat breakfast, watch them sit in silence, watch them cry when no one else is around. They forget you're there and sometimes they wish you weren't there."

"Do you want me to take you down then?"

"No."

"OK then. Would you rather I pretend you're here or not here?"

"Both, I suppose."

"Well, in that case, farewell. And please pass the butter, Sir Ghost."