And no, I’m not talking about the ongoing global poop-tornado that is 2020. The less said about that the better; THAT tsunami of WTF hasn’t been funny since Tiger King.
I’m talking about the very specific weird ass cliched start-of-a-horror-film things that keep happening to me. Shall we run down the list of exhibits? Let’s.*
Exhibit A: Norton’s Country Estate Definitely Haunted House.
So one of the super not enjoyable things we had to do this apocalypse, was sell our house. Which was also not funny at all, and necessitated being away from the house for various repairs, staging, marketing, blah blah boring. Fortunately my good buddy Norton** was ready to rescue us from boring with a lovely little country estate we could use for a few weeks. And by “country”, I mean a sleepy little one-Starbucks town that The Drama affectionately referred to as “Butteforke, Oregon”***
And by “estate” I mean the kind of quirky little old house that you just walk into and immediately say to yourself (as The Kitten and I both did), oh yep this place so sooooo haunted. Don’t get me wrong, I love that wacky little house. It’s old and weird and awkwardly designed, and so am I, so we understand each other. But it was definitely haunted.
There were strange noises. Footsteps overhead when no one was upstairs. And then the peculiar incident of the lasagne. I left a frozen lasagne on the kitchen counter while the oven preheated, and went out to the deck with my cocktail. Heard a loud crash from the kitchen while there was no one else in the kitchen, went in and found the package of lasagne in the middle of the kitchen floor.
And no, I had only had ONE cocktail.
“Ha ha!” I said to myself, “I must have left it closer to the edge than I thought! It toppled off and flipped over! That’s a perfectly rational explanation! Ha ha!” Meanwhile the part of my brain that was paying attention during all those horror movies that The Canadian watches to relax was rolling her eyes and saying “you know what you sound like, right? You sound like the people at the start of a horror movie who dismiss and rationalize paranormal phenomena until it’s too late and the walls are bleeding and the doors are slamming and NO ONES GETTING OUT ALIVE….”
Fortunately Norton’s ghosts appeared to bear ill will against no one but the frozen lasagne, I can only assume they are Italian or something. The only other actually menacing things were: the bathroom with the same color scheme as the bathroom in “The Shining”, and the Pissed Off Black Demon Cat…….who stalked the yard glaring at me like I had personally killed and eaten it’s grandmother and was picking my teeth with her whiskers while sipping my vodka tonic. Pissed Off Cat was almost the villain in the Disney Parody Musical that Norton, Khaleesi and I were gonna write about my adventures, until we remembered we had lives and jobs and kids and no time for such potentially lucrative creativity****
(Not Norton’s bathroom. But only because Norton’s is smaller, and he doesn’t have a bidet, the philistine)
Anyway, we all survived Norton’s Haunted House and escaped from Butteforke with our lives and souls intact. Which brings me to:
Exhibit B: “Baby”
We recently drove up to the lake***** and visited the Thrift Store where The Canadian’s sister works. It is NOT called “Needful Things”, I think I should make that clear. The Kicker was happily perusing the stuffed animals; the oversized lion, the bunny with the straw hat and carrot….. and then she saw it. And she fell in love. Behold:
The Kicker named it “Baby”, but I’m pretty sure The Canadian is gonna call it “Annabelle“, and I bought it for her, because apparently I don’t listen to the voice of sanity in my head that pays attention to horror movies.
Also my SIL practically GAVE it away, and I’m sure not at ALL because she wanted the cursed object out of her shop……..
So “Baby” goes everywhere with The Kicker now, we took her to lunch and Kicker slapped her hand on the table and announced (in reference to Baby) “She’s not talking!”
Yep. Not creepy at all.
Then right after our acquisition of Baby, we went off to…..
Exhibit C: The Cabin yes fine IN THE WOODS
……that we are renting for a week until our new house is available and Holy Pope On a Unicycle, I think Baby brought us home. To her home.
This place is frozen in time. Circa 1983, if I had to guess. Seriously ……. there’s wallpaper on the outlet covers. The cabinets are country cottage oak. The appliances are clunky and reliable. The couches are blue corduroy velveteen. The decor is …. well….
(Observe, the Country Cottage Charm wallpaper beneath the oak chair rail, right next to the creepy headless figurine)
So anyway, all of that is just FINE and HILARIOUS, I’m Gen-X enough to enjoy a quirky romp back to the Cold War Era: but then I opened the closet in the third bedroom and there were all these old board games including THIS ONE:
Which …….rang a bell. An 80s era horror VCR board game? Wasn’t there a horror movie made about a 1980s video board game?
Why yes. Yes there was.
SO, not only did games like that actually exist (my parents being far too wholesome to expose me to such things, a wildly competitive game of Boggle was as scary as it got at my house), but there is one of these things that inspired a horror movie sitting quietly in the closet between the 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Big Ben and the vintage Trivial Pursuit.
So now I’m seriously torn. On one shoulder, there’s my sensible middle aged mom self, pursing her lips and saying “Don’t TOUCH that thing, you silly woman. It’s 2020 for Pete’s sake do you REALLY want to risk unleashing malevolent supernatural forces on top of everything else??”
But on the OTHER shoulder, there’s my badass adventurous self, with too much eye makeup and a low cut top and a bottle of whiskey and she’s all; “DO it. Watch the movie, then play the game. There’s a VCR in the other closet. Do it. DOOOOOOOOOO it!!! (Swig) And also, you need more tattoos.”
So basically if you never hear from me again, Badass Whiskey Mama won the tussle, and is currently trapped in some alternate dimension with monsters and creepy mist and bad special effects. But hey, it’s not like THIS dimension is winning any prizes this year……
I guess I’ll send you a postcard.
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*yeah I’m just going to skip the traditional “why haven’t I posted in months” nonsense, because it’s always the SAME nonsense (500 kids, general life crises, legal shenanigans from the ex, blah blah), and it gets tiresome. Moving on.
**who at this point is clearly and shamelessly trolling to get written about.
***it is not actually in Oregon and he didn’t actually say “Butteforke”. If you can’t imagine what he did say, you can congratulate yourself for being less of a potty-mouthed degenerate than The Drama.
****we were gonna call it “The Best Little Haunted House in The West”, with songs including “If You Can’t Get it at The Walmart You Don’t Really Need It”, and “I’m almost Absolutely Positively Sure No One Was Murdered In This Bath”
*****Yes. I am aware that at least 73% of horror movies start with the protagonists “driving up to the lake”. We have established that I am in denial and throwing caution to the wind.