Oh, boy. This feels so good.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of the ever-wise and ever-sexy John Stewart, I give you "your Moment of Zen."

Life on Mars

So I'm really not doing very well with the blog ideas lately, but darned if I'm not at least trying to come up with entertaining (if not exactly well written or researched) entries. Today is no exception, but I have forced my bored and underutilized brain to put a few strands of thinking together to actually back up an idea I've had for a long time but never was able to give any flesh to. Ahem:

There's been much media hype recently about methane found in Mars' atmosphere by NASA probes. The presence of methane on the planet, according to what I've read, is significant in and of itself because, as one blogger put it, "Methane is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere: it goes away rapidly. So there must be a source of it that is making methane now, actively." Furthermore, the presence of the gas detected seems to change from time to time and from place to place, meaning that whatever is producing it is also changing, possibly according to seasonal/rotational/what-have-you changes on the planet.

Pretty exciting. Of course, the media is in a frenzy, putting headlines like "Life on Mars" on publications and implicating "alien bugs" farting and other such unsubstantiated nonsense. And for the time being, these wild allegations are just that: nonsense. Methane can be made in a number of different ways, and with what we know so far about Mars (which, let's remember, is extremely little) there are plenty of options as to how a gas that's associated with volcanic and biological activity on Earth could be produced on a very different planet. Volcanoes, at least as we know them, are right out, since the other gases released in volcanic eruptions and such haven't been found on Mars, but there's still a lot to learn about how their geology differs from ours. Aside from volcanoes, however, there's plenty we don't know about the chemistry taking place under the surface of the planet, and the chance that methane could be being produced by the interaction of other substances that we haven't been privy to just yet. And, of course, there is the remote but very real possibility that there is some form of living being burping and farting and decaying away somewhere on Mars in substantial enough numbers to be contributing its gaseous waste to the atmosphere.

Most scientists and science enthusiasts out there are quick to caution us that the biological option is the least likely to be true, given that there is very little and very salty water (in the form of ice) on Mars. And it has long been held that life is only possible where there is abundant oxygen and water, as there is on Earth. Scientists have acknowledged that perhaps life is possible in other conditions, but given that we would know very little about how that would work, it's safest not to hypothesize.

I say, why WOULDN'T life be able to exist in other conditions, and the very vastness of our universe seems to point to that idea. Granted, we haven't found it yet, but we've been spending our time looking for it exclusively on planets like our own, under the assumption that it can't exist elsewhere.

I understand the need to narrow down the search, since we can't well try to examine every planetary object out there, but I think limiting ourselves to the idea that life is only possible on Earth-like bodies is, well, limiting. Who says there's not some species out there on some dark rock that exists entirely by consuming plutonium? WE don't know. We're making a very rigid and binding set of assumptions that, despite all our resarch and speculations, we know virtually nothing about. And those assumptions are based upon our own experiences, which take up a fraction of the experiences available in the universe so small it probably can't even be calculated. Those assumptions, therefore, statistically speaking, have to be considered ridiculously invalid. They're like a baby assuming that everything in the world is fuzzy, because its eyesight hasn't yet developed fully, or like a deep sea fish assuming that all the world is darkness. Not necessarily bad assumptions, but still completely WRONG.

And here's the thing: we should know better. Not so very recently, scientists have discovered living organisms living ON EARTH completely independently of the sun, in the absence of water, and even with very limited access to oxygen! If they can live HERE under such circumstances, why would they not be able to do so elsewhere?

Seriously.

Entire communities of species hitherto unknown to science have been found - long ago enough to have been filmed by BBC film crews and subsequently studied - living in the deepest parts of the ocean (The Mariana Trench near Guam, and on extremely deep-water "volcanos" spewing superheated water into the ocean) and in caves completely cut off from sunlight. Some quite advanced living creatures have been found in these supposedly inhospitable environments, surviving on colonies of bacteria that subsist on acids and sometimes even rock. They did not depend on reliable sources of oxygen or sunlight, and some went without water entirely. Not exactly our idea of normal life, but it exists, right now, on our very own planet, which just goes to show what we know.

