Monthly Archives: January 2013

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

My favorite movie of all time is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I’m pretty sure there’s a doctoral thesis waiting to be written about how this film is the foundation of my artistic, aesthetic, and interpersonal development: “He’ll leave anyone behind to follow his artistic delusions!”

Which, uh, has a kind of disconcerting truth to it. Yikes.

Anyway, the movie has meant different things to me over the years. The artistic metaphor of Roy Neary pursuing his vision at any cost is what appeals to me now, but as a kid, it was all about being little Barry. Kidnapped by aliens to play across the universe? Access to all their secrets? Near immortality as we exceed the speed of light? Sign me up!

You wouldn’t be far wrong to think I’ve spent much of my life straining to be an insightful and perceptive person WORTH kidnapping by an advanced interstellar species.

It’s not going well, if the lack of kidnapping is anything to go by.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Maybe CE3K misled me. Maybe the aliens prefer the creepy oddballs you see in all the abduction accounts, people with diverging eyes and fanny packs and therapeutic socks covering their forearms.

Nobody cool has ever been kidnapped by aliens.

Think about it. Bruce Lee? Milla Jovovich? Jack White? Sarah Vowell? I guess it’s possible they’ve been kidnapped and kept quiet about it, but…come on. The aliens overwhelmingly come for the kinds of people who end up in encounter groups with crumbs speckling their wolf t-shirts — people who need to be kidnapped because there’s no greater love than being stolen, I guess.

Maybe alien abduction victims have repressed traumatic experiences of being left at school by their mothers. Maybe the hypnotherapists need to regress them back to THAT.

“No…wait. Where’s Mommy? Is that her van? It’s got the wood paneling. Oh, no…No. No. It isn’t her. But I got here on time like she told me. I’m standing where I’m supposed to be, by the stop sign. The janitor is closing up the school. They’re closing the gates. Am I going to have to walk home? By myself? In the dark? THE LIGHTS! THE LIGHTS!”

There’s no surer way of feeling special than to think that a hyper-intelligent species has built a ship capable of traversing space and time solely for the purpose of saving you from the company of lesser people who don’t love or understand you for who you “really are.”

That’s what I hoped as a kid, that my people would come to rescue me from the human family. I spent a great deal of my childhood derisively snorting “humans!” when people disappointed me. But then I figured out that, yeah, those humans actually ARE my people, damn it all.

It was a scary and freeing day when I figured out that your people don’t come looking for you. It’s the other way around.

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Ooh, the Island of Incipient Racism!

After Plato’s first allegorical mention of this fallen empire of peace and progress in 360BC, Atlantis became a kind of anthropological “dark matter,” an invisible but necessary force for scholars to explain how dirt-scratching Meso-Americans could have learned to build those fancy-pants cities. Whenever an explorer discovered something of surprising sophistication made by brown people, there were always the angelic Atlanteans to explain where they’d gotten it.

Ignatius Donnelly went even further in 1882, claiming that Atlantis was the root of ALL civilizations. Madame Blavatsky considered the Atlanteans as heroes of “racial evolution,” a concept that the Nazis jumped on with both hobnail boots a few decades later. Noted American screwball Edgar Cayce saw visions of Atlantis in his dreams and predicted it would rise in the 60s, which explains the sudden god-like appearance of Steve Jobs.

Come on. If anybody was an Atlantean, it was that guy.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Atlantis was a convenient dumping hole for pot-fueled fantasies about the future — probably just as it was for Plato: “Man, in Atlantis, parents totally don’t hassle their kids about long hair.” As we’ve learned more about plate tectonics, though, the less likely it seems that a continent could rise and sink in human history yet leave no trace.

Oh, except for that weird ass road in about twenty feet of water off the coast of the Bahamas.

The Bimini Road is a half-mile stretch of limestone blocks that look a little like a massive paved boulevard leading to and from nowhere. In the Atlantis episode, In Search Of boldly proclaimed it was either a road or a buried wall. Their footage seemed to focus only on a thirty-foot section of semi-rectangular blocks so the effect is pleasantly eerie.

“Holy shit,” you want to say while watching it. “There’s a road down there!”

It helps to be nine or so when you see it.

Yet, sadly, annoying eggheads have again pissed all over our dreams by claiming it is a natural formation, and they’ve used carbon dating and other stupid “science” to prove it.

They’d better watch themselves, though. That’s just the kind of hubris that got the Atlanteans killed in the first place.

