The drive home

I always enjoy the long drive, especially when it's a quiet, moonlit night. Leaving my parents' house to go back home, lots of things come to mind in the peace of my car's cabin. I open the sun roof and let the steely moonbeams flood in. It had just rained and the clouds are lazily drifting apart, letting the moon come up. The weather's cooled down, especially in this time of night, after the rain. There's plenty of haze coming off of the land and the asphalt, as the late showers and the night's dew draw out the day's heat in the eerie form of mist and shadow.

I think it's times like this that would actually make for a pretty good ghost hunt. The mind is more susceptible to the supernatural when the setting is right...the bright moon, the cool, wet temperature, the mystery of the fog - the vehicle of spirits who laid asleep in the earth. Remnants of their ghosty limbs cling to the pinions of supernatural smoke and cloud, giving them a fleeting form in the moonlight. They come up to haunt, but not to scare...

I think ghosts are leftover potential energy that are caught up in this state of existence. My sense is that, these spirits, these souls, are still here because they had not fulfilled what it was they needed to do while they were still alive. Consider, if you will, life as we know it, as a series of events that are somehow intricately interweaved, interconnected...then each connection that is made is driven by forces that govern the units which articulate in order to make said connection. The soul is that force that drives the unit, the body, to articulate and make the connection, which drives this process known as life forward, like an automaton brought to life by electricity, magnetism, heat, light, energy, coursing through its wires and circuits. But the system is not completely hardy. There are unaccounted variables that come into play and despite all of life's efforts to make all its connections, some units tend to break down. People die, by all sorts of means, some never get to do what it was they were meant to do. However, like any good system, a backup, a redundancy, a failsafe device is always built in to preserve the system should a catastrophic event occur...in this case, influence.

What do I mean? People say they've seen ghosts or spirits. Other people believe that they can commune with the dead. Still others feel the presence of the dead and continually believe in the afterlife. For whatever reason, the dead, even after they have decomposed, still influence us. And I believe that, despite their lack of physicality, they make up for it in energy, and they move us like a magnet moves iron filings through a piece of paper. I do not know if there is a consciousness to this effect, but if there is, then it must do so for the reason of preserving the continuity that is life, like any substance that exists in a medium, it must move down a concentration gradient until equilibrium or dynamic flow is achieved.

And so, the dead, the spirits, the souls of others influence the living, to make the connections that they have failed to accomplish when they were still whole. Perhaps the things they were supposed to do are maybe the same things we are meant to do now in our lifetime. Perhaps they influence us because they are connected to us by the job, the thing that needs doing. Perhaps their energy becomes our force, their memory becomes our thought...stored inside our unconsciousness like a capacitor building up the charge, then released in a giant flash of brilliant light.

Convoluted, confusing, but fun stuff for the drive home. And it was a nice night for a drive.

Song of the day: "Tonight, You Belong To Me"
- Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters