DO GHOSTS HAVE GHOSTS?

Did I mention that bloodpressure meds make dreams vivid? Especially if one is in the habit of having a hot caffeinated beverage in the evening. Now, I know that what I'm supposed to do, having reached the age when pills are part of the daily program, is to quietly tone down my habits, and over a period of the next four decades or so slowly become a vegetable, only starting up to scream "damned kids get off my lawn" or occasionally babbling incoherently while gumming a rusk soaked in warm milk, but the problem is that I do not have a lawn for the damned kids to get off of, and I hate rusks.

As a Dutchman, rusks (beschuit) are a tangible part of my cultural heritage.
They're "okay" with a very thin slice of jonge kaas (cheese).
Or butter and hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles).

That latter is also something which I do not have. I live in a cultural wasteland.

What I do have is dreams, which are sometimes populated by ghosts. A cat that visits the corner of my eye when I'm still half asleep, before vanishing. And, most recently, a female figure in a loose shift that does the same. Possibly the former owner of the cat.

She floats a bit, shimmering, mouthes something I cannot hear, blinks out of existence. Then it's time for me to get up, go to the bathroom, and head into the kitchen to put the water on for coffee. I expect that as the weather grows colder she will start to wear something warmer, perhaps a sweater or a fluffy bathrobe. Flannel jammies.

She isn't my apartment mate flitting through my room. I know this because of her hair colour. My apartment mate, though of a similar height, does not look like that, never wears a shift (jammies with penguins, or happy sheep, or grizzly bears) and has black hair that's rather short. And I'm fairly certain she does not have a ginger wig, as she has no desire to be mistaken for Irish or Scottish.

Maybe I should research the occupants of this building before my landlady's parents bought it decades ago. They're all Chinese American (landlady, passed parents), but before then it was probably mostly Caucasian-filled.

In the years that I have lived here, it has still been mostly Caucasian.
Even though many of the folks nearby are Chinese American.

My apartment mate, also Chinese American, has a theory that Chinese ancestried people, if they're lucky, are visited by the ghosts of all the seafood they have eaten. Delicious haunting. And I should mention that Cantonese people are quite seafood obsessed, which may play a part in that belief-system.


I'm imagining little flocks of ghost lobster and shrimp all over the hills of San Francisco, scurrying after people and trailing fragments of salted black beans and garlic. Which explains why elderly Chinese often take the bus, even for one block. Ambulatory Crustaceans can't mange the step up into the vehicle. They probably cluster at the stops forlornly, waiting for someone likely to get off.



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