I grew up with ghost stories.

This week the subject of haunting has been weighing particularly heavy on my mind.

Bloomington feels like a ghost town today. I love the December mid-holiday lull. People linger longer than usual over late breakfasts downtown or newspapers in the library. Those who always seem too busy to talk stop and say hello. In the small physical space of two blocks I unexpectedly see old friends, high school classmates, and a bizarre assortment of family members. It feels haunted in a comforting way, the way Bloomington feels when it's not "progressing," when old good things come back.

The deer at Griffy always look like ghosts--their white tails almost translucent as they glide away. This morning I saw three and Toby didn't even notice.

I watch Bush briefly on CNN in the staff breakroom as I refill my water bottle. Two employees laugh about Condoleeza Rice, saying what she's thinking, they say it's something like 'I gotta get back to that ranch and get something to drink! Just gotta get to '07 and I'm outta here!'--I often wonder what she's thinking, standing behind him, surveying the crowd. Bush's speeches are frighteningly repetitive. Hauntingly so. I hear one phrase ("This is an important step in the war on terror...") and I swear I've heard it seventy times before. Maybe more.

I've lost myself in the Best American Short Stories * 2005 this past week. There is no theme so to speak, but all of the stories are strung together with an eerily haunting strand of images and interactions. Perhaps it is the literary clime of the hour. My favorite in the collection is Edward P. Jones' "Old Boys, Old Girls," a story of a prisoner who serves a five year sentence for murder. Most interesting is the post-release tale of a man who resolves the only way to make it through is with such a thick stoicism that life is barely recognizable. He lives like a ghost. Family connections find him, old lovers, he tries to turn away from them all, in the end he commits an amazingly loving and intimate act in the midst of such a fucked up situation (vague so as not to spoil) that I almost couldn't believe Jones hadn't written it with more emotional embellishment. I love his writing style. He tackles huge difficult subjects with such an even tone.

An Angela Davis speech was on Democracy Now today. She mentions the ties between the legacy of slavery and the birth of the prison as we know it. Describing the prison as haunted by the history of slavery she says she believes in ghosts, well--the ghosts of history. Most haunting to me right now continues to be the murder of Sean Bell and the ghosts that his murder dredges up--most poignantly that of Amadou Diallo.