So, let's say things on Mars are very different from here. WE couldn't live there. But there's nothing -NOTHING- to say that nothing can.

So, basically, all I'm trying to say is that David Bowie is in fact right, there IS Life on Mars, and he knows it because he is actually a god from outer space.



Hah! Betcha didn't see that coming!

Fun links for a Wednesday

Well, I haven't come up with anything groundbreaking to say, except to reiterate how much I sincerely admire and kind of have a crush on Barack Obama. What a guy. How nice is it that I can honestly say, with no reservations, that I think our President is a really great person? It feels so GOOD to say that.

Anyway, to help you get over your post-inauguration let-down blues and through hump day, here are some fun links and other goodies:

Go Around Twice If You're Happy, a public art piece in Dubai. It warms my cold January little heart.

On my favorite site, Overheard In New York, here's a funny bit from a guy who may have been trying to direct someone to my old apartment near Fordham:
Guy on cell, giving directions: So you take the D line... No, D as in "David." D! D! A, b, c, d! (pause) No, D. Okay...then you walk down to Hoffman Street... Hoffman Street, as in "Dustin Hoffman." He's that actor, with a big nose, that you really like, the one that's in that movie about your life...yeah...yeah! He's a cross-dresser! Tootsie! That's you, bro!

--Arthur Ave

Overheard by: eternal student


Here's a site for all your get-well present needs this cold and flu season: Giant Stuffed Microbes of Joy.

And, of course, a particularly humorous installment from Fuck You Penguin, a blog where the blogger tells cute animals what's what.

Well.

I'm a little unable to put up a blog post today. I was, of course, going to write about my deep and wild excitement about the fact that we not only have a new president who is NOT George W. Bush, but that we have a new president that's not Bush who is a really awesome guy. But I'm feeling a little disenchanted at the moment, since I was planning to watch the inaugural ceremonies streaming live on my computer at work, and instead was treated to chopped up sound bites and frozen pictures on my screen, no matter what website I tried to use. Seriously, throughout the ceremonies, when everyone I work with was crowded around a TV twenty feet away from me and behind a door, I was trying MSNBC, CBS, Huffington Post, Wonkette, New York One, and Hulu in succession to see if any of them would work on my ancient and grumpy computer. But none did. So I got a few good screenshots of Obama talking, each of which stuck on my monitor for a good fifteen seconds before getting replaced with a snapshot of some random person in the crowd waving a flag and two seconds of confusing noise. Ugh.

So I'm a little disappointed and way less excited than I was this morning. I'm going to wait to go home to try watching it again, this time on a better connection and faster computer. And then maybe tomorrow I'll have something to blog about.

Stupid work computer. Interfering with my experience of historical moments. Grumble.

Crap

Well I just realized I haven't blogged in two days but I have absolutely no ideas about what to write. But I only have ten minutes left of work and nothing else to do so it seems like I should write something. I really need to pick a theme for this blog and stick to it, it would narrow the field of options considerably. But that seems so limiting... Hm...

I've been surfing the interwebs all day looking at random things in between bouts of frantic copy-writing for one of the magazines I freelance for, and I've realized something. The internet, in most of its blog and list and funny pictures areas at least, is a vast wasteland populated almost entirely by people like me. People who are gainfully employed in a manner that puts them in front of a computer for at least eight hours a day, but who still have absolutely nothing to do. It's amazing. How much manpower is being wasted in this world by losers who have learned the entire LOLdictionary by heart? They make Photoshop masterpieces and post them on all sorts of sites, and then write comments about them, sometimes inventing whole new personas from which to create debate, which creates interest, which brings in more hits to their site, which... is... self-aggrandizement at its finest.

