Spooktober Stories, Year Twelve.

Jonathan Phillips, erstwhile author of Spooktober Stories, has ceased to exist in any real sense, and now persists only as a ghost, haunting his own life.

He seems to observe himself from a great distance, in a world he no longer recognizes as one that he inhabits, a world of deep and repugnant ugliness and pointless cruelty and stupidity. He believes that his actions might still have consequences in that world, but he is no longer able to observe or even intuit what those consequences might be. Even if he could, he wouldn't want to. He suspects that he is also ugly and pointlessly cruel and exceedingly stupid.

Jonathan Phillips, the ghost, spends a little bit of each day monitoring the actions of that real Jonathan Phillips, (the ugly, cruel, stupid one) but he finds him frankly completely uninteresting and somewhat depressing to watch. He prefers to be a ghost. As a ghost he can stare dully at the void and feel nothing at all about it. Also, he has taken up baking, which is a nice thing for a ghost to do.

If you are a ghost too, I recommend taking up baking. You have to pay attention to a lot of little details, and internalize the intricacies of sourdough starter rise and ambient temperature and bulk proofing and wet kneading and lamination and all sorts of things that really take up a lot of ghost time, which you, as a ghost, have an excess of.

Anyhow, welcome to year twelve of Spooktober Stories.