I had my most intense ghost experience in 1990 during my freshman year in college. My roommate and I were studying one night when our dorm room suddenly became freezing cold, even though the city was a sweltering 80 degrees and we had no air conditioning. The nerves in my skin started buzzing—like TV snow—as if I’d suddenly been draped by an invisible blanket of static electricity. I looked up from my book just in time to see a man standing in our room. Our room’s door was locked, yet somehow he’d gotten in without a sound, and now there he was, obscuring the entire door with his wide 6’5 frame. He was opaque and dark—a shadow man—with no discernible features except for two glowing yellow eyes. I glanced at my roommate, who was staring at the door with his mouth and eyes wide open, unable to speak. I looked back at the door again and the figure was gone. I asked, “Did you see that?” And my roommate replied, “The eyes!” Doubting myself, I glanced down at my book, and to my shock, saw an afterglow of the man on the white of the page—an after-image burned onto my retinas like a camera flash. I looked to the left, then the right, and the image moved with my gaze. How was that possible, if what we’d seen hadn’t emitted some kind of energy?

The man continued visiting us over the next two weeks with increasing frequency. Every time he appeared, my roommate and I would feel our room go abuzz with cold static and our hair would stand up. The static energy was so powerful that we could tell where the man was in our building—even if he was at the far end of the hall, we could feel where his energy was coming from in the same way you can feel the Sun’s heat with your eyes shut. The man visited at all hours, including the dead of night, until we started losing sleep. The cold static was rubbing my nerves raw to the point that I felt hypersensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others. When the static was around, I gained a measurable amount of psychic awareness, and my roommate was having the same experience. For fun, one of us would draw a picture, then focus on it intently, to see if the other could pick up on the thoughts and draw the same picture. The results were uncanny; again and again, with increasing accuracy, we were able to reach each other’s thoughts. The other students in the dorm thought we were possibly insane, but they couldn’t argue with the fact that our arm hair was standing up, and that we seemed able to know what the other was thinking in test after test.

I had my first out of body experience during this time of raw nervousness. One evening while walking up a path to our dorm building from class, I felt a surge of “jangly nerves”—an energy that seemed to come up from the ground and wash over me—and suddenly I was flying, like a Chinese dragon with a long tail that was still attached to my physical body. My dragon-spirit “body” flew up the path to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to a small living room where I saw my friends sitting around talking. Then, in a flash, my spirit retracted, slamming back into my body. All of this had occurred in the blink of an eye. Not sure if what I’d experienced had been real, I ran to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to the living room, where I found everyone—all the students I’d seen in my vision were there—except one woman, Laura, was standing, while in my vision I’d seen her sitting. I asked her, “Were you just sitting on that couch a second ago?” To which she answered, “Yes. Why?” So it was true: I’d visited the living room before I’d arrived.

After 2 weeks, my roommate and I couldn’t take it anymore. Our nerves were fried, and we were averaging 2-3 hours of sleep per night. Desperate, I researched everything I could find on exorcism, cleansing, repelling ghosts, you name it. I finally settled on a series of shamanic rituals that involved communicating with the ghost, and relocating him. I chose the ground outside of the dorm as his new intended home. Naked and alone in the dark of the dorm room, I carried out the exhausting ritual over several hours, during which the ghost communicated that he was lost. I reassured him that his new home in the earth would be comforting, and less disruptive to everyone around him. He agreed to be bound to his new home, which I sealed by burying a jar in the dirt right outside of our dorm building (which, appropriately, was called “the Shire” in the Middle Earth housing complex on the campus of U.C. Irvine). I walked back inside the dorm building, and felt a quiet sense of peace—the static energy was gone, and never returned while we lived there.

Several years later (around 1996, I think), a friend who knew the above story handed me a copy of the university’s newspaper, which included a news article about the incident. The reporter had written that the Shire was apparently experiencing a haunting, and that the ghost bore a resemblance to a ghost encountered several years earlier during which a “shaman had been brought in” to exorcise the building. The story detailed the exorcism—including the burying of the spirit in the dirt—and then said that recent building construction around the Shire had no doubt released the ghost back into the wild….

Scotch Wichmann doesn’t always do performance art, but when he does, he does it wearing ice shoes. I skated out onto stage wearing these beauties during last night’s Ice Fish Fur show, and they were slippery as hell—thank god I was sober. I was able to hold out for almost 2 minutes before my toes went numb—not bad! See them in action on YouTube. Shoes sculpted by KayDee Kersten.

Come catch my new performance art work ICE, FISH, FUR at HIGHWAYS in Santa Monica Friday, September 14, where I’ll be doing unspeakable acts with ice, fish, and fur (how ever did you guess?) in a surreal, linguistically limber, and painfully autobiographical piece about murder, madness, ancestry, magic, and more….