I watched the music video for Rammstein's song "Amerika," which was sent to me by a friend, and which is hilarious. Of course I'm sure they meant it as a very serious political statement about how American stupidity is taking over the world, but Rammstein as a band takes itself so seriously that one can't help but laugh at it or risk brain-explodey. But the comments! Oh, the comments! These are the people who have no creative talent with which to make things to post and then comment upon. They write things like: "whatever. britan i dont think is the best cause thats the whole reason why america exists. the whole world isnt perfect."

...

And Rammstein's point is proved!

...That really had no point to it, but it's interesting food for thought. And now my ten minutes are up and I must venture out into the Arctic Tundra that is New York City in January. Wish me luck!

Love Potion Number One

An article published today in the New York Times cites another article, recently published in Nature, about the chemical and evolutionary nature of the human experience of love. According to both articles, love as we know it - that rush of euphoria, infatuation, obsession, lust and intense emotional connection that we experience at certain times for certain people - has developed in human beings as a way to strengthen pair bonds between mother and child, and between mated pairs in order to keep them together for the sake of that child.

I've done a lot of reading on this subject and have heard many theories, but none of them counter this very basic idea that love is not so much a mystical force caused by the cataclysmic connection of two souls as by the chemicals that evolution (or God, if that's how you look at it) has placed in us to keep our species going. That may be an unromantic way of looking at things, but as far as I'm concerned, knowing this doesn't reduce the experience of love - nothing really can. Love is one of the defining characteristics of the experience of being human. Even if it is just a bunch of drug-like chemistry pumping through our bodies, it is still the thing that drives people to perform amazing feats, to feel and experience the world and what it means to be alive as perhaps no other species can. And this, no matter what causes it, is transcendant.

But leave it to scientists, of whom many of you may already know I am deeply suspicious, to treat something that borders on magical with the same amount of levity as they would any other natural phenomenon, which is to say, as if it were nothing at all.

While the Larry Young, the author of the Nature article, doesn't cite any specific plans just yet, he mentions that "it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink." John Tierney of the New York Times then goes on to speculate that perhaps what we need more than a real "love potion" would be an "anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself."

Tierney makes some good points about how, if used correctly and at the right times, an love vaccine could prevent people from performing some of the stupider acts that human beings have been wont to perform over the ages - running off with someone else's spouse, falling for a complete loser that all our friends say is bad news, committing criminal acts in the name of love, and so on. Certainly it could be a much bigger boon to humanity than a love potion, which would be used in all the wrong ways, to force people into relationships they didn't want if used on others, and to fool ourselves even more about people who aren't right or even good for us if used on ourselves. But I see problems inherent in both these ideas, and not just small problems. Love, whether it's being enhanced or muffled, isn't something to be taken lightly. Love is a force that, as some have said, can move mountains, and conquer all, and is more or less something we shouldn't fuck with. At least as far as I can tell.

Whether we like it or not, and no matter what name we put on the hands that have sculpted us as we are, evolution or God or what-have-you made us capable of experiencing love for a reason. It has helped us get this far, to the point where no other species on earth can come close to shutting us down. We have beaten the odds and we have gotten as far as this because whatever it is that made us gave us the ability to love. It also gave us the ability to walk upright, and while other species might have been rolling on the ground laughing at us when we started, it hasn't backfired on us yet. Love, just like walking, ultimately came into our genetic code for a reason, and a reason that has served us well so far.

Of course there are times when love hurts us, and when we wish it had never happened, but to cheapen that experience by bottling it just seems... dangerous. What kind of messes could we get ourselves into by taking some anti-love potion and going out on a Saturday night, ending up accidentally with someone who had taken a love potion, or vice versa? Morning-after experiences can be embarassing enough without a whole new cocktail of chemical enhancements to be dealt with, as recreational drugs have proven for centuries already. Add to those already tried-and-true drugs a substance that could literally make one fall head over heels in love and suddenly the possibilities of violence, stalking, jealousy, anger, and regret - among other things - multiplies exponentially. Can you imagine a college dormitory full of 'potioned-up' students, half having even more and more libidinous sex than they currently do while in the throes of the 'anti-love potion's' no-strings-attached high, while the other half fight each other and sigh and moan and wail over their 'soul mates' who they met in line for the unisex bathroom at the club?

