Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

Backbone

Houses have "feels" to them, just like any well-trafficked space for humans that spans many years. One might even say that these living spaces become permeated with the psychic energy from so many people who lived in them over the years, serving as a beacon for those who come after them, whether or not we know the history of these places. Such was the case with me, certainly; I noticed the beautiful Queen Anne here in town every time I walked past it, on the long walk from my mother's apartment to the local library, in country miles and any type of weather, because such is the measure of my devotion to you, my loving audience. It's what I trained for.

But, that didn't make it any easier. If I was sick—like I was my first year back in Rockland, lying on a thin pull-out chair that served as my bed on the cold floor of my mother's spare second room that she denies as such, to obscure the real reason for exclusions, which is her psychotic temperament—I still had only me to pull through anything, any time of year. So, when I found out that a really large studio was "to let" in the old house on the cheap, guided by the forcefully abusive hands of my mother and father who still gang up on people together when it occasionally serves both of their needs, it wasn't a surprise to me that the space called to me with a variety of energies.

A nice boy I grew up with—who cleaned my rugs for me, continuing the trade that his family established up here many years ago, in a reference and number given to me by my mother to better facilitate the quickness of my move—noted the exact same thing: "Hey, my friend used to live here years ago!" No way! It wasn't a surprise to me. Rockland is that small a place to live. Cool! I showed him a few of the key features that dated the place, like the original flue made in the 1800s by an iron worker from the city. The local librarian who's also a history buff told me an account that backed it up roughly to the letter, though I figured Dutch in there as an early ethnicity.

He said that the old house was designed as a showpiece for a German-American fire insurer from the city who hired fancy artisans that he paid to come up by train, to complete the impressive house. And that matched with what I found in the makers mark imprinted within the iron on the flue. Who knew insurance was such a lucrative business? But then, it occurred to me that structures were very prone to fire years ago, being made of wood and all. Another local told me at the library that her husband was descended from an Italian painter called Niccolini, who made a living painting big fires for just such a purpose, on a hill overlooking the burning structures, to record the event with a supposed deft accuracy. Huh.

His son-in-law, a chiropractor, moved into the big house after his daughter married, another dubious trade that has never won legitimacy from the authentic medical establishment that honors their Hippocratic Oaths solemnly made and upheld, like a lawyer pledging the truth with his clients while swearing on a stack of Bibles. While I have loved the house before I moved in, as a passer-by who can appreciate the finer details of historical architectural constructions, like the decorative wooden cut-outs that look like the spines of a backbone from certain angles that buttress the beautiful old house, the apartment around the bend of the big porch attracted something much less savory.

My neighbor told me the police had to batter down the front door during a violent domestic dispute he finally called the police on, and that was before the sick woman who left feet first this past year in a body bag, because after years of public drunkenness and drug use, she finally succeeded in committing the suicide that she'd loudly proclaim to anyone who'd listen. It was quite different from my side of the house, but similar to my neighbor's predicament with the previous couple years prior: we'd both reached out to prevent harm from happening to other people, and we were both still here, like the backbone carved out of wood by an artist far better than the man who hired him to do such crafty work. Such is the power of a much mightier spirit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/nyregion/30bartender.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/nyregion/julian-niccolini-co-owner-of-four-seasons-restaurant-pleads-guilty-to-misdemeanor-assault.html

Demon Hunter

One of the more salacious facets of our Holy Roman Catholic faith is exorcism, so much so that Hollywood has grown fat and rich with its telling and re-telling over the years, almost in direct contrast with the intensely taut state that is demonic possession. It's not something I talked about during my office career, as sanitized places where the gossip can be about sex or drugs, but never about the evil that lurks around a generic-looking water cooler, but that's exactly what it was.

After reenacting countless work scenarios where every single card in the crazy deck was played for a host of sick people at work, it was the only explanation left to explain the suicides, mental illnesses, and violent psychosis I observed firsthand, as well as heard in the first person from other employees. You could feel it swirling around you, the way you can feel a house's soul as either empty and fraught, or lively and well (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2016/01/sick-house.html). It's the same thing with some office spaces and commercial buildings: if you immediately get a bad feeling (or very soon after), trust it.

