Black Gate

Here at Chateaux Goth Chick, the holidays mean spending a lot of time with family. In your house you may be drinking eggnog and celebrating your annual traditions and at my house it’s the same, only different. Here, December first marks the start of approximately four weeks of  more self-restraint than I exercise in all the preceding months put together.

Allow me to explain.

Although it is generally playful, for the eleven previous months I will have been teased about my taste in music, movies and books; about my “little side job” writing a blog for a disgruntled, anti-establishment audience and about how I’ve run all over the planet looking for ghosts when I’d probably scream like a little girl if I ever saw one.

Yeah? So?

My Mom will have told a small number of stories a large number of times about how I was always a “weird little kid” preferring to sit up all hours reading comics with a flashlight under the covers or sneaking out to the living room in the middle of the night to watch reruns of Son of Svengoolie, while other girls my age were playing with Malibu Barbie.

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Okay, not a cheery thought, but you aren’t reading Martha Stewart’s Living as you well know.

Back when I was a fledgling Goth Chick, learning the joys of sitting cross-legged for hours on end in the aisle of my local bookstore, but not yet in love with a particular genre (just no romance novels, ever), a somewhat twisted piano teach handed me an Agatha Christie novel.

I say “twisted” because one could argue that such tales were in no way appropriate fare for a nine-year-old. Then again, when taken in the context of the other media available to this age group today, Agatha’s plot lines are probably fit for the Disney channel.

But I digress.

My piano teacher looked like she was fresh from an audition for the part of a matronly, widow piano teacher. She even had her lines memorized, scolding me exactly the same way every week while I banged on the keys through purgatorial scales and off-kilter renditions of Ode to Joy. But in keeping with my life-long theme which at that point was only a mere pattern, she was a bit left of center.

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Welcome to Goth Chick post number fifty-two.

It was one year ago this week that I moved into the underground offices beneath Black Gate headquarters and began tackling the challenges of a new job. As I’m sure you can appreciate, those early days were a singular challenge. First there was the task of getting all the boys around here to put the toilet seat in the down position, and then the tedious undertaking of choosing the first group of interns — and assigning them to clean the various science experiments out of the communal refrigerator. To say nothing of the effort needed to find new locations for all the cleaning supplies, so I could make space for my desk and drink blender.

Given my initial reception from the other staff members, I was struck with the sneaking suspicion that our editor and chief, John O’Neill, may not have been completely forthcoming in describing the scope of my new role. For instance, several of my fellow staff members kept dropping by to inform me the coffee maker was smoking from lack of coffee, or that the bucket under the leak in the ceiling was overflowing.

In spite of these numerous inane interruptions, I set about to do what John had asked of me: bringing my “unique skills to bear on the daily challenges of the Black Gate team.” True that the staff was certainly a tad heavy on boys wearing shirts with Star Trek quotes, and a sci-fi convention anywhere in the world left the phones unanswered and the mail piling up. It was therefore my task to equalize this imbalance by doing exactly that which I excelled at: Throwing mocking, dark, threatening female sarcasm right into the center of the Enterprise bridge known as Black Gate. So, for your amusement (as well as my own), Goth Chick News went live in November, 2009.

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No, I can’t just go to Vegas like a normal person.

I’m pretty sure that by now connecting the word “normal” with anything you read here is no longer something you attempt to do. However, just in case there were lingering doubts, I’m stating my position for the record.

That out of the way, I can now tell you that during the two weeks since last we met I have been gleefully trudging through the sands of the Sahara in search of tasty paranormal tidbits to smuggle back through customs for you.

And rest assured, Morocco yielded a doozy.

In mid-October I boarded a flight from Chicago, connected through Rome and landed in Casablanca (yes, the one from the movie) where I kicked off a ten-day tour of the major cities of Morocco.

In addition to some really nice ceramic tiles and possibly a carpet (a flying one if I was really lucky), my goal was to collect stories of the paranormal in a culture governed by its religion. I tempered my expectations with the thought that a country full of devout Muslims may have no room in their beliefs for such things, and that even asking about them could be offensive.

Wrong on both accounts.

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