I’ve been cooped up in this stuffy bedroom for far too long and the nonsense ends now.

As happy as I was for Sammy Stephens (about as happy as one can be for a man felled by the Ellen DeGeneres death-touch) and his unloosed spirit, I couldn’t help but be a little spooked by the whole affair. Okay, a lot spooked. Sure, Sammy turned out to be a friendly ghost. But where friendly ghosts roam surely all sorts of ghosts roam. For fear of falling afoul of less friendly phantasms in this still quite mysterious Microwave Mansion of ours, The Shoelaces holed up in his room for a solid three weeks, locking his door and fortifying his position with a shroud of jersey sheets within a glowing ward of bracing funk records (check out Maceo at 4:15, and stick around for the aftershock at 8:53). In a word: bivouac. Bivouac, bivouac. Ahem. Cowardly? That’s neither here nor there. The ‘Laces made capital use of the time hunched for hours on end over the records spread across his campground, and by the end of my stint I had finally divined the complete mythology of Dr. Funkenstein (not to be confused with Dr. Dunkenstein, the inspiration for the stirring, baffling, beautiful musical homage kicked off at 2:44)), Sir Nose, and the whole battle to achieve Funkentelechy for all humanity. Oh but it wasn’t a divining rod that led me to ultimate discovery; The ‘Laces availed himself of these informative advertisements he found among his tape collection:

These served as a sort of cliffnotes version of the story; The ‘Laces figured the rest out through rigorous study of his own. As they say at the end of Motor-Booty Affair – “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him backstroke.” Anyway, it’s a great saga on a par with anything laid down by Homer or Hesiod. But I’ll leave the elaborating for another day because honestly The ‘Laces is a bit brain drained after three weeks of intensive funk exegesis.

So the other day I peaked out my door and saw my roommate, Count Leo Tolstoy. Shoot would you get a load of this guy? He may have a bit to learn about the bizarro mirror-world of broadcast television, but at least he’s out there gettin’ busy experiencing. He made me realize that the only way to best my paralyzing fears and ensure once and for all that the Mansion is cleared of ghosts is to get out there and clean its cobwebs out myself. After all, it’s springtime, viz. shi-ningtime, viz. spark-lingtime. So grab your hoses and holystones people and let’s put our backstrokes into it!