Gug's House

Either someone is walking upstairs in a way that is making their floorboards creek in the eeriest way possible, or there is a gagged, struggling man hanging from the corner of the ceiling of my room.  Or it is something like a man but he doesn't have a mouth. Or it is a ghost that is imitating a gagged, struggling man in order to get me to look at it and as soon as I look at it I will see it is something much more terrifying, like a giant house centipede with human baby heads on both ends or a giant upper half of a face that is staring at me and one of its eyes rolls backward and on the back side of its eyeball is a picture of my face with dark holes where my eyes should be or maybe a dog with an eight-legged spiderlike body and a grinning human mouth on its forehead.   And then it will either leave me alone and horrified or else it will throw me out of my bedroom window and I will fall down two stories with my face grinding against the brick wall of the building next door all the way until I'm impaled on an old fence post probably through my neck or through that part of your chin that your jawbone surrounds that's just fleshy.  The fence post would go in there but I don't know where it would come out, maybe it wouldn't.  Anyway, what I'm saying is, I'm going to try not to look that way tonight and maybe goodbye.

• Where my parents come from, you buy Illinois lottery tickets but the TV there all comes from St. Louis so you could only see the numbers for the Missouri lottery.
• Pepap says Grandma Eunice has a lottery number that she chose herself and wrote on a scrap of paper and put in a drawer somewhere in the Gegel ranch.  Then, every day she watches the (St. Louis) lottery numbers to see if the number that she wrote down would have won her the lottery that day.
• The early Gegels are the basis for a Shirley Jackson short story.

Or maybe my Dad said this at separate times in my childhood in reference to both Arby's roast beef sandwiches and Mrs. Butterworth's maple syrup.  Maybe he was constantly pointing out to me that various food brands had a special kind of humility that was rooted in their success.  Maybe that was something he wanted to make sure he passed on to his son.