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!

Tyrone Shoelaces here. So it’s Tyrone Shoelaces’ first night in the Mansion and he goes up to his room to put his clean jersey sheets on his bed only to find laying on his floor a dusty old Gideon’s Bible. Normally the ‘Laces would have dismissed it as a curio but he learned recently that the Bible is the most popular book in America. 2,513 U.S. adults can’t be wrong, so the ‘Laces saddles up and starts reading about Joseph, since he’s the one Bible Joe who seemed to have a style the ‘Laces could dig.

Joseph went to prison but he was smooth enough to make good with the warden, which no doubt helped in his eventual escape. Just like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption. Man, Tyrone Shoelaces loves that movie.

Sammy Stephens sho’ nuff got the shaft in the credits though, maybe because of the Red Scare. Shit, House Un-American Activities Committee, Tyrone Shoelaces would like to see you step under THIS

and we’ll see who’s finished. But Shoelaces feels conflicted about Sammy Stephens. He loves him, but he can’t figure out how much of Sammy he really sees. Sammy is a character to Tyrone. Would you want to be loved as a mere character to someone else? Is that better than never being loved at all? This is why Tyrone Shoelaces can’t sleep at night. This Gideon’s Bible has an apparatus suggesting Bible verses which may be of assistance in various sorts of trouble.