Chaos.

Some people, as both articles mention, are born less receptive to the chemicals that cause "love" in the first place, making them less likely to feel the urge to "settle down" or "find someone," while being able to lead less conventional but still very full lives. What's wrong with that? Probably many of our greatest scientists and even artists suffered from lack of desire to love, and ended up making breakthroughs that affected the rest of us for years. But often these "loners" end up convinced by our culture that they "must" find someone and "must" settle down to be normal. Meanwhile, others of us seem hardwired to enter into torrid love affairs with every likely candidate to come along, getting themselves into relationship after relationship with people who hurt, abuse, and devalue them, while friends tell them they need to "cool down" and learn to appreciate being alone.

A love potion and anti-love potion, respectively, could perhaps help these people, but if these 'potions' were to be marketed and developed like any other pharmaceutical, would we then have to label these already-troubled individuals (troubled only because of what society tells them they should be or do, mind you) as "diseased"? Must we now make the desire to be left alone or to be loved as "syndromes" or "disorders"?


I appreciate that biologists and drug manufacturers are trying to help us, but I wish they'd think about it a bit first.

Cop out

I am way too sick and full of mildly psychotropic medicines that are supposedly combatting my illness to write a blog that comes close to making sense today. And, given that last time I tried to make sense I ended up talking about Bowie Child vs. Robots in the future, I thought making an attempt in my current state would be a mistake. Perhaps hilarious, but it would get nobody anywhere in the long run.

So instead, I'm taking the opportunity that having my sinuses feel as if they're going to pop my eyeballs out of my head and my lungs hurt with each breath I draw to do what some of my favorite other bloggers do, and guide anyone who reads this to some other interesting websites. I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from some of these, so I thought maybe others would, too.

1) Firstly, on a somber note. If you like seafood, which I know most of you do, or sushi, or anything from the ocean, you should be aware that most of our fish stocks worldwide are being overfished and fish in really destructive manners. I just watched a British documentary last night called "Deep Trouble" about how badly depleted our once-thriving ocean is becoming, and how it's our responsibility as consumers to find out how the fish we eat was caught and where it comes from. But it's hard to make responsible decisions about what we purchase without first knowing what's ok and what's not. So,here is a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Guide . The people here keep a close watch on fish stocks in the wild and on fishing practices world-wide, and keep their site up to date on what types of fish are ok to eat and which are not in the area where you live. I'm sure their info isn't 100% accurate, because depending on where you're buying, you could be getting fish from any number of fisheries and markets and so on, but it's a good start. You can even order a wallet-sized card with a guide appropriate to you region on it, so you can keep a list of what's ok and what's not with you at all times, making spur-of-the-moment sushi forays less morally confusing!.

2) On a more entertaining note, NPH hosted SNL on Saturday! Hooray for initials, and the for the internet making it completely ok for me to use them and expect people to understand what I'm saying! I was really considering getting up at 4:00 am to wait in line for ticktes, but I got drunk instead and ended up sick from a cold too, AND Had to be at work at 10:00 am, so I didn't make it. But go to Hulu for some good clips.

3) Any of you who are responsible YouTube watchers or internet trollers have no doubt already seen Drunk History , but if you haven't yet, go check it out. It's entertaining and yet slightly disgusting in a perfect balance. There are a lot of homehade ripoffs out there, though, that ARE gross, so try to be prudent with your link-clicking.

4) Of course, if we're going to venture into YouTube territory, there has to be an obligatory Cute Animal installment. I used to be quite against the Cut Animals on the Internets phenomenon, but as the days here at the gallery have dragged ever onward and I have gotten more and more bored, I've become ok with. Animals are funny. Especially the ninja cat .

5) And, to make your day a little brighter, there's scientific proof (or at least a study showing that perhaps it's true) that fat butts are an indication of good health! True story!

Two posts in one!

Ok, the most important issue of the day today, obviously, is:

1) IT'S DAVID BOWIE'S BIRTHDAY!! He is 62 years old. As most of you probably know, I have a serious obsession with the man. I can't explain why or how it developed, but I think it has something to do with my love of the movie Labyrinth from a very early age, which introduced me to his sparkly nature, his awesomely sexy accent, and the gigantic... er... talent... that is displayed when he wears very tight pants. As I got older I started to listen to his music and realized that he does indeed rock my world in every possible way. The man has been ten years ahead of the curve musically since the late sixties, pioneered the glam rock movement, and I'm pretty sure actually is an alien living among us. He married supermodel Iman, who I think is also an alien, and their super-perfect babies will rule the earth someday, I'm sure.

He is older than my parents. But I would still say yes if he asked me to marry him, or spend the night with him, or let him eat sushi off my body, or... well... anything. That would be after I either wet myself or just made a fool of myself generally by blathering stupidly about the weather for twenty minutes or some-such, just because he had spoken to me. Yes, I may have a problem, but at least I am honest about it.

So, everyone, please go home tonight and listen to your favorite Bowie song, and lift a glass to the man that has had more influence on modern music than most of us realize, who was sexy enough to be probably the only man ever caught naked in bed with Mick Jagger, who can wear tights and sparkly eye makeup and still be sexy, and who could probably turn you into a bowl full of jelly with one piercing, two-toned look from his creepy/sexy eyes, and who, weirdly enough, has not yet made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Madonna has, and although I like Madonna, I think she should have told them she refused to accept her spot there until they put him in. Cause, I mean, she'd be nowhere without him... But that's another blog.)


2) And the second thing I want to bring up here is not quite as important to me at the moment, but will probably be a bigger eveny than Bowie's 62nd birthday in the long run. The iPod people will soon market the iBreath. A breathalyzer for your iPod. (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-idrunk19-2008dec19,0,3073178.story)
This seems like a good idea on a very, very altruistic level. The guy who thought up the idea, Don Bassler, calls it a safety device that "may save lives." He told the LA times that "the hope is that the iPod's cool factor will take away some of the stigma of acting responsibly and using a breathalyzer," which is all well and good. But...

Well...

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Who uses iPods the most? Who are the most tech-savvy people out there? What group of people finds out about new gadgets and must have them as soon as possible? And who goes to parties and follows peer pressure to drink heavily to the point of critical intoxication? Who are generally inexperienced and naive enough to think that they can handle anything and that nothing bad can ever happen to them? The answer to all these questions is the same: image-conscious high school and college students who have lots of their parents' money to spend.

Given what we know about the implied target demographic for the iBreath, then, what is the likelihood of that demographic using this device for good instead of for getting as wasted as possible? Sure, there will undoubtedly be a few responsible honor students out there who keep the iBreath safely in their pockets or by their steering wheels, but the majority of drunken high school and college students I've known in my day would be much, MUCH more likely to sit in a circle chugging jungle juice and seeing who can blow the highest reading before passing out, vomiting, or having their stomachs pumped. (For an in-depth description of the evils of hand-held breathalyzer devices in the past, please refer to Tucker Maxx and his "Famous Sushi Pants" story: http://www.tuckermax.com/archives/entries/the_famous_sushi_pants_story.phtml)

Thank goodness others have followed the same reasoning as myself: "Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said she worried that young people would use the breathalyzer for drinking games." I'm not alone in my fears, then, but when was the last time that MADD actually had an effect on the youth drinking culture?

