The Banshee

I'm a man of science, so I don't believe in ghosts. In more specific point of fact, I'm a man of social science because I have multiple history degrees, so you know I really want to believe in ghosts so that I could talk to them and ask them about, like, if Henry VIII knew about China or what it was like to have scurvy. So the fact that I don't believe in them carries double the weight, because of my obvious devotion to intellectual rigor and because of how much it sucks I can't seance up Christopher Columbus just so I can tell him he's a dick.

I also don't believe in curses. I like sports well enough, which is where you hear about curses the most, but any of us who were adults through the first two decades of this century saw the White Sox, Cubs and Red Sox all win World Serieses. A curse implies supernatural punishment or impediment and there's no way to look at the fans of at least two of those teams and understand: if there were an invisible, conscious constant, It wouldn't allow them to be happy. Sure, "but they suffered for so long," fine, but did they? The Yankees have won the whole fucking thing like 27 times, if you need any more proof there's nothing beyond the worldliest, most corporeal. Darwinian cruelty and indifference at work. The worst-possible outcomes only express themselves that consistently if it really is chaos, ironically. I hate to be all Manichean about it, but a manifestable divinity surely would have come up with some kind of evidence of a countervailing force in the face of such reckless and wanton evil.

So many people, especially lefties like me, and especially ones my age, will tell you "well, I'm not religious, but I am spiritual," which basically means sometimes they don't mind tofu all that much. Sure, they'll eat animals, but it's important everyone knows they feel the requisite amount of bad about it, and besides, it's only the ugly ones like fish and chickens, but certainly almost never veal. With that in mind, I would never describe myself that way. I like to think of myself as a conscious agnostic, recognizing I don't know what I don't know and, further, understanding about myself that I am genuinely disinterested in the answer. Do I want to know if there's a god or spirits or souls or whatever? I mean, if someone else figures it out, clue me in, sure, just like I'd want to know about cold fusion or a viable jetpack. But I'm not holding my breath for either, nor am I trying to solve either problem myself. If I go casting around for deuterium, I'm already completely wasting at least one person's time, minimum.

No goblins or cryptids or horses. All made up, mythical stuff. If I wake up at night agitated from some nightmare, I've never been afraid a wolfman or a dracula was lurking in the shadows of my room. I'm perfectly capable of convincing myself the level-eight spicy aloo matar is a heart attack, I'm already plenty scared.

I'm not a total idiot reflex-skeptic though. Like any reasonable person, I of course believe in boogeymans.

You're probably saying "well obviously, but don't you mean boogeymen?" to which I'd reply "wow, what a stupid fucking question." They don't travel in packs, your typical boogeyman, it's one per person, so multiple versions of a definitionally singular thing has to be pluralized with that instantial singularity in mind. So mathematically and grammatically it can only be "boogeymans." You can fight me on this if you want, but keep in mind I looked it up on the internet here. Go argue with that guy if you're so keen.

If it's not curses or ghosts, what is boogeymans? Besides being self-evident, I guess I'll indulge you and say boogeymans is juju. Whatever the bad version of "serendipity" is. It's a thing you don't fuck with because it's clear way before you try it that it's going to get you. It's why every year there are compilations on the internet of X-rays of unnatural things people got stuck up their asses. That's not bad luck or whippets or whatever, that's walking (backward, in this example) into a situation you know is fraught and getting exactly the result you knew you probably would. Your boogeyman got you, and you know it. But you also know: you never "get got" by boogeymans, it's always something you realize in retrospect was a surrender. Boogeymans don't gotta chase you if you go running into their arms.

As another example, let's say you spent $250,000 to get inside a homemade submarine to visit the underwater site where like a thousand people died in that same water. Is your voyage cursed because the Titanic was cursed? No, of course not, a curse is a stupid idea. There's no invisible force outside of nature trapped in that busted-ass boat on the ocean floor. What's boogeymans then? Tens of thousands of pounds of pressure differential in a vessel unequal to the task of keeping the ocean weight off your bones. It's not ghosts of Titanic in a hexed tomb that got those people, it was the draw of the wreck in a place inhospitable to human life in the first place. It's a nexus gathering of celebrity and hubris that dulls the impulse to self-preservation, a sense of daring that is the only sustenance that keeps boogeymans alive.

Boogeymans got Titanic in the first place, hooning around the North Atlantic in the dark in a ship a bunch of regular, squishy, drownable humans decided to call "unsinkable." The only thing that defeats boogeymans is preparation and a sense of the finitude of a human life. So you can do daring things without boogeymans getting in your way, like flying in a rocket to the moon. That's a manifestly insane thing to try, but with the right amount of math and physics and redundant systems, boogeymans get all pushed out to the periphery, where they really have to chase to make themselves known. And everyone knows boogeymans hate running. All strength work, no cardio.