In criminology, sometimes a gut instinct is the only thing a really good detective has, besides knowing the killer is guilty as fuck, because evidence is notoriously tricky to find, and that's what evil relies on. It was the only explanation that made sense to me after my years toiling for insane family businesses; that they thought they had "the drop" on better workers because they cheated. It was something my dad and I used to talk about openly with one another. He worked for a sick family in Pennsylvania (the one year we had lived, as a family, outside of the New York area) who had a solid business that didn't need tricks, but they skimmed off the top anyway, and for peanuts, too. If they made a million-dollar deal, then a thousand or a few hundred dollars would go missing. It was always petty cash.

And it was baffling to my father, because they were already rich and successful. I asked my dad why he didn't call the cops after figuring out their scheme, and he just muttered that "all good things come in time". He got a big payout as his severance for knowing about them, in a dramatic stand-off scene that enabled us to move into a house in suburban New York with our family dog. He just wanted out. I knew it was finally over when the head of the family (one son flipped on the brother and father to cop a plea) appeared on the cover of a famous American magazine, and it still sickens me to think about it to this day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rigas). 

Given his rough Brooklyn upbringing, my father already knew that the line between businessman and gangster could be a thin one. I think he was afraid they'd kill us, if he talked about it to anyone in the cable business. Besides the company, there were absolutely no signs as to how tight a grip the corruption of this wealthy family had over the other rich white men in town. We lived in a beautiful Victorian house we were very happy with, and the countryside was beautiful. I had my own room! Plus, we got the cutest little Samoyed puppy I'd ever seen in my life. Life was good. But, still, there was something. My mom asked one of the women in town to do a "house reading" for us, which, to the uninitiated, is gauging a living space for "good" or "bad" spirits. 

We were told that our house was "clear", meaning that if anyone had died there (and with a house that old, before funeral parlors and that sort of thing, dying at home came with the territory), they'd been happy, peaceful people who'd moved on easily. Oh good...we breathed a sigh of relief. That's good. And it was. We had a clay patch in the backyard, beneath a little ridge that led to a set of old train tracks we loved to explore together. As kids, we were instantly bumped up a grade for our innate New York street smarts and natural acuity (in rather stark comparison to the small-town folk), and we jumped into huge piles of autumn leaves in the fall that smelled of the richness of the earth. It taught me that good and evil can live right next door to each other, sometimes in very close proximity.

Let's leave it at that for now, as a sort of a beginner's primer to the (super)natural forces that exist around us, every single day. I couldn't wear a cross to work back in the day without getting hassled about it, (in yet another tale of workplace harassment that's actionable by law), and my life in the secular world has always danced around the natural one that I know to be true, but try telling that to deeply ignorant people who are afraid. Fear is a crippling emotion that feeds off bad juju (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju), keeping its oppressors stuck in deeply ingrained patterns that can last for many years, often until death. And afterward.

Some say that "if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger", but that's not what happens with evil. No, sometimes it soul-sucks at you real slowly, until you grow weaker and weaker, almost dead with its sickness. Doubt me? Well, I've survived brush-ups with a few witches (recently, too, with a deranged Hexe: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hexe), and as your favorite modern Fili (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fili), let me assure you: witchcraft isn't something that you just hand out once a year with Halloween candy. No, children, there are dark things to be afraid of that go bump in the night, and I'm here to tell it to you straight. Class is now in session.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/04/16/vatican-exorcism-course-draws-170-students-to-study-demonic-activity/

The Winchester House

The doors to the bathrooms were solid wood; they were replaced with glass so that tourists would not mistake them for functioning bathrooms, which they are not. The only functioning bathroom was outside Sarah Winchester's bedroom, which had a small window for a nurse to check in on her, later in her life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House

I loved ghost stories as a kid. Whenever a new catalog from a particular children's book club came around the classroom, I always circled a few key titles for my perusal: ghost stories, vampire tales, paperbacks from the horror genre, and the "Guinness Book of World Records". Anything about the supernatural or fantastical immediately captured my imagination, like faked spirit photographs from the early 19th century, or those infamously blurry and deliberately ambiguous images of the Loch Ness monster. How could anyone prove or disprove such vague claims?

It was in this quest for the truth that my first tentative paranormal investigations began, heightened by my natural curiosity about the big, unanswered questions behind common cultural mysteries. I never really believed in space aliens or crop circles, but I was fascinated by the gullible people who did, usually fringe characters who never really fit into the world, seeking phantom societies they felt more comfortable with. 

