A Midnight Train to Anywhere

My wife and I attended a wedding this weekend in San Diego, the highlight of which was a tray of miniature Kobe beef burgers that went largely unnoticed by the other guests. As they frolicked on the dance floor to the sweet siren song of Journey's Don't Stop Believing, I abandoned social decorum altogether and gorged myself as if tomorrow were the end of days, when such forbidden delights would be fodder for grandfather's firelight reminisces as the klaxons in the distance warn of our robot overlords' approach. Actually, I only ate three, but I felt as if I had drawn them from the very table of Zeus himself. And Zeus loved him some Kobe beef burgers. And impregnating virtually anything he could shower in gold or accost in the form of a swan. But he was married to his older sister Hera, goddess of women and marriage...

And we're back to the wedding, which was absolutely terrifying, seeing as how I forget people's names when I haven't seen them in a few months; imagine walking through a reception filled with people who you haven't spoken to in a decade, many of whom you didn't particularly go out of your way to speak to when you knew them in college. Be that as it may, I still wanted to stay at that reception for as long as I could. Why? Because I had this waiting for me in my hotel room:



What exactly is that, you might ask? Well unless you just suffered a stroke or some other significant medical event that would cause a largely unused portion of your brain to suddenly misfire a few million neurons, chances are you didn't just blurt out "That's a painting of a miniature doorway at the top of a tiny stairway to nowhere inside a hotel walk-in closet." But that's exactly what it is.

Upon first seeing this carnival horror, I immediately thought of Poe's "The Black Cat." Was there a dead woman bricked up behind that wall, one whom the murderer couldn't help but taunt in perpetuity by painting her means of escape on the other side? The fact that it was a full-fledged door, rather than a clumsily scrawled rectangle made in chalk, was some consolation, though. Had it been the latter, I would have been forced to conclude it was either a portal to some waiting room for the recently deceased or a sumptuous banquet, table laden with every imaginable delight as a pallid form with no eyes sits at the head of that feast (and by the by, if you are told by the creepy giant faun not to touch anything in some magical in-between locale, and when you get to that place, there's a fucking eyeless monster sitting at the table, you keep your emaciated fingers to yourself). Glancing out the window of our hotel room, I saw neither sand worms nor fascist Spain, so the door remained a mystery.

If anything came out of that door during the night, it made not a sound, but instead stood over our sleeping forms silently, perhaps pondering what to do with these interlopers, these intruders in its sacred domain. All I can tell you is that in the morning as we prepared to leave, I noticed the paint of the keyhole in that door was chipped.

Not really spooky, I know. But if you want to see something truly frightening, watch that Journey video I linked above. Tell me if lead singer Steve Perry's penis isn't looking stage right.