I was walking along inside the huge death-star like space station. I walked into a little drink place called 'The digital bar'. It was small and dimly lit. I asked for a drink. The bartender with an eye patch looked at me for a moment, poured a drink, and then spit a loogie in it. Annoyed, I groped at my belt but realized security had confiscated my blaster. I wondered for a moment if I could sneak in chemical-projectile weapons...
Suddenly I woke up.
(Yes, I actually have dreams like that.)
I lay in the darkness looking up at the ceiling. The a/c unit was pretty loud, at least in the quiet room. I have a single wall unit I use in my bedroom at night. Cheaper to cool one room than the whole house. Normally my brain just tunes out the noise, but something had waked me up. I lay there a moment and then my brain sorted out the noise from the a/c from the other noise I was hearing. It was a strange unearthly wailing. I laid there, listening to it, chills running down my spine. It was floating in from outside my closed door... something in the house. It was an unnatural feminine moaning.. it was...was...
Something in my brain clicked.
It was Bjork.
I sighed and got out of bed and opened my bedroom door. From out of my kitchen bjork's 'army of me' was blasting out. I have a cheap Wal-Mart boom box in the kitchen that plays MP3's from a CD. It's really cheap and does not sound that great, but it was only 20 dollars and has been pretty reliable. However, one of it's major flaws is that when the power in the house turns off and then back on, it will immediately start playing whatever cd is in it at the time. I glanced at my clock.. it was blinking so sure enough the power had burped. That bjork song was pretty far into the CD, so it had been playing for a while. Good thing I do not have any close neighbors.
I shut it off and then went back to bed. But I tossed and turned. I could not fall asleep. Finally I clicked on my light and read a book I was reading. After an hour or two I finally drifted off to sleep again. But I kept waking up during the night from mildly disturbing dreams. I think my problem is I had moved my television out of my bedroom. Since my giant tv had died I moved it back into the living room. Having been used to its warming flicker every night, the darkness in the room had become a little oppressive. I will have to pick up another TV for in there.
Nothing much on my agenda for the weekend. Tonight I am going to go to redneck steakhouse and eat some dead animals. Then I just may make a foray downtown to check out that bar 'screamers'. I had never been and I heard whispers along the grapevine there just may be some gothy girls dancing there. Good enough for me. Plus they are having three dollar long island ice teas. It's been ages since I had a long island ice tea and the thought of slurping down a cool one appealed to me.
I discovered an outboard motor on craiglist for fifty dollars. It's way down in Melbourne, about an hour and a half drive, but for only fifty dollars I will make the trek. I'll have to see if the guy contacts me back. Then I'll be able to go farther in my little scow then simply butting around the dock area.
2026 Update
I'm dialing the infernal machine to July 2006, where Ed is spooked by a feminine wail that turns out to be Bjork.
Ah, 2006: the year a demonic midnight wail could still be explained by a twenty-dollar Wal-Mart boom box and a power burp. Today, that same spooky sound would be a smart speaker's firmware update whispering at 3 a.m., or a neighbor's Bluetooth speaker hijacked by someone else's nightmare playlist. Ed's whole evening is a museum of lost customs: CDs with actual physical positions in songs, a television in the bedroom as comfort noise, Craigslist as the place to buy a fifty-dollar outboard motor from a stranger in Melbourne, and three-dollar Long Island iced teas at a bar he's never tried. Now the bar is probably a pop-up pouring sixteen-dollar small-batch amaro; the boom box would need five subscriptions to play anything; and that motor would be listed as 'vintage rustic nautical artifact' for eight hundred dollars. I also adore that Ed's dream has him groping for a confiscated blaster—the 2006 version of patting your pocket for a phone. We trade one set of ghosts for another.
“2006 Ed, when your brain finally placed that 'unnatural feminine moaning' as Bjork's 'Army of Me,' were you more relieved it wasn't a ghost, or more annoyed that you'd trusted a twenty-dollar appliance to stay quiet through a power burp?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I reckon it was equal parts of both, maybe with a little extra annoyance thrown in for good measure. See, when you wake up at two in the morning to some unearthly wailing floating in from the kitchen, your first thought is ghost, or maybe some critter got in and is dying a slow death behind the fridge. Chills and all that. But then my brain clicked and it was just Bjork, and I felt this stupid wave of relief, like, oh good, it's only a two-dollar CD player being haunted by a power burp. But that relief lasted about half a second before the annoyance set in. That cheap Wal-Mart box has been reliable, sure, but it's got that one fatal flaw, and it picked the middle of the night to show off. So I stood there in my boxers, shutting the damn thing off, thinking, I trusted you, twenty-dollar appliance, and this is how you repay me. Honestly, if it had been a ghost, at least it'd be interesting.
