So I’m running on a huge human hamster wheel in the middle of the forest in Lithuania. I know, we’ve all been there. I’m up to full sprinting speed and feeling pretty good about the entire enterprise when suddenly the entire steel contraption begins to bounce. Uh-oh. I wasn’t on the design team for this thing but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t made to bounce. Then, without taking a break from bouncing up and down frantically, it begins to sway back and forth, woozily, side to side. This. This isn’t good. This is how people end up on YouTube rolling through a Lithuanian forest trapped inside a huge human hamster wheel that has broken loose of its moorings.

No worries, though. There’s a brake lever. Kiss my ass, problem!

Tink. The brake lever swivels all the way back to the handgrip with absolutely no resistance whatsoever. Uh-oh.

WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIR BOING CRASH BOING CRASH SWEEEE SWEEEEE

This is, for the people watching at home and reading this blog as a cautionary tale, a terrible, terrible time to test the brakes on the huge human hamster wheel you’re running inside. When you’re going so fast that you’re a stumble away from tumbling up and down around the inner circumference of the wheel like a sock in the dryer? That’s the bad time? Yes. That may be the very worst time to test these brakes.

BOING CRASH BOING CRASH SWEEE SWEEE, the giant human hamster wheel bounced and swayed. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe it will just tip over, instead of taking off across the forest like one of those race car toys where you rip the plastic cord out and it goes WHEEEEEE hauling ass across the kitchen floor.

Yeeeeah. Maybe it’ll just tip over. And I’ll be trapped underneath it, sucking the moisture off of blades of grass when somebody wanders through here tomorrow. And points and laughs before leaving.

I grabbed the hand grip and SPRONG SPRONG SPRONG SPRONG deliberately slowed my stomping pace, flexing my thighs with each step to slow the wheel’s momentum, as the giant human hamster wheel found its center and stopped swaying like a boxer who’d taken one too many shots to the mouth. SPRONG… SPRONG… SPRONG… I delicately and awkwardly slowed and slowed my steps as the wheel stopped whizzing and gradually slowed to a stop. Whew.

I looked over, and noticed, for the first time, that the brake lever wasn’t connected to ANYTHING.

Lithuania, you maniacs.

The Giant Human Hamster Wheel was my favorite thing in the Europos Park sculpture park, but it was not the only cool thing. For example, they had this giant head:

What if you just had that in your back yard? People would come over and be like “What’s up with that thing in your back yard?” And you’d be like “What, the dog? He has a NAME, Todd.”

I also loved this thing.

The name of this hilarious sculpture is “Good.” And it is.

But the reason I came to this sculpture garden was not for any of that. I didn’t ride the bus for an hour and a half to the outskirts of Vilnius to see a half-assed smiley face on a rock. I didn’t follow the Ltihuanian tourism board’s navigation app from the bus stop and deep through a winding residential neighborhood, greeting by the frowning confused looks of locals and nearly attacked by a huge dog that was held back only by a flimsy half-assed fence, only to end up in the woods behind the park confronted with a sign that said a bunch of shit in Lithuanian plus a stick figure that clarified all the Lithuanian nonsense meant TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT, then had to turn around and walk for 45 minutes back to the real entrance, most of this dodging cars on a highway with no shoulders, all to go for a run in a big hamster wheel in the woods.

No. I was here to see the TVs.

Europos Parkas features LNK Infotree, a labyrinth made of more than 3,000 soviet-era televisions, commenting on the pointless absurdity of the propaganda that was delivered through those TVs for decades. In the center of the labyrinth, a statue of Lenin lay on the ground, pointing wistfully at a rerun of Andy Griffith or whatever was on the TVs back then.

The labyrinth has seen better days. When it was constructed in the now distantly-retro year of 2000, it was large enough to get lost in, the pathways between the stacked TVs snaking out in the shape of a giant tree. Over time though, the wooden supports rotted away in the rain and the stacks of TVs began to collapse inward upon themselves, like a reasonable person might expect a pile of TVs left out in the rain to do over the course of twenty years. Eventually most of the TVs had to be removed so they could search for missing children underneath the piles.