This is part of Solo Dolo, an evening of new solo works that’ll also feature Philip Littell, Megan Therese Rippey, and Johnny Ray (who looks like he *might* be doing something wild with mud or some other amazing slop–I can’t quite tell from his photo, but I’m sure it’s going to kick ass!!!).

If (1) it’s been awhile since you’ve seen performance art, (2) you’ve never seen it, or (3) you never want to see it again (but you can’t help yourself because you crave it like an auto accident lookie loo), then this is for you, served fresh on a golden platter (or more likely, a honey-drenched hunk of leather plastered to the side of my face). Ah yes, I like to think of Highways as the West Coast’s Carnegie Hall of experimental live performance, so don’t miss this chance to see bloody fresh solo works for only $10 before they tour the 2013-2014 fringe festival circuit.

The Solo Dolo show at HIGHWAYS. 8:30PM. Tickets $10 online or at the door (show may sell out, so I’d recommend buying online). 1651 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA (1/2 block north of Olympic).

The full 5-minute video footage of “Seed” — my psychic-surgery-with-citrus performance I unveiled in Ventura last month — is finally up on YouTube.  I had no idea a grapefruit could make sounds like that….

I’m uber excited to be opening for Elisha Shapiro’s THE FUNNIEST NIHILIST one-man show at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Believe in nothing? Then this show’s for you! Producer of the Nihilist Film Festival, creator of the Nihilist Olympics, 1988 Nilhilist Party presidential candidiate, and more, Shapiro weaves a hilarious tale of a life about nothing that you won’t soon forget (and if you do, that’s ok with him too…heh). June 24+25 @ 8PM in L.A. Tix are FREE, but they’re going fast—get ‘em while you can!

NEWSFLASH! The Roughhausers were just confirmed at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland! We’ll be at the OUT OF THE BLUE DRILL HALL venue Friday Aug. 26 and Saturday Aug. 27 at 8PM! Tickets are only $10…in dollars? Pounds? I have no idea. We’ll also be announcing kick-ass popup shows in the streets all week long with performance art, dada acts, close-up magic, freak acts, and much, much more! Tune in to our Twitter feed if you’re going to be there! OH MY GOD THIS SHOW’S GONNA ROCK!

Gather the key ingredients for your next meal without having to leave your bedroom/bathroom/garage! The Natural Harvest cookbook is packed/stuffed/crammed with mouthwatering semen recipes. Author Fotie Photenhauer (if that is her real name) claims to be a nurse, so she probably knows her way around a creampie, if you know what I mean. Don’t miss her juicy interview. Forget condoms; break out the salad bowl!

postscript: i love the first comment this post got. but i dont see what the big deal is. we humans consume tons of animal products: ice cream, sausage, entrails, pig feet, brain, tongue, fish skin…looking at it that way, i would actually feel more comfortable eating my own jizz because i know where it came from, and what is/isn’t in it. your man-juice isn’t going to suddenly start containing mercury; if it is, you’ve already got way bigger problems. google it and you’ll see that spunk is harmless with 7% of your RDA potassium plus protein, with not enough of anything to kill you.  millions of swimming sperm? big deal. eat yogurt and you’re downing billions of probiotic bacteria in one sitting.  besides, lets get real: you dudes were all teenage boys at one time. and teenage boys are curious motherfuckers. who masterbate constantly. and will eat anything.  so, men—let’s not pretend like this cookbook is something that we don’t already all know about. right? hello? anyone still there?

Available here.

If only they were scratch and sniff.  And too bad they’re not available for people—I know a few assholes that could use one.

I was surprised that I laughed when I watched this. Manson has a fine sense of timing as a lay actor, and a great sense of humor/irony, which together betray an obvious understanding of psychology and human behavior. In those terms, he is very much a shadow comedian, the comic’s evil twin, a real flesh and blood Joker who knows how to manipulate, shock, or even get laughs with a well-delivered punch that tells ironic truths…even as it’s breaking your ribs.

Each punch carries a double meaning; the faces he makes are a calculated critique of America’s media circus and its fascination with deconstructing him—but then—we remember what he is famous for, and so then comes the second meaning: a megalomaniac killer showing off—showing us he is unknowable because he is insane—a superficial act that plays the very circus he is simultaneously critiquing. For a moment we *think* we know him because he’s familiar…he’s been on TV…but then we witness just how at ease he is with what he is…a monster, there, sitting in his chair…then suddenly lunging forward. All hit at the same time. A “real” comedian playing for a paying audience couldn’t pull this off—not even close. Any subtle monsteresque threat a comic could muster would dissipate in the safety of the distance from the stage to the seats. After all, who really fears being murdered during a comedy show? (Ok, maybe the comic—ha). It would be Grand Guignol at best. It’s macabre to say it, but Manson manages to achieve a complex moment of comedy here that few others could…or would…or, shit, should.

Click to zoom in.