When Words Mean More
For Instance, Ghost
I’m thinking of made-up words. The truth is that I’ve seen more new made-up words in the last 25 years of my life than I ever did before. Sometimes, now, when I’m reading things out there in the Internet world, I don’t understand what is being said. I use Google as a translator into my own native tongue so I can understand. It’s a very strange feeling. Almost like I’ve been in jail for 25 years and am just now out. What’s a cell phone? Why does the toaster do that?
A good place to hear new words is on Reddit. I’m an old person, I watch old television shows, I’m just not around younger people much. So, to get a sense of what the younger folk are talking about, go anywhere on Reddit. I spend a lot of time going back and forth to Google, asking, “What does ???? mean?” Reddit is also good to round out your vocabulary on any subject. Like bread is bread. Right? No, bread is evidently not just bread. I looked just now, and somebody asked in a photograph what the bread was they were eating. Incredible. I put the link below. Who knew?
Sometimes, the words I hear are normal words. It’s just that now they feel somehow insulting. You can tell by the other words around them or the face of the person talking to you. Having been in several different countries, I can tell you it is easy to inadvertently insult people. You have to watch their faces. That’s when you say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was trying to say …”
I remember when I first started hearing the word ghost. I’m a psychic, and the word ghost only meant one thing to me. An apparition that I may or may not be able to hear or even talk to. The last ghost I encountered was when a friend asked me to investigate a supposedly haunted house in Alameda. Yes, I can confirm there was a presence there. Most folks got feelings that somebody was in an otherwise vacant room. Noises were heard. Clanging, doors opening, or footsteps going up and down stairs. Stuff like that. What I heard was, “My house. My house. My house.” Nothing more than that. How can you talk to somebody who says the same two words over and over again? It was like she was stuck on stupid, like a scratch on a record where the needle kept jumping the groove and running over the same spot over and over again.
I’ve encountered a few other ghosts. It’s easier to talk to them if they are more like the folk in Spirit I talk to. Those are real conversations. “Hi, how are you? Are you okay?” I always ask, though everybody always says the same thing. Yes, they are fine, and no, they don’t need anything. My conclusion has been that folks in Spirit are fine. Ghosts, though, are not.
I think I would hate to be a ghost, though they really might not know any different, just the same as any of us can change completely who we are. I’m not going to become a CPA or a lawyer just because I choose to. I’m too old, I think, and I have absolutely no interest in changing. Maybe a ghost feels the same.
I remember an old television show I loved watching called Dead Like Me. It was hilarious. The story was of a young adult in her early 20s, as I recall, who was just moving into adulthood. She was old enough to still act like a shitty teenager. You know. You’ve met them. Anyway, she still lived at home. Her name was Georgie.
Her mother was sick of her moping around the house all day and said she had to get a job. So, she got the job at a temp place. I’ve worked at temp places before. It is sort of cool. They train you, usually to do simple things until they see what you can do and then begin asking for you to return. You move up through the ranks and can either stay a temp or be hired by the company. Money exchanges hands between the temp agency and the place you’re now going to work for permanently. I don’t know how much. It’s been so long that probably has changed. But it is sometimes, for a number of months at your new permanent job, they have to kick back a portion of what you make to the old temp agency. Not really sure about that, but that’s what I think happens. What’s nice about it is you don’t have to make a commitment to a job you know nothing about. It’s like dating gone wrong compared to dating gone right.
Anyway, Georgie goes to lunch on her first day at work at the temp agency, and a toilet seat comes blasting out of the sky and kills her. It’s a freak accident. But she doesn’t go where people normally go once they die. She becomes a Reaper. She meets up with a team of other Reapers. It is their job to touch people who are about to die to take their souls. What they do with them, we never find out, but the process is evidently crucial to a good transition to the afterlife for the poor, benighted soul.
The Reapers are still seen in our world. They have flesh and blood bodies, and both need a place to live and jobs to support themselves.
There is humor in this. What the reaper looks like now is not what they looked like when they were alive.
They are not ghosts. They are stuck at a mid-way point between being alive and being dead. The folks they touch get to ascend on a beam of light to heaven. Evidently, nobody goes to the bad place. Somebody in Spirit just said to me, “It’s all bad.” I had to laugh because usually, they say, “It’s all good.”
I’ve been attracted to shows like that for years. You can watch episodes of it here and there on the internet. I just checked, and it looks like season two is still available on Amazon Prime.
For me, talking to Spirit is like talking to anybody else. Talking to animals is the same. Everybody speaks English to me, thankfully, because my knowledge of other languages is a step lower than how I understand modern English. I have to qualify that statement. I once talked to a plastic lawn chair. It did not make sense to me. No English speak on that one. It was this chaotic grinding of rocks screeching against each other. It was my first time, and I haven’t done it since then.
The Links: Dead Like Me Please tell me what bread this is? From Reddit with 1.4k upvotes.