Halloween weekend

Halloween was fun. I didn't do anything special, really, but it could not have turned out better, in my opinion. Around 7:30, I left for Ypsi, not really knowing what to expect (previously I had been told a haunted house visit was going to happen, but it did not), but knowing that I'd be home in a short number of hours. I ended up bringing a small watermelon, since mom told me we had to eat it within a day or so, and I didn't want to eat it alone. It wasn't that good, though, which made me sad. We sat around playing Jenga for a while since a couple of us had never played. The group ended up being Ali, Doug, Courtney, Adam, and myself. I lost Jenga twice because my hands are so shaky. After giving up on Jenga, we watched a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which sucked, and went for a walk, and it was one of the greatest walks I've had in a while. At first, we played a game called Slidey Pumpkin, which has two rules:

Kick the pumpkin piece, and
Slidey Pumpkin ends when the pumpkin piece is too slick (or SLIDEY) to kick anymore

Someone had smashed a pumpkin on Eastern's campus, and that's how that all started.

But walking with them, especially when there are more people, is too fun. When I'm out in that setting, I run and jump and get into all sorts of tomfoolery. I like to kick people under their feet as they're walking to really piss them off, and that turned into a fun cat-and-mouse game. Adam has this habit of jumping on people's backs, and the last two times he did it to me, I ran off with him pitifully clinging. The first time was on his birthday, and I ran for a block, then ran back, and it turned out to be a bad idea, because it was cold, and my asthma was just horrible for the next couple of hours (I didn't have my albuterol with me because my Advair has been so wonderful, breathing problems really haven't come up). I had also run that block uphill with someone on my back. So, this second time last night, Adam yelled "Uphill!", and I let him go (although that time, I had everything I needed to keep going if I so chose). I'm so glad to have a group of friends like these, where we can wrestle, climb on, and even tickle each other, and it's absolutely fine. It's freeing to have people who don't have tons of hangups. In fact, I'd say I have more hangups than they do. Courtney and Adam always tell me I can spend the night, and I hardly ever do because it feels odd to me, like I'm intruding on their space or time, although Adam has explained to me a number of times that this is not so.

They are the only people I know who I would say had "secular spirituality," even though I feel that phrase is retarded. They just have a remarkable freedom of being that I couldn't explain otherwise. They live a truth that a lot of people lose when focused on icons and dogma, by which I mean an open, intense agape love for the people around them. That's a core value in any faith, but how often do we see it, or even experience it in ourselves for others? But my friends make it easy for me.

I'm reading more and more about Christianity and Judaism, but I don't see information anymore, all I see is bias. It shines through any so-called refutation, and these barely veiled emotional stances making reading -anything- tough. Even the big-name stuff tastes funny. CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity" had me asking "THIS is the first word in modern apologetics?!" I don't want anyone's take on something, I want pure information, I want I want historical, linguistic, psychological, anthropological, sociological, and archaeological analysis, EVEN IF some of those things don't neatly apply. I AM asking "why" on a number of accounts, but the answers, I believe, lie heavily in many more areas of "what", so don't give me more of that "why" crap.

