Friday is for Nihilism

It's Friday! Another hopelessly false construct, made by the idleness of man, in the hopes that perhaps by measuring our countless hours (too few of which we can actually remember), we can make our days (spent in selfish indulgence or pointless suffering) seem like they have meaning. Meanwhile the sun (our great keeper, and uncaring life-giver) continues to burn, until, like mighty Chronos, it grows angry with our pitiable little terrestrial orb, and devours us. But before any of that happens, Friday is also Chat Transcript day (James, Zach, and I were discussing the new writer-ladies, at least in theory)!


Zachary: Pros: More voices, more steady updating (hopefully).
Zachary: Cons: DAMAGING THE PERFECT ALCHEMICAL BLEND OF MADNESS
Thomas: That's a very forgiving definition of "perfect"

Thomas: I would settle for "Needs minimal editing" and if they lie, that they lie amusingly.

Zachary: You should have come and visited while I was home, Thomas.
Zachary: So Beth could stab you to death.
Thomas: That is the exact opposite of what I want to happen.


Thomas: Plus it's not like I have a job to distract me from blogging.
Zachary: It's not like I do my homework!
James: It's not like I don't drink red bulls and stay up and read until my head twitches angrily enough to write something.
Thomas: *internet superhero high-five*

Thomas: While the rest of us are kind of like crude hammers, covered in glue and broken glass.
Zachary: ...I'd say I'm a gnomish hooked hammer, personally.
Zachary: And can be wielded using weapon finesse.
Thomas: *facestabbings*
James: Some time in the future, we ought to have a week where we get all the d&d references out of us for about a month.

Thomas: *has been playing dress-up with his Gaia avatar for five minutes now*
James: Zach?
Thomas: ...
Thomas: So, James, have you heard any of the latest killers album?
(five minutes pass)
Thomas: ...Helloooo?
Thomas: I have said eight times more than everyone else combined. I am king of chat!
(another three minutes)
Thomas: And now to post links to pornographic videos.
Zachary: Oh yeaaaaah.
Zachary: This window exists.

Zachary: ...so, uh. Staff meeting?
Zachary: I'll try not to forget I'm in here.
James: Yes.
James: staff meeting.
James: all three of us need to be paying attention to the window at the same time.

James: we have almost 18 unique viewers.
Zachary: I know!
Zachary: That's partially because of me doing a little bit of sitewhoring recently.
James: And 4 readers from Canada.
Thomas: The lost world!

See you all tomorrow!

Hola!

Hello, Cathleen Kennedy here, the newest contributor to this often humorous, frequently political (when James is writing), sometimes existential, and always serious forum we call elevennames.

When Thomas mentioned that he, Zach, and James had a blog, and that they were looking for other people to write every now and again my first thought was “well why not? Its not like I have lots to do this semester . . . . besides my senior project”. (which is sort of a big deal at our school) So now I am using this incredibly reputable blog as a tool for procrastination, by once a week subjecting you people out there in internet land to my opinions, ideas, and random digressions of thought.

What else is there to say? I like history, but nothing more recent than about 200 years ago. I often times work on plays both at school and in community theaters, usually in some kind of sewing or costuming capacity. I know three other languages besides English, and am in general very academically focused. And I enjoy nerdery of all varieties.

Oh, and I have no idea who I am voting for this coming election, because while I care about the future of our country, I know I will probably end up voting for the democratic candidate, no matter who they are. *sigh*

Now I am frantically casting around for a ghost story so I can be cool like the other kids and fit in for theme week . . . . I am actually incredibly interested in that sort of stuff, but am not sure if I should come up with some kind of vague, but real story like Zach, or just retell one of my favorites.

This is a semi true incident that combines something that actually happened with a ghost story I was told in Scotland and a conclusion that was provided by a friend to whom I was retelling the story:

In 1348 the Black Death or Bubonic Plague as it is called now, had reached Scotland. By this time the disease had been moving northward through Europe for a year and a half. In the capital, Edinburgh, people heard reports of the huge death toll in other cities. In Paris there were reports of over 400 people dying every day, not to mention the fact that it was said that entire villages could die over night. There seemed to be no way of stopping the horrible, painful death that came to everyone who caught this plague.

