I have some ideas for an ironic haunted house — it will be composed as a series of deep and meaningful vignettes, built out in the greatest of detail. Behold:
Room one. A darkened living room, as commonly found in any house across America. A TV in the corner, slightly flickering, still running standard definition. On the TV, a Kern Burns documentary — perhaps the one about baseball or jazz, it really does not matter. There is a box set nearby — one of ten, or so. This will be on for a looong loong time. Slowly, black and white photos pan across the screen as a monotone narator rambles on.
Room two. A public library. The labels on the shelves show that we are in the Science-Fiction/Fantasy/Horror section. On a closer glance, all of the books in the library relate to developing J2EE applications.
Room three. The milk/juice aisle of a grocery store. Everything is fully stocked, except the orange juice. There is only the generic orange juice left, not the brand you actually get/like.
Room four. An outside scene. The viewers are in a city, and there is a traffic circle. That is all.
Room five. An middle or high school classroom full of wooden desks. There are no students, but at each desk there is a 750 question scan-tron exam where you have to bubble in the answers as well as also bubbling in your name and social security number. There is a single pencil, which is dull, too short, and has a badly worn eraser.
Room six. A corporate computer lab, full of computers, with very long ethernet cables coming out of each one of them. They all run into various switches which are plugged into one another (more than once!!!), and are otherwise tangled and hard to trace. Some cables are badly twisted and perhaps damaged. All the lights on the switches blink in insane patterns, evoking a discotheque, though the only noise comes from the humming of computer fans and the 60Hz drone of fluorescent lighting. Very few machines have network connectivity.
Room seven. A DMV. There is no line, leading viewers to the suspicion that something is deeply wrong.
Room eight. A modern science museum. This is an exhibit about dinosaurs. The plaque above one of them reads “Brontosaurus”.
Room nine. A Barnes and Noble. There are no chairs.
Room ten. A large indoor swimming pool, empty of people, but full of water. A sign reads “beware invisible great white shark”. However, being invisible, you wonder if it’s really white or not. There is a penny on the bottom of the pool.
Room eleven. A kitchen counter, with some bananas and other fruit in a bowl. The faces on the bananas are very very angry.
Room twelve. A hole from a miniature golf course. There is a ball and a putter, and the greens are well manicured. There is no hole.
Room thirteen. Inside a Bojangles. There are two contains of tea in the corner, made for refills, one large and one small. Both are labeled “unsweet”.
Room fourteen. A college math classroom. On the board, there is a problem involving flux integrals through nth-dimensional hypersolids. There is also a real live llama. It is unclear whether the llama is related to the math problem or not.
John Carpenter, call me.
