Yesterday when I went to my mortgage website to pay my mortgage, I saw with a surprise that it was almost fifty bucks lower than what it was last year, going down from $657 a moth to $609. I don’t know why, I don’t know how that shit works. But it meant almost fifty extra bucks on my paycheck so I was hyped. So instead of putting it into savings or dumping it into my credit card I naturally went out and spent it on booze.
Deciding to stray from my normal haunt of the bottom-shelf captain Morgan rum, I decided to move up a couple of shelves and buy something fancier (And a little more expensive). I ended up with a bottle of ’El Dorado’, rum from some Caribbean island I had never heard of that had been aged twelve years.
It was not bad. A little sweeter than I would have liked but it had a deep smoky leathery flavor that I found impressive. I had a few nips of that and watched ’Balls of Fury’ but alas, even good rum could not make that movie amusing.
I do not know if it was the rum or my dinner of pretzels and peas, but I had some strange dreams last night. One of them, while not being a full-fledged nightmare, was one of those dreams disturbing enough to make me wake up. Some other things had happened initially in the dream, but eventually at one point I was hanging out with my friend Mike. Apparently he was on some sort of business trip and I was tagging along for the fun of it. However, I became annoyed when I found out his business trip consisted of visiting some abandoned tractor-trailers in a patch of woods. Apparently we had to spend the night in one.
So I opened one up and saw it was filled with empty crates, bits of flotsam and a few dead cats. The dead cats looked like they had been flattened or run over and were crawling with maggots. I ended up using a crate to push their carcasses outside. So I was trying to make my bedding in a crate in this dark tractor-trailer when I became aware of a ’presence’. It was that unnamed intangible evil presence that sometimes infiltrates dreams. I am sure I am not that only one who has been visited by this ’presence’ in dreams.
So in the dream in this creepy dark abandoned tractor-trailer filled with dead things and some unmentionable evil, I was already spooked. In the dream I had with me a little cheap AM radio and I decided to turn it on in an effort to calm me down. Without tuning to a station a song immediately sprung out of the radio, sounding scratchy and far away. It was a vaguely country-music like voice singing, and the lyrics I caught were: We know where that son-of-a-bitch is, The son of a bitch is in the living room, We know where he is.
The country-music like voice was sung with a lot of hate and malice, and it terrified me in that way that only dreams can terrify you. It was that horrible realization that the ghost or demon entity or whatever it was fully aware of you and you knew it was coming to get you. It was enough to make me wake up. I was laying on my bed and all my blankets had been pushed off and I was cold. I pulled the covers over me and flipped on the little television by my bed to the cartoon network in an effort to banish the disturbing feeling. I have been almost a month now without a cigarette, but I really wanted one then.
That’s when I became aware of the noise. It was similar to the noise a jet makes when it is flying low overhead. I live near the Sanford airport so it is not unusual to hear these. Usually they pass in a matter of seconds. But last night I was listening to this rumbling and it just kept getting louder to the point where I could feel the vibrations in my house. It went on for about ten minutes until I got my bathrobe and went to the front sunroom to have a look. The noise was very loud outside but I could not see the source. The weather outside seemed calm.
I even ended up going to my computer and looking up the weather map because I began to wonder if I was actually hearing a tornado. However the super Doppler showed clear skies. This was about 2:30 in the morning and the sound went on for over twenty minutes. I was already spooked from my dream; the sound from the sky was just disturbing. Eventually it went away. The only thing I can think it was possibly some big jet was awaiting clearance at the Sanford airport and was circling the area until it had a chance to land. Either that or there was a massive UFO hovering over Sanford last night.
I eventually drifted off back off to sleep.
2026 Update
Dialing the brass knobs to March 2008, where Ed is celebrating a fifty-dollar mortgage surprise by buying rum and meeting the devil on AM radio.
Ah, 2008 Ed. That was the era when a mortgage payment could just drop and you'd shrug, bless the mystery, and convert the savings directly into liquor. Now you'd get a push notification, a thousand screens asking if you want to enroll in autopay, and probably a subscription fee just for the privilege of looking at your own debt. The internet was a place you went to check the weather; it didn't live inside your bloodstream. Your little TV by the bed played cartoons; now it watches you back. And that cheap AM radio? Gone, replaced by a phone that would have recorded the rumbling, uploaded it, and had strangers arguing about drones before your bathrobe was tied. The strange part is your reaction—no app, no forum, just a cold night and a weird noise. You were living in a haunted folk tale while the rest of us now live in a haunted feed.
“2008 Ed, when you found that almost fifty bucks freed up, did a single, tiny demon whisper into your ear that booze was the only logical destination—or was that just your own excellent judgment?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, I’d like to say a tiny demon did it, but the truth is that little voice was mine, and it’s been with me since birth. Fifty bucks freed up, and my brain went straight to, “Well, that’s a nice bottle of rum.” No savings, no credit card, just good old-fashioned logic. I did fancy it up a notch with the El Dorado, though, so at least I have some class. And that dream, man, that was the real haunting, plus the phantom jet noise, so I figured I earned the booze. Honestly, that mortgage drop felt like finding a twenty in an old coat, so I celebrated the only way I know. The demon and I split the difference, I guess. Take that, fiscal responsibility.