Then the disease somehow managed to breach the city’s walls. The first person infected was only a peasant, but the rest of the population, both rich and poor knew that with in days they too could be part of the epidemic that had swept across Europe. So the next night the city officials paid the brick layers to seal up the street on which the infected person lived. The inhabitance of the unlucky street woke up to find 12 foot tall brick walls had been erected at either end of their road shutting in both in the infected inhabitant and several families of healthy people.

Over the subsequent weeks the people in the surrounding area could hear the screams and the pleas of the people trapped with in the walls, as more and more of them became infected and others simply died of starvation. It is said that the residence of Edinburgh invented ear muffs, so they wouldn’t have to be consistently tortured by the horrible sound of their neighbors dying. Of course, there was no way of dealing with the stench. The bodies of the dead began to pile up because there was no way to dispose of them, and soon even those outside the walls could not ignore the horrible smell of rotting corpses that wafted from the walled up street.

Eventually the people inside the walls grew silent, and after about two months, the city officials decided that if everyone who lived there was dead (and they surely were by this time), then they could clean out the houses and resell them. There was only one man brave enough to enter the corpse infested street, a butcher. He brought his knives and a wheelbarrow and went systematically through the houses chopping the dead into manageable pieces and then disposing of the body parts. It took him three weeks of hard work, but in the end the houses were ready to be resold.

However, everyone who lived in one who has lived in those house between the 14th century and now has reported seeing dismembered body parts lying around their homes at some point or another accompanied by a horrible smell and sometimes ghostly screaming.

And now you know the horrible truth about earmuffs.

For another fun ghost story listen to this

Our Spooky Lies Will Haunt Your Face

As you may have gathered, we are in a yarn-spinning mood this week. Also, say hello to new staffer (and lady-type invader of our secret clubhouse), Cathleen.

Before I begin with our sacred duty to scare the pants off of you with words, let me take a moment to say that short babies lead lives of tragedy - so I suppose that Spartans are paragons of mental health.

Scared yet? Just wait.

Gather 'round, younglings, for I am about to tell you a true tale of my youth, when I was still a young man. First, some background; the events of that night occurred when I was a lad of 17 summers, still naive in the ways of the world. I lived at home, in the ancient farmhouse of my family. My great-grandfather purchased it from the descendants of the Ashleigh clan, a group of now-defunct local aristocrats, who suffered financial setbacks and family in-fighting enough to drive them to ruin. Back when the house was constructed, though, they were steadfast Christians, and put all of their efforts into helping their fellow man, enough to the point where the house was actually a small branch along the Underground Railroad. I've seen the hidden spaces in the basement, beneath the floorboards (larger than I thought they'd be) and even a false wall behind a closet (barely large enough for me as a child).
The house is relatively large; three floors, two basements (one old, one new), a sunning room, and one of the first electrical garage doors in the state (very impressive). It's also old and shadowy - the third floor, where I had my bedroom, was sloped to match the curvature of the roof. And there were... other features. Doors that were only three feet tall, leading to rooms that I presumed were for storage, which had even smaller doors in them, leading to smaller rooms, and smaller doors still, which led to the breezy non-rooms of the attic - just dark spaces above the ceilings but below the roof, home to bats and, one notable summer, a wasp infestation.
Regardless, I didn't think much of it. The third floor had always been my floor. While my sisters had bedrooms below, I got the one up on the top, sacrificing comfort for privacy. They were both away at college, though, and my parents were on vacation to Italy, and I was left alone, to see to the maintenance of the place. Which was okay. It had been four days already, in the warmth of that summer, and I woke up, ate, cleaned, and basically whittled away at my time. I made plans with friends that night, and was in the shower when I first heard the noise.
I couldn't quite make it out in the shower, but turned off the water when I clearly heard it the first time. It sounded like something on the roof, sliding down the side of the old tarpaper. I didn't really think much of it at the time - the house was old, and was always making strange noises like that. The water pipes groaned in winter, so I figured that maybe some of the old beams were just readjusting, or maybe one of the old sheets of roofing fell off. I got out of the shower and began getting ready, when I heard another noise, like footsteps downstairs. Now, I knew what footsteps sounded like, because I could hear a person on the first floor walking around, if their stride was heavy enough, but these were completely unusual. Now I was beginning to get a bit afraid. I got dressed, and tried my best to ignore the sounds. As I had hoped, they began to fade away. I finished getting dressed, and calmed myself. It was just the house, of course.

