This Old House v. Poltergeist is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, November 18, 2002. It is part of Journal.
Some homes resist improvement.
I had a variation on a reoccurring dream last night. I think of it as “This Old House v. Poltergeist,” in which our hero must simultaneously try to refurbish a battered old wreck of a house and contend with a slew of demons, apparitions and other things that go bump in the night.
This dream started shortly after I extricated myself from a turn of the century house that I bought and failed to refurbish — a house in which I lived through a disastrous long term romantic relationship, a couple of business misadventures and the loss of a great many old friends.
My subconscious seems to think these projects were all one project; that if I could just fix the house, I’d fix everything that went wrong and erase my regrets.