All I can say is, I'm worried, people. As if the iPod and the iPhone weren't already sinister first waves of a frightening trend away from human interaction and the use of the brain that will inevitably lead to our downfall when robots take over the world with their superior ability to follow orders unscrupulously and their inability to make errors (so what if I'm conservative about technology?), now we're all going to become DRUNKEN drooling morons who can't leave the house without being plugged in to fifteen gadgets. We're making ourselves easier targets for the robots here, people.

That is, of course, unless we allow the Bowie Alien Child to rule us all, in which case I'm sure we'll be in good hands. Judging from the formidable might of the Bowie-Iman alliance already, their offspring will probably have the necessary technology and genius, and of course the sparkles, necessary to defeat the robots.

Oh my GOD. I just re-read what I've been writing. I'll stop now.

It hurts me when I look at pictures of the reservation.

Pictures of my time there, and visits back, my one and only visit back, bring me a lot of real physical pain. I feel I wasn't there long enough to establish the connection from myself outward to the community and the children that I wanted to forge, even though the experience of living there and all that came with it has taken up residence in my heart and will never leave. I feel that I used the reservation for my own purposes, that the people there saw me for what I inevitably was: a tourist with time to kill. But in my deepest parts I know that my time there was immeasurably more than that - I simply have no way to assert it. Were I to go back to visit now there would few who would remember me - I was too shy and too confused to know how to become a part of them all, while they became a part of me forever.
A one-sided love affair. I hope someday I can change that and go back. God I need a sweat.

THe Old House by the Highway, pt. 6

We left the hospital the next morning around seven. I was in a full leg cast and had been given crutches, which would take me a while to figure out. I had been given a strong dose of serious pain medication and was grateful for the fog of indifference it had lowered over me regarding the night's evens. Monica hadn't said much beyond asking what had happened. I'd told her I'd fallen through the banister and had seen the goat again, and that seemed to be as much as she needed to hear. She'd just nodded and said, “I knew it,” then turned back to her magazine as the doctor came in. I was glad she'd let the issue go for the time being – I was in too much pain to have explained much more. I knew she would have believed me, but I think my silence told her just as much as the whole story could have.

We pulled up to the house and I started to ready my crutches. “No,” she said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “I'll just be a minute. Stay here and rest.”

I just nodded and let her go, too drugged to care much and relieved in my own cloudy way that I didn't have to go into the house. I may have fallen asleep, but it didn't seem very long before Monica emerged from the house with two duffel bags. She threw them into the backseat of the car, then dug into her pocket. She pulled out the hoof we'd found in the garden and had been keeping on the mantel. It seemed like years ago that we'd found it.

I watched her as she walked down to the highway, waited a few minutes, then ran across the four lanes in one dash. She stopped for a moment, looking at the hoof she held in her hand, then threw it far out into the river.

She came back to the car. “I've been wanting to get rid of that thing ever since we brought it in,” she said. “Gave me the creeps.”

She turned around and unzipped one of the pockets on the duffel bag behind her, then turned back around with a business card in hand. I craned my neck to look at it, but gave up when a nerve went shooting down my neck toward my leg. She tucked it into the dashboard in front of the odometer. “You get some more rest,” she said, and turned the car back on.

“Where are we going?” I mumbled.

“To get some answers,” she said. “Then to a hotel.”

I just nodded and let myself fall back into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

When I woke up again, we were parked outside an unfamiliar ranch style house. A large van sat next to us in the driveway. “J&J Plumbing,” it read along the side. The wording rang a distant bell, but my medication didn't really let me recognize it.

Monica was at my door, opening it and helping me onto my crutches. I got myself upright somehow and began the slow process of moving myself forward, following her up a slight incline toward a well-maintained yard. As I got going, though, some of the painkiller-and-sleep haze started to wear off and the name on the truck struck a chord in me. “We're at Justin's?” I asked blearily.

Monica nodded. “This sonofabitch knows more than he's telling. I'm asking him about the goats.”