Today, I played an annual game of Cthulhu. It took place in 1928, in fictional Arkham, Massachusetts. Our group was approached by a professor at Miskatonic University to rescue a team who had gone to investigate a mansion, and were two weeks late. I played a cop, but we also had an archaeologist, a professor of Occult Studies, a private investigator, a reporter, and a Catholic priest. Some of us had "dark pasts," and mine was as a Sicilian criminal who was wanted all over Europe, but had found a niche as a cop in this small, out of the way New England town. We got up to this mansion, and the building, despite not being on the city's records, looked maintained. We hopped out of the truck and tried the doors, but they were locked, so we busted in with our crow bars. There was a monstrous, chimeric statue in the foyer, which later disappeared, and various side rooms. In the library, we found an English translation of the Necronomicon, a book of dark spells in Latin, which the priest, in reading, dropped and splashed holy water all over, and some book in Egyptian. We found a false book which acted as a switch, but we're still not sure what it did. After hearing some creaking overhead, I raced upstairs, shotgun in hand, pounding on a locked door and yelling that the police were here, and to open up. I saw a light through the keyhole, but there was no response. I kicked the door down, but I didn't see anyone, and was advised against wandering off. Going back downstairs, I watched our flank as they wandered through more rooms. On another set of stairs, I saw someone peek out, so I rushed over with a gun! When I saw a man on the stairs pointing a gun at me, I shot him twice, and Aaron, the gamemaster, said I got him in such a way that he would bleed out. But then he started saying words in a strange language, and all the lights started dying out, so I shot him in the head. Everyone had a problem with this, because saying that the dude was casting a spell wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but I didn't care, because I saved us some hassle. I then appropriated his wallet, because I was the cop, and who was going to arrest me? I got fifty bucks for my trouble. Continuing on, we ended up in a room with a piano and a comfy chair. The private investigator sat in it and began hearing the piano playing, then saw a woman playing it. I decided to plunk a few keys, but the PI started freaking out and grabbed his gun, saying that "she" was going to get us. The priest then sanctified the grounds, but I don't know whether or not it did anything, because we didn't test that room again. At one point, our archaeologist stared at a mirror that told the "future," that someone in the group was gonna kill her, but it never came true. After that, we went the side doors, and went to check our car, since we were starting to get freaked out, and they didn't like that I killed a guy. But our tires were slashed, and the transmission had been torn out and left on a seat for us. That was when we discovered the chimera statue missing. We -really- wanted to leave at that point, but it was starting to storm, and most of us were armed, so we decided to keep searching the house. At that point, I had seen movement upstairs, so that's where we headed. As it turned out, it was the guy I had shot in the head. He had reanimated. We rekilled him and tossed his body in the fire. We then found another haunted mirror, but we smashed it without viewing it (it was facing away from us at the time). We tried the next door, but whatever was on the other side turned the handle the other way, so I ran up to it, yelled that the police were, got no answer, and fired through the door with my shotgun. Upon inspection, it seems that I had killed another officer. Also in the room was a weaselly science guy, who claimed to have been from the first group and survived along with the cop for a couple of weeks... until I killed the cop. Since I had breached the door, it wasn't a good place to hide anymore, so we made him show us the way to the subbasement, where he claimed "they" went, where "they" chanted all night. We'd heard some of it when we were outside, but it stopped when I went over to the well (which was the apparent source) and yelled down, asking if they were the motherfuckers that trashed my car. Down, down the spiral staircase, below the well, and into a spiraling chamber filled with twelve cultists and their leader-- the asshole who asked us to come here in the first place! Again, I announced that the police were here, and that these chanting cultists needed to cease. They did not, so I started shooting them. At the bottom of the chamber was a pit of bubbling water, which was black and boiling. The rest of the gang started pitching in and killing cultists, but our noble reporter was tossed into the pit by the cult leader, and disappeared under the water when a giant tentacle grabbed her. After dispatching the leader and half the cult, the last six gave themselves up. At gunpoint, I made them line up and take their silly cloaks off, revealing regular (clothed) townsfolk-- all amassed in a secret sect trying to "awaken" the "great ones". They needed two sacrifices, but we saved them-- the reporter was the only live body to be lost to the monster. The cultists were armed, and one of them actually got a round off which struck me pretty badly, but then I killed him. Then, one by one, I executed each cultist that I felt didn't tell me enough about what they were doing until we were down to one, at which point the private investigator tackled me to prevent one last death. Our Occult Studies prof, who felt that his was the only true religion (he practiced voodoo), felt that it made sense to kill the last one, since the cultist went on about how they only "need one more, one new convert" to continue their goings-on, and so took his knife and killed the last cultist. All that remained of the sect was the books, and we were stealing those anyway. We spent the night in a secure room (one the statue wouldn't fit into, if it were indeed animate and dangerous) and trekked unmolested back to town the next day.

There are two basic rules to any Cthulhu game, one of which I learned today:

1 Don't read anything, it'll make you crazy, and
2 Ruthlessly dispose of everyone

I almost killed the rest of the group, thinking that one of them would be the "one convert," but I didn't. Instead, I told them that we didn't know each other, to never speak of what happened, and to never come back again. There were odd stories in subsequent days about grisly murders and a strange creature being seen swimming away in the ocean. I dunno what they meant >_>

Sean