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

When we went to the beach on Sundays as a kid in Florida, there’d often be old guys in straw hats with those clear green plastic brims sweeping their metal detectors up and down the shore. They’d stoop creaking to the ground, scratch out one of my father’s beer can tabs, and then shuffle away scowling.

One of the many souvenir products sold at my parents’ bookstore was a faux pirate coin about the size of a quarter. Formed from an impression of a real doubloon, the only feature that distinguished it from the real thing were the tiny letters COPY on the back. The letters were very tiny, and with the sun shining down and all the excitement…

My father liked to flip those into the surf every now and then to watch the metal detector men freak out. It was his revenge for all the stripped books they used to steal out of our dumpster.

Hmm. Maybe that explains a lot about me.

Nova Scotia’s Oak Island captured my attention as a kid because it was the ultimate boy’s adventure story, starting in 1795 when Daniel McGinnis and two friends rowed over to investigate the source of weird lights. What they found was a block and tackle hanging from a tree above a depression in the ground — and a mystery that still hasn’t been solved.

Whoever originally dug this pit was a real asshole.

Near the surface was flagstone. Ten feet down, there was a platform of logs. Twenty feet down, another. And then every ten feet after that, another platform. At ninety feet down, there was a stone inscribed with weird symbols (now missing, of course). It was translated to read that treasure was forty feet below.

Except, ha ha, the fucking thing started flooding every day with the tides. An experiment with dye revealed three tunnels around the island that delivered water to the pit. Was it a booby trap or simply a geological feature? Nobody quite knew, but it was a big pain in the ass.

The “Money Pit” has claimed six victims over the years with everything from carbon monoxide poisoning to drowning. Men have lost their lives, their careers, their fortunes down there. The island is so riddled with holes and trenches that nobody is quite sure where the original pit is. People and corporations are still digging away today.

And what’s down there? Well, what do you want to be? It’s got to be good, right? The wonderful thing about the Oak Island Money Pit is that you can fill it with anything you imagine. Treasure of Captain Kidd? Maybe it’s down there. Jewels of Marie Antoinette? Sure. Lost plays of Shakespeare? One hundred and forty feet underground in a flooded chamber is a perfect library.

Oak Island is a Rorschach Test of dreams. It’s a toy box of pirate signs. Maybe that triangle of rocks is an arrow. Maybe this pirate map with no known provenance shows Oak Island. Maybe those gold chain links we found weren’t a victim’s pocket watch chain but something from the treasure. What’s wonderful about the Oak Island mystery is that you can look down into that shaft (or one of the hundreds of others) and see exactly what you want to see.

A couple of boring egghead types have even supposed that it might be a natural sinkhole.

What’s my theory? The Will Ludwigsen Test of Unexplained Phenomena© asks, “In all our theorizing, have we sufficiently accounted for human folly, laziness, and self-delusion?”

No rational person would go to such lengths to hide a treasure — if only because the risk of it being unrecoverable even to the person who buried it would be too high. And nobody is that smart, either. No, my guess is that there could well have been a cache of some kind that McGinnis saw recovered in the middle of the night with those lights, and he and his friends dug up debris from the excavation. Over the intervening centuries, a treasure hunter’s game of Telephone has embellished the story through each re-telling until it was codified in the mid 19th century…and by then, there was plenty of junk around that looked like something big was there.

Go outside today and stare up into the sky (not at the sun, dumbass). Squint as though you see something. Maybe even point. And then watch as other people look up at the same nothing you’re looking at.

That doesn’t diminish how wondrous the Money Pit is, mind you. People are literally digging for their dreams, and there’s something oddly noble about dying in a pit for pirate’s treasure instead of in an office somewhere.

It was easy enough to assume the Publishers Weekly review of In Search Of was someone who owed me a favor, but then comes this one from Kirkus:

“Ludwigsen’s well-wrought, entertaining tales feel like a mashup of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and his evocative, whip-smart prose steeps readers in a realism that’s mordantly funny and matter-of-fact but glimmering with whimsy and horror that leaks around the edges…Ludwigsen’s creepy, comic world reveals plenty about our own.”

It’s hard to know what to DO when you get a review that says everything you ever want said about your work. This paragraph is exactly what I’ve been trying to achieve…and there it is. Huh.

I have plenty of defense mechanisms for the usual apathy that writers face, but there’s not much in my emotional toolbox for handling praise. I’m nervous even drawing attention to it because maybe it isn’t seemly.

And if my readers know one thing, it’s that I’m all about what’s seemly.