The remaining section of the maze was rebuilt as a sturdier selection of shitty rotting TVs, with a roof over their heads and plexiglass preventing them from hilariously collapsing onto a tourist from the Ukraine.

The statue of Lenin has also seen much better days, not unlike Lenin himself.

The rest of the park is full of funky fun shit, like these acrobatic athletes suspended from the trees.

And... other assorted randomness put there expressly to confuse the forest animals.

All in all the sculpture garden was a massive pain in the ass to get to, and I didn’t quite get the number of rotting Soviet TVs I felt like I’d been promised. But the guy manning the front gate was super-nice and gave me stickers so in the end it all kind of balanced out.

Vilnius’s tourism slogan is “The G-spot Of Europe: Nobody knows where it is but when you find it -- it's amazing.” This is possibly the horniest tourism slogan I’ve ever heard, right behind “Hawaii: Come get leied in Hawaii™”

Vilnius is a nice city to wander around in, the tourist-friendly and well-preserved Old Town blending with a kind of punk-inspired street vibe.

Is she vacuuming up spilled beer? You may not win the Good Housekeeping award this year, Merga.

“What should we have for our logo?” “How about two ladybugs boning?” “I didn’t hear you because I was texting but I’m sure whatever you said will be fine.”

Some Hari Krishnas singing on the street and (I think) some local women dancing along just because they were into it. This was fun.

The beautiful and haunting entrance to the National Drama Theater in downtown Vilnius is watched over by three muses who will definitely follow you home if you look them in their lack of eyes.

So I’ll just casually walk down my street to get something to ea-JESUS WHAT IN THE FUCK IS THAT?

It pointed at me casually as it passed.

In other news, Lithuanian vegan restaurants gave me a metal straw with my drinks, and I loved them for this. Maybe this is not a struggle in anyone else’s life, maybe it’s an eco-friend vegan restaurant thing or maybe it’s a California thing but over the last three or four years the world has been taken over by paper straws. And I get it, you don’t want to crap up the world with disposable plastic straws just because some people are too lazy to use their lips. I get that.

But of all the things in the world you could make a straw out of, why in the world would you pick paper? Because you hate people?

Feels weird in your mouth? Check. Falls apart instantly when it gets wet? Check. All right, let’s make these little miracles!

Can you think of anything worse to make a straw out of? A hollowed-out turd? Ew. A bunch of live flies superglued together? Good god, stop using your imagination like that. Let’s just accept that paper is a bottom-five straw-making option so I can get back to complaining.

Vilnius also has the same kind of hyper-aggressive sparrows that I met in Finland, who spent a solid hour trying to grab donuts out of my mouth. A half-dozen would land on my table and advance on my food menacingly until I got my phone out to take a picture of how crazy this was, scaring the weirdly camera-shy birds away. The attitude was very much “Hey man, which one of those donuts is ours?”

I was staying in the attic of a quirky and fun little hotel that had an indoor windmill in the middle of it and no staff whatsoever. My room had a very bizarre door. I may have been staying in another dimension.

Part of the town was paved in oddly loose sidewalk tiles, which rocked back and forth and went tink tink tink as people walked and rode bikes over them, making this entire section of town sound like one huge clay wind chime.

One of the most interesting minor details of Vilnius was that they have female crosswalks. Not places where only women can cross the street, though that would be interesting, but rather crosswalk signals where the little light-up dude is a little light-up lady instead. I always find myself taking pictures of the crosswalk dudes in other countries, because I find the variations in personality within such a mundane, overlooked everyday object to be fascinating. So of course I couldn’t miss this.

There are apparently a dozen or so of these in town, though I had to quest halfway across the city to find one. Luckily this one had a self-congratulatory sign explaining in Lithuanian that yep, check it out, we’re pretty awesome, we like the chicks.