She helped me hobble my way up the front walk, then rang the doorbell. There was no immediate answer, so Monica – always the insistent one – knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, but finally Justin, clad in morning stubble and a bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in his hand, answered the door. He looked at us through the screen door, puzzlement and wariness mixing on his face. “Well hi, folks. Didn't think I'd be seeing you again so soon. What can I do for you?”

Monica smiled, but her voice was hard. “Can we come in, please, Justin? We need to talk to you about last night.”

He hesitated, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Last night? I… uh... Was I drunker than I remember?”

Monica smiled again and opened the screen door. “No, not at all. Nothing like that. But we do need to talk.”

He looked over his shoulder again, then shrugged and opened the door for us. Monica thanked him and as I hobbled by I smiled resignedly. Justin’s eyebrows rose as he realized I was on crutches. “Oh my god, I'm sorry,” he said as I passed into the well-kept living room. “I didn't see that... Are you ok there, Ed? What the hell happened to you?”

Monica closed the door behind her. “That's what we're here to talk about. Could we sit down somewhere?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his bemusement growing as he looked from her to me and back. “Why don't we go into the kitchen and I'll get you two some coffee. You look like you've had a long night.”

He led the way and I settled into a roomy wicker-backed chair at a large kitchen table. The room was decorated with pictures and ornaments of chickens. I was vaguely grateful they weren't some other barnyard animal. The sound of a running shower came from somewhere down the hall.

Ed settled into the chair at the head of the table after handing us two brimming cups of delicious smelling coffee. The scent of it kicked my brain another gear toward functionality. I took a sip.

Monica looked at hers for a moment, then straight at Justin. “Justin,” she said sternly. “Ed fell down the basement stairs last night when the banister broke. He landed on a pipe and broke his leg.”

Justin nodded soberly. “Well I'm mighty sorry to hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “Those stairs are tricky, I’ll give you that.” I could hear that he meant it, but there was an edge to his voice. I think he was afraid we'd ask him to compensate us for the medical expenses, since he'd installed the banister.

Monica smiled. “Well we’re certainly not blaming you,” she said warmly. “It could have happened to anyone. But we do need you to be honest with us about something.”

Ed looked down into his coffee, as if he knew what was coming.

“What happened in that basement, Justin? There is something not right happening down there and we need to know what it is. It’s not just the smell anymore and I think you know what we mean.” When he was silent for a moment, she continued: “Ed wouldn’t have been going down there in the first place if it was just the smell bothering him.”

Justin nodded, gathering himself before he looked up and spoke directly to me. “I should've told you folks, I suppose,” he began slowly. “But, frankly, I'm something of a skeptic, and I guess I was just hoping it wouldn't ever become... an issue.” He looked at Monica, then took a sip.

“My father,” he continued, “was real eccentric, like I told you last night. And, like I said, as he got older, he started keeping animals as pets that should never have been let in that house. He had pigeon roosts and chicken coops inside, some wallows for pot-bellied pigs out back. I told you about his fox. He had a donkey or two out there from time to time, even some giant godawful lizards. I don't even know what all he had most of the time ‘cause the place smelled awful, and with my allergies I could hardly be there ten minutes without sneezing my head off.”

He took another sip.

“Well, one day I went over there and he had a new 'pet.' A big old billy goat he called Rex. He was just in love with that thing, Lord knows why. The animal smelled terrible, just crapped anywhere it felt like it, and chewed on everything in the house. Just a lousy animal. But Dad had a soft spot for it. Kept it at his side all the damn time. Let it go anywhere it wanted.” He shook his head. “The next time I went over there was a few months later, and, well, he'd started up a whole herd of goats! A whole damn flock of 'em. Must have ten, fifteen goats roaming through his house.” He chuckled derisively, then looked at me.

