So I May Have Bought a Haunted Painting

Okay. So I may have bought a haunted painting. Now I don't mean haunted in the sense that this painting is home to an angry ghost. I mean that I think the painting may be a magical door way to another world. I mean, well, look at it.

When I saw it, I stopped dead in my tracks. It was an arresting sight. It was like I wasn't just looking at a painting, but that I was looking into another world. You know how there's that scene in movies when the main charter sees the magical item in the thrift store and then the wind kicks up and the music does something that is both happy and ominous at the same time? Yeah that kind of happened.

So I bought the painting for 75 bucks. Then I had a minor panic attack because spending 75 dollars on something I want makes me feel like a failure at life for some reason.

It was about then that I realized that, well this was a big painting. It's about 2.5ft tall. The only place in the car it would fit was wedging it behind the seats where the ice scraper tried to defile it and I had to manually separate the two. On the drive home I kept twisting around in the car to look at the damn thing, like at any moment something was going to happen. I don't know what. But something. So I get the thing home and prop it up in my office while I try to look up the artist online. Which fails magnificently since I am fairly sure that this was painted BI (Before Internet*.)

Deciding that the best thing to do would be to mount it on the wall at this point because it's clearly not getting anymore magical sitting there on the floor. So I do my thing and mount it up on the wall. At this point something dawns on me.

It's right above my PS3.

You know that bit from the Narnia chronicles Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Edmund and Lucy see the painting of the ship in their aunt's house and think it looks like a Narnian ship and then the painting comes to life and floods the room? Yeah.

You see any insignia on that ship? You see any indication that this ship is from our world? Because I sure as hell don't. Why did I buy a possibly haunted painting and then hang it above one of my most valuable possessions? I don't fucking know. Why do I do these things to myself? Why am I asking so many motherfucking questions?

What's weird is that I don't like to have my back to it. Except my desk faces away from the painting and now I have to keep twisting around to check on it. Which I guess is bad planning on my part.

If I stop posting after this and you never hear from me again and it's like a just just dropped off the face of the world- the painting got me.

Avenge me.

* The painting is oil, and as far as the store guy knew, about 15 years old. It is signed Jackson in the lower right corner. I tired using Google image match to find the painting, but nothing came up. There were some really close look a likes, but nothing that matched. (Looking at the angle the ship was leaning was the fasted way to tell if the paintings were the same.) So in the off chance that anybody knows anything, let me know. Preferably before the painting goes all crazy pants and I wind up trapped in it somehow.

Why are we terrible at going to the store?

I am a firm believer in combining trips. However I am also terrible at anticipating what we are going to need. I can easily put on the list the things we are out of completely, but I can never realize that if have half a brick of cheese that we are going to need more before next week. Or we do fine on food, but don't check anything but the fridge and end up using paper towels instead of toilet paper for two days. 

And it's not just me. Scott does this too. I can't figure out why two intelligent people have such a problem with this concept. 

Now I would like to keep a well stocked pantry so that we have extra of everything, but I can't do that in a mobile home because I live in a shoe box. I like to buy when it's on sale, and then live off my stash of pasta and canned tomatoes for all time. Unfortunately when you travel a lot you tend not to buy perishable things. This leads to getting home and opening the fridge to revel that you only own moldy cheese and condiments. And frozen peas. And sadness.

We also got a magnetic white board for the fridge so we could make a list of foods that we needed as we went though them. This, in retrospect, was a terrible idea. The problem develops because that system eliminates actually looking around the kitchen to see what were out of. In addition to the above organizational issues, I firmly believe I enter some sort of weird trance when I enter the grocery store. This trance makes me unable to remember any item that is not on my list. I call this problem 'store amnesia.' It's like I get terribly distracted by my desire to get the foods as fast as possible. 

I dislike shopping for foodstuffs, unless the store is really empty. It's like a circus where I have to dodge screaming children, fat isle blockers, the elderly, and the group of like five women that have to take up the whole alley and have to stop every three feet because those cake toppers are just to goddamn darling. I hate all of you. I also tend not to buy a lot without the husband there because I never want to get a cart. They slow me down and I get stuck in shitty cart traffic jams. Plus I have to take them out to the car and hunt down the cart return area while people barrel past me while looking for the best parking spot ever. I just want to get my fucking noodles and get the hell out. 

I think what we need is an app where if I mount a web cam with a flash in the fridge, It will take pictures of what I have and then send them to my phone while I'm in the store trying to decide if I need more soy sauce. Or maybe leave one spouse at home so that the shopping half can call home and start rattling off items. “Do we need more mayo? What about butter? Do you still eat this brand?”

I really don't have a good idea of how to fix the problem, which is why none of my sandwiches had mayo on them for the past week and haven't had any tissues in my office now for about three months. 

But it's okay, because not buying enough food is one hell of a weight loss plan, because hunger is the breakfast of champions.