Lithuanians are also pretty patient about an insane foreigner standing in the middle of a busy street, trying to get a good photo of their weird lady crosswalks.

On the long walk back to my hotel I passed another one of these crosswalks totally by accident. Of course.

Vilnius has two interesting museums. Actually it might have 53 interesting museums for all I know, but you’re going to hear about the two I went to, that’s what you get for not going to Lithuania yourself ya bum.

The money museum features an interesting history of the shit we’ve used to pay bills over the course of human history.

But the real reason you go there is because in the basement they have a pyramid made out of a million pennies. I mean, they don’t have pennies in Lithuania but it’s their equivalent worthless coin, so much so that enough people were willing to donate them just to see if the museum people could stack that many without somebody blundering in drunk in the middle of the night and face-planting right into the whole thing, which I’m frankly still amazed hasn’t happened yet.

A screen nearby plays a sped-up video of those million pennies being stacked. They’ve clearly edited out all the times they had to start over because somebody farted or a goddamned Canadian coin got into the mix somehow.

Across town is the even-cooler Museum of Illusions. This museum is so neat because it’s staffed entirely by beautiful and interesting women who seemed to be kinda into me (something else Lithuania oddly shared with Finland, in addition to the psycho little birds), and- wait, there were illusions? Wow! This place has everything.

One of my favorite items was the mirror box, which is a lighted box you can stick your head inside that has mirrors on every surface. This creates an infinity world of whatever you stick in there, creating a neverending cell phone graveyard or an All-Sean production of The Muppet Show.

Also awesome was this frame with two feathers in it. A coil of elerctrified wire vibrates the feathers. The light shining on them is flashing at a rate too fast for us to perceive, but it causes us to see the feathers move in slow-motion. This was incredibly trippy, as you’re looking a physical object that’s right in front of you, but the strands of the feathers are waving ultra-slowly, like reality has broken and you’re inside a dream.

A painting of a wolf painted on top of a painting of a sheep in two differenct colors, so that you see one or the other depending on which color of tinted glass you’re looking through? Check.

Spinning this shiny puck on top of a mirror caused it to revolve chaotically like a dropped hubcap, only it continued to do so almost endlessly, rotating and forming bizarre shapes as the light bounced off the puck from different angles.

Put a ring of lights up against the mirror and voila, you get to feel like you’re stepping into the Twilight Zone, this place is a madhouse, feels like being cloned.

A television played a great video of a cat going shithouse when confronted with one of those optical illusion patterns that seems to rotate and crawl unnervingly as you stare at it. The cat eventually ate it.

But the coolest thing in the museum were the holograms. Tucked away in a back corner downstairs, each red-tinted plaque has a light shining on it, giving you a glimpse into an incredibly-eerie 3D world. I’m used to holograms being some silvery flat thing that maybe has your Visa logo pop out or whatever. But these were something else entirely, photos of people and animals that captured an unnerving amount of detail, to where you felt like this person was right in front of you, and you could move from side to side and see the sides of their faces, or view them from slightly above or below. Every pore of their skin was visible, the texture of their hair, the translucence of the lenses of their eyes. This felt like looking into a dream, another realm where this little girl or puppy was trapped and frozen in time. It felt so real it was slightly uncomfortable to be standing so close to them, like putting your face right up to someone else’s face. The entire experience was both unnerving and wonderful.

The photo doesn’t quite do this one justice, either, but I was also enamored of this little pig.

The pig isn’t actually there, it’s down inside a box surrounded by curved mirrors, which create a mirage of the pig protruding from the top of the box. This illusion was utterly convincing and I was blown away by how my brain was forming a three-dimensional pig on the top of the box even though nothing was actually there.