“I mean, can you imagine? An old man, in his seventies, living in a house with a pack of goats! And the damn things are dumb as a box of nails – can't walk down stairs but they can damn well walk up 'em. And here's my old man, who thinks they're the be-all, end-all of domestic pets, and he’s carrying eighty, ninety-pound animals down flights of stairs when they get themselves stuck at the top.” He took a long sip. “I told him, I said, 'Dad, you can't keep doing this. Those animals would be better served living outside where there ain't any stairs.’ I said, ‘You're gonna fall down one of these days and break your damn neck.' I offered to build a shed outside for them to sleep in, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said something about how his babies were worth the risk. I just left. Couldn't stomach the thought of my father living like that. Had to get away, you know?”

He looked down into his coffee again, as if the scene were playing out on its surface, then started speaking again, softly. “Well,” he said, “it didn't take long for the locals to give him that nickname I told you about, and damned if I didn't join in. Some things are tough to face like a man. I should've gone over there and built him a shack for the damn things whether he liked it or not, forced him to listen to me, but it seemed like his dignity was already near gone. I didn't want to go bossing him around, taking the last of it away, you know?”

I nodded when he looked up, but he looked away again, out through the glass doors onto a patio where a large grill shone in the morning light. “After a few weeks I went back over there to check on the old man, and... I couldn't find him anywhere. Him and his goats, just nowhere to be found. The chickens were there, and the dogs and the cats sniffing at 'em like they hadn't been fed in ages. But no goats and no ‘Old Goat Man.’ But his old station wagon was there. I let myself into the house and... well... you know that smell you were telling me about. I hope to hell it ain't ever been as bad for you folks as it was when I walked in there. Smelled like animals and their shit and something rotten. I went down there and...”

He sighed and looked back at us, his eyes filled with sorrow. “There was my old man, dead in the corner. His leg was broken.” He nodded at me. “Just like yours. The bone was sticking up through his skin and all that. And he was... he was gone, must have fallen down there and couldn't get back up and wasted away, or maybe hit his head, too. Probably carrying a goddamn goat down there for something. And all those goddamn goats were down there with him. Stupid bastards followed him down the stairs, except of course they can't walk down stairs. So they' all fell. And they all broke their damn legs, too, falling down the stairs. So none of 'em could get the hell back up! And they...” He shut his eyes against the tears. “By the time I got there they'd started...”

I held up my hand to stop him. I knew what he was about to say and I didn’t need to hear it. But he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “They’d already gotten to eating him. My old man. Goats'll eat just about anything if they get the notion... and not just that, but they got the taste of meat and it looked like they started going after each other down there, too.” He opened his eyes again. “It was like something out of a horror movie, I tell you. All these dead goats laying around, and my old man, stripped down to bones in some places, with the live ones mostly limping around like zombies, all covered in blood...”

He stopped talking and swallowed, then took a few bracing gulps of his coffee. He looked back at Monica and me. “I should've known better, really, than to try to cover it up. I had a closed-casket funeral for him, told everyone he'd died in a farming accident and left it at that. Nobody except me and the coroner and undertaker knew what'd happened. I got all those goats and carcasses out of there, and I just hoped if I fixed the place up, there'd be no need to tell anyone. Just get it off my hands, you know. It's a nice house, structurally, and all.” He paused. “I should've known something like that would leave a mark on a place. You can't expect that kind of thing to just go away. But I've never been one to believe in ghost stories and all, so I just hoped... I should have at least put a new basement in, with a decent floor and lighting, but I just... I couldn't bring myself to go down there any more than I had to. I just left it.”

He looked right at me. “I'm awfully sorry, Ed,” he said. “I should've known better.”

I just nodded. It all made so much sense when it was said aloud. I'd been right all along but hadn't been able to voice it. Monica put her hand over mine on the table.

* * *

We sold the house shortly thereafter and were able to negotiate to be released from the mortgage. We moved back to the city, our experience with rural life having scarred us both for good.

We never found out if he told the next buyers about what had happened to his father or to us, but when we came back to check that everything was out, a cement floor had been poured in the basement and a new wall was being put up over the old stones.

It still smelled terrible.


THE END!