I try not to write about NYC often, because so many others have had so many better things to say about it than I could ever put down. However, today appears to be an exception.
Park Ave was a nightmare today. Sanitation was out en force to clean up the doubtless countless carcasses; remains of last nights glut moved on to a better place…in Jersey. Anyway, traffic was a crawl, so I suggested that perhaps the best idea would be to cut over to 5th, off of which I could reach my place of employ nearly as easily as Madison.
Shooting past 113th street, heading south on Park ave, I was thinking about how many times I had taken this trip in the past, and how the city’s movement never ceases to amaze me. It is like a vat of maggots, writhing horribly, yet with such fanciful glory that one dare not tear one’s eyes away…lest the secrets of the universe are divulged in the second of base squirming that takes place while your gaze is averted.
By the time we got to the tip of the park, I felt like I was riding down one of the greyish flesh-mechanique folds of a Geiger piece. I am one more meat cog in an immese clockwork horror of subterranian-to-towering proportions. The naked branches of twisted trees blotted out the white sky of early morning. A murder of crows stirred in thier branches across from Sinai. I could hear thier chorus even over the drone of traffic and hustle of busses. Pedestrians nearby (albiet thin in number) seemed not to notice. I always notice crows.
What I wonder is, how many ghosts does this city have? I mean, Ghostbusters deals with it playfully… clearly there would be big business for a paranormal investigator which promised results such as thiers in a city of this magnitude. Ghosts have moved so far from commonplace lore in today’s society. The idea of “ghost stories” have been eclipsed by video games, HBO, and even Nick-at-night specials. Children are not supposed to be faced with, or deal with death. Fear is not the way to get children to behave anymore.
The old stories say there is a Crow for every restlles soul. Was that murder representative of the bodies dumped in the pond over the last century? Hoboes who froze to death in the bleakest winters, or the old folk who passed in stroke or heart attack on the sweltering edge of midsummer’s blade?
Ghosts require only the quasi-energy of the death point, and the emotions of life, or the emotions of the death point, in the case of an “eventful death”. That energy leaves an imprint; a signature… like Newton’s soul molds, that can be “activated” by the transient energies around them. Sometiems the circut either requires very little draw, or no draw, which leads to the msot violent of hauntings. They can exist for decades on the energies that birthed them before fading into echoes of what they once were, only to return to matter once more. Other ghosts require a steady feed of energy, oftentimes from lifeforms, to stimulate thier mold. These are often the meaningful ghosts, the old spirits of the woods, and the guardian spirits of sacred places. Purposeful ghosts require a particular energy signature to activate thier full cycle, and once it has run its course, they return to matter. How do you find the hoaxes in a haystack like that? Look to crows, and the old stories…. How many of all these shells float jsut beyond the visible curtain in Manhattan, living off the near-endless supply of almost immesaurable, yet signifigant energy waves we produce?
Gods my paranormal theory sounds pretty weak standing naked on the street like that. What all this has to do with the breeding rate of crows in Manhattan is somewhat beyond me. However, it stikes me as odd that another bird; a scavenger, could prosper so widely in an area so beset by pigeons without there being some odd explanation…
I relished the shiver I had before I got to work. Not because I particularly enjoy fear, or its effects, but because it means I banked my embers well. Despire my research and all-cosuming methodologies having gone subterranian for the now, the whistles of thier deep machines can sometimes still be heard amidst the day-to-day of my Eloi life. Perhaps someday soon, the first Morlocks of my toil will find a way to work the Eloi pattern to thier advantage.