That was the lesson of the Museum of Illusions, that your brain sucks. Actually it was a neat time to reflect on how our senses aren’t windows into the world in the way we tend to think they are, they’re just organs feeding information into a brain that takes all of this in, makes a lot of “Eh” judgment calls, shrugs, tosses its hands up and forms the hallucination we experience as reality. Sometimes it’s close to what’s actually out there, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it adds extra pigs.

I found myself fascinated by the idea that we don’t directly experience anything. It’s all an interpretation several layers removed from the thing we’re experiencing, moving through the flesh and the brain before our consciousness even gets a crack at it. Similarly to the way a movie can be an interpretation of real events, only passed through a writer and a director. As long as we’re in the body, we’re imprisoned at a remove from everything around us.

This made me think about the out-of-body experiences I’ve had, and how different perception is when you’re out of the body. Everything is more “real” than what we normally think of as reality, more vivid and dimensional, in the same way that a chair is more real than a photograph of a chair. We just don’t have a frame of reference for what it is to experience something more real than the reality we’re familiar with. When you look at a chair from out of the body, you can experience all sides of it at the same time: left, right, above, below, inside, outside, all without moving. You’re not limited to just experiencing light bouncing off of the object and hitting your physical eyes.

This thought made me chuckle, since the common image we have of a ghost is this faint, indistinct, see-through being, which is also how I think we imagine out-of-body perception to be. When in fact it’s the opposite. I’ve had the ability to see and interact with ghosts ever since childhood, and so I’ve always been fascinated by how they’re depicted in popular culture. I think when people interact with ghosts, we’re not necessarily seeing them with our physical eyes, we’re psychically tuning into another dimension or level of energy, and experiencing that overlaid with our physical senses in that moment. Because most of us aren’t used to doing this, we do experience the ghosts as fuzzy or indistinct, even transparent, because we ourselves are not 100% tuned into their reality, we’re still mostly in this one and are experiencing an blend of the two the best that our brain can manage.

Most of the ghosts I’ve interacted with in my life didn’t know they were dead. Yes, just like in The Sixth Sense. Most people I talk to find this hard to believe. After all, how can you not know you’re dead? Didn’t you notice that you’re some kind of see-through bedsheet floating around, dragging chains and shit? But, that’s not what their experience is like. To them they’re as real and vivid as they’ve ever been, with a solid body, walking around the same places they always have. We’re the ones behaving strangely. Why aren’t we talking to them? What’s wrong with us? Maybe they died very suddenly or left their body the moment before an accident and didn’t experience their physical death. To them, life just kept going on like nothing had happened. Whew, that was a close one! Or, Man I was sick for a while there, good thing I got better. Uhm… you sure you did? Most of them don’t believe that they’re dead precisely because they’re not transparent or disembodied, so ingrained are we in this sort of symbolic way we culturally represent the dead.

The one thing they do seem to be detached from is time, in the way that we experience it. I think the rhythms of our physical body anchor us in time, in a sense. Otherwise, we flit in and out. Many of the ghosts who have been dead for years or decades feel like only a few days or weeks have passed, which adds to their confusion. And they are generally confused, so fixated on something from their life they can’t let go of that they haven’t moved on to the higher realms, and instead remain lost so close to our world. This makes sense to me, who hasn’t experienced time flying by when you’re intensely focused on something?

Some people scoff at the idea that people wouldn’t realize they’re dead. How dumb can you be? Nobody’s responding to you! You’re not impacting the physical world! But the human powers of rationalization and justification are truly amazing. How many people do you know right now who are in denial about something that’s obvious to everyone else? How many assholes don’t know they’re assholes? Shouldn’t the experience of their entire life have made this obvious to them by now? No, no, it’s everyone else’s fault, I’m fine. It’s the same with the dead. We see what we want to see.

The house I grew up in was haunted by three ghosts, who nearly all of the large number of people living in that house had experienced at one point or another, even family members who were very disinclined to believe in ghosts at all. This went on for decades until several years back my uncle asked me if I could get the ghosts to leave. I… I don’t know? Can I? I’ve never tried that.