Eventually, every huge hoax has been exposed to reveal the more interesting truths behind them, like: why would a group of British artists spend their evenings developing mathematically-accurate concentric circles in flattened fields of wheat? Well, because they're beautiful, and because mass hysteria is a prevalent human phenomenon, so much so, that for many years, major universities in England devoted departmental funds to their art, mislabeled as surreal, nocturnal alien encounters (http://www.circlemakers.org/). The art is actually much better than some invisible ghouls that go "bump" in the night, but the stories and untruths inspired by creative acts are part of the culture that surrounds each myth-making legend attached to them.

I was reminded by such a cultural creation walking uphill from town with one of my friends from the "basic yoga for disabled seniors" class that's held every Monday at our community center. She told me a great story about an older man who owned several trade magazines (they published journals for electricians, boat builders, etc), who disappeared on a yachting trip. She didn't think much of it at the time, because the younger son immediately took up his vacant post to evade lingering questions among the staff and authorities working the case. She attached her memory of the event not to his untimely death, but to the area called "The Bermuda Triangle". She cited all the typically kooky stories we've all read in the same pulp fiction outlets, like those Big Foot photos that never seem to be in clear focus. Isn't that odd?

Much like ruining a younger sibling's belief in the tooth fairy, I felt bad for letting her know that there are no unknown, uncharted giant invisible whirlpools that suck in boats from the ocean, much like there aren't invisible air-shafts over Bermuda that pull down planes into the sea without mechanical or pilot error. Stories like that are great cover-ups for nefarious deeds, though, which is the more likely part of the scenario behind the disappearance of her publisher way back then: that he didn't know how to captain his own ship, thus was lost to the rough currents and sudden squalls that any good sailor knows how to combat effectively (and here in the conversation I cited Robert Redford's movie "All is Lost", as a recent example of one man's battle against the sea), or that he absconded with company funds and staged a fake death so that he could make off with all the money. 

Even worse (and this I didn't share with her because she has a fragile psyche), may be that his own son murdered him so he could take over the family business, which happens a lot more than we think. My friend said she looked up the old company online, and they are no longer in business, which didn't surprise me at all. Well-constructed edifices do not topple easily. The name of the building she worked in has changed, too, but she didn't want to hear the truth. She wanted to believe in comfortable fairy tales that remain mysteries forever, because she disassociates from reality. I asked her a few quick, sharp questions designed to assess her ability to observe her surroundings while in yoga class, and she failed every assessment test I gave her, not that I'm trying to ruin my friend's peace of mind.

Far from it. I want to build her up so that she tells me her really good stories, like the one she mentioned about the mysteriously absent pater familias, because I told her the truth: those are the stories publishers actually want. She walked away from me full of new information that she will almost certainly struggle to assimilate effectively, which is also point of the point. If she can learn to build her stories around real structures that hold, then she won't be tempted to lapse into unproductive patterns of thought that go nowhere, like her mythical Bermuda Triangle, the worst kind of cultural deception there is, because it's not real. In fact, there's nothing magical there at all.

It reminded me of the old story about Sarah Winchester, the wacky eccentric heir to the Winchester family fortune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Repeating_Arms_Company), who said she built staircases to nowhere to accommodate the dead people murdered by the rifles her family's company made, a story told to me in grainy black-and-white photos from an old paperback I ordered many years ago, through my elementary school's book-buying program. I felt sorry for Sarah, even as I understood the power of her penance. She lived through the profit from a culture of death we are still living in now (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-10-20-remington-700-trigger-cnbc_N.htm), as evil a stain as any human could ever hope to bear, and no wonder she couldn't stand the weight of it.

Would you be able to live in a fancy mansion, knowing that your family murdered millions of average people, just like you? If you can't (and you know you can't), then how can you ask your peers to bear up under the sin of killing that's behind every mass murder? We can't go on like this. Let's tackle gun reform laws revised for mandatory licensing, certification, and permits for legal gun ownership, with psychological background checks cleared before we issue permits to the ill and infirm. It's why you're seeing more frequently open manifestations of extremely violent events. We're shining a light on the darkness that hides within. We're winning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

http://www.winchesterguns.com/library/articles/detail.asp?id=746