The House on the Rock

Last month when Kori was on vacation, we finally went to The House on the Rock.

It's a freakshow of under lit crap, two and a half miles of walking through a musty house filled with hideous 60's shag carpeting and sensibilities.

I'd been there when I was in High School, we'd skipped school and driven 4 hours to see Yes in concert, then spent the day stoned our of our gourds walking around, but it's grown a lot since 1974 or so.

Whole new buildings devoted to obsessively displaying oddly arranged crap have sprung up since then.

Every room in the house felt like some overweight hipsters had had strange and bland orgies in it, like a mob of paunchy swingers had shed their sansabelt polyester slacks and ugly vinyl leather looking jackets to get down and dirty on some bored housewife.

Once you're through the house they send you on one or two more tours, depending on how strong your ability to absorb dark and chaotic collections of crap is.

Oddly enough, Kori and I and our pal Lisa all have high tolerances for weird.

It was like walking through a museum put together by a mentally diseased hermit who hated light and forgot all the labels.

Pretty cool, in other words, for freaks like us.

The low point for us was the never ending dollhouse that covered the last part of the tour, a low ceiling walk through smelly carpet and two billion really ugly dolls.

The high part was the Carousel pictured above, and the room full of angels hanging from the ceiling.

Hundreds of mannequins with wings all done up in cheesy white robes, and that carousel had hundreds of lurid or freakish carved animals on it.

You can't ride it, but it sure does knock your senses into hammered shit.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and he wrote one of my favorite books, American Gods. Most of the book takes place in Wisconsin, and he wrote a terrific scene about how the carousel room was a door between worlds.

It sure felt like it he was right standing there in that strange room.

I don't ever need to go back there again. Maybe in another thirty five years if I still walk the earth.