When my uncle was home alone, he’d hear a commotion on the other side of the house, and go over to find the pictures knocked off the walls and objects overturned on the desk. Windows were closed. No animals in the house. It kept happening.

I’d generally avoided the house ghosts up until that point. One night, years before, I awoke in the middle of the night and saw a woman standing at the foot of my bed. Oh, hello. She saw me see her, walked around the side, and sat down on my bed. She put her hand on my leg.

NNNNNNOPE! I jumped up and shot out of the room in a blur. I eventually fell back asleep that night on the living room couch, watching vampire movies to take my mind off of what had just happened. That stuff wasn’t scary, vampires aren’t real.

Now I was going to try to interact with them on purpose. Oh boy. Over the years my abilities had gone dormant to a degree, from disuse. Growing up I’d eventually learned how to turn this sense off, and now it took some effort to turn it back on. I did this occasionally, if a friend was moving into a new apartment and wanted me to check it for ghosts. But mostly the ability seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Sometimes I’d tune in while walking down the street and see the wandering spirits. But you didn’t want to stare at them too long, or else they’d realize you could see them and start following you around. Nooope!

I sat down in the back room where the woman had sat on my bed years earlier, and tuned in. The dim air in the room took on the appearance of television static, little vague bits of light floating around. Just the kind of thing your eyes play tricks on you w- the bits of light formed up into one big blob. Uh-oh. I felt a presence in the room and shifted my perception inward.

There was an old man standing in front of me. Collectively, the family had experienced the ghosts as an old man, an adult woman, and a little girl. OK, I guess I get the old man. The leader of the gang.

He was looking for his granddaughter. He, his daugther and granddaughter had been traveling West, long ago in the covered-wagon days. The little girl fell ill on the journey and they had feared for the worst. But... all was not lost, recently they had seen her, healthy as can be! They were desperately looking for her, but she proved elusive.

The more I talked to him, the more I was able to piece together what had happened. The little girl had indeed died on the journey, and not long after so had the lost and grief-stricken mother, and the grandfather. Now the little girl was enjoying a mischeivous game of hide and seek. None of them realized they were dead, and the hundred-plus years that had passed seemed like just a few short days to them.

And so I began the difficult task of convincing the grandfather of this reality. What year do you think it is? Really? I pointed at the modern telephone on the desk. What is that? Was this house always here? Where are you? The more I encouraged him to question his reality, the less certain he became in his answers. Eventually I was able to convince him that he and his family were frightening the people who lived here now, and it was time for them to move on to better things, on to a higher place. I felt a sense remorse from him as this sank in, and then quite gently he was gone from the room.

Uh. OK?

And just like that, the hauntings stopped. No more sightings of the old man, the little girl or the woman. Nothing getting knocked over unexpectedly, no more eerie feelings in the house. Wow. So I really can do that? OK.

People who hear this story often ask if I spoke to the old man out loud, or in my head. For lack of a better way to describe it, it was a bit of a mix of the two. I heard his words as if he were in front of me, but it was impossible to tell if it was with my ears or my mind. And when I thought my responses clearly toward him, he understood. I think when people ask this, they’re trying to decide whether or not to believe the story. Like if you heard the sound in the room, it was a real thing, but if it was in your head, you probably just imagined it. That isn’t really how it works in my experience. I think it’s rare for a ghost to, say, make a sound that could be physically recorded, but I suppose if they can knock over a lamp a sufficiently motivated ghost can probably vibrate the air enough to make a sound. I think most of the communication beyond the physical world is telepathic.

But I find it fascinating that this distinction is so important to people, since it’s not like you can’t imagine a sound. And at this point I probably trust my inward experiences more than the outward, physical ones. But I understand if someone hasn’t had enough of those experiences to grow to trust them, and instead wants to just bet on the horse they know, their physical senses. Their windows into the world. Just don’t take them to the Museum of Illusions in Lithuania, where you’re reminded over and again that your senses are just making this shit up as they go along.