When I got downstairs, the window to my sisters' bedroom was open. A chilly late-summer breeze gusted in.

I closed the window, and tried to put it out of my mind. If we were being robbed, I was just going to go ahead and let them take whatever they wanted - I wouldn't be in the house. I closed the window, rushed downstairs, grabbed the keys to the car, and took off to hang out with my friends.

A few hours later, I came back, and was relieved to find out that all of my fears were unfounded. I cursory examination of the first and second floors revealed nothing out of place - no open windows, nothing removed, nothing knocked over. As I walked up the stairs to the third floor, though, I heard the noise that I'll never forget, as long as I live - the sound of a small door closing, followed almost immediately by another, and another. As I topped the stairs, I saw that the tiny doors - the doors that lead to the attic - were all closed. I paused for a moment, and listened. Nothing was shifting around, no footsteps, no noises. I didn't sleep at all that night, and heard every old groan the house made, and I could have heard a pin drop.

The next morning, things seemed normal again. In a few days, my parents came back, and life kept going. It wasn't until that Christmas, when I went into those little rooms to retrieve the ornaments, that I remembered that night in late summer. As I opened up the smaller and smaller rooms, I saw that the last door, the door to the attic space, hadn't closed the whole way. As I reached out to close it, I felt a chill run down my spine, and slammed it shut. I gathered the ornaments, and went back downstairs as fast as I could.

Later that evening, the house was freezing cold. My mother complained, and I went upstairs to check. Every one of the attic doors was open, as was the window in my bedroom.



And if that didn't do anything for you, how about this?

Theme Week: Ghostly Tales!

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and in strange aeons even death may die." -H.P. Lovecraft

Which is to say that theme weeks aren't dead, they've only been sleeping. This week, the shambling beasts from outside time return as spectral adversaries to haunt our minds and send shivers through our imagination. This week's theme is, as the title has probably told you, ghost stories. So, without further ado:

The Adventure of the Haunted Trainyard
A true ghost story retold (but one of several ways) by Zach Marx, with much credit owed to his companions

Once upon a time, in a land of gray woods and rolling hills, a band of friends set out on an adventure.

They left their grey woods behind them, and found themselves in a strange postindustrial wasteland, populated by exceptionally hopeless suburbanites and home to strange, depressing sports outlets. Over a tangled cluster of old warehouses, auto-body workshops and ratty macadam courtyards, the foreboding single tooth of an industrial keep, big enough to build a mech in, loomed menacing but silent, its many antennae serving no visible purpose. The keep seemed close by, but could be reached by no direct approach, defended on all sides by outlying low buildings of uncertain purpose.

Skirting the outskirts of the postindustrial complex, our heroes happened upon a line of decaying train engines, embodiments of the same ideals that had once animated the complex, living engines of industry as it was, not the spectre of neo-colonial hypercapitalism that stalks the world today.

They adventured into the hearts and souls of those old trains, and brought back an echo of what it was when they had purpose and life. And when the old stories and old battles were over, they sat and studied the industrikeep.



They longed to know what secrets it housed, what diabolical plots or engines of despair it might conceal, but as they sat on the train-roof, they felt the sadness of the years rust soak into their bones, and knew that whatever truths it would contain were too much for them then.



Another day, perhaps, they would enter the tomb and discover the truth for themselves. For now, there was a sunset to watch, and another land to return to before the dark grew too deep, for at night the unquiet spirits of the closed-down factories would rise up from the grubby sidewalks of the unvisited storefronts, and rattle the windows with their fury.

Wishing to avoid this, the friends went home for cake.