fine spring morning, way back in the twenty-first century, there were a couple of ghosts who were good friends, and they were having breakfast at one of their places, eating muffins and drinking steam.

In case you were wondering why the ghosts were drinking steam, well, it's because liquid beverages are too substantial for ghosts to consume. They therefore drink steam, which more closely resembles their essence than liquids do, being wispy like ghosts are, and having somewhat the same specific gravity.

However, it is not pure steam that ghosts like to drink, but steam from boiling beverages, the kind of beverages people are used to drinking, such as coffee,

tea,

and cocoa.

That way, the steam has some taste.

The steam from caffeinated beverages is also caffeinated, and ghosts are quite affected by caffeinated steam.

Now, you may wonder, how can ghosts eat muffins? Well, muffins aren't too substantial. Ghosts are particularly fond of bread, cakes, and muffins, since such food has many air holes and is therefore light.

Anyway, back to the story (in case you forgot, it was one fine spring morning and a couple of ghosts were having breakfast).

The stocks were soaring.

Birds were singing.

Children were playing.

Dogs were barking.

Bats were sleeping.

Tadpoles were swimming.

In spite of all this, one of the ghosts was going through a mid-death crisis--he worried about how he was spending his eternity (or the time till whenever he was reincarnated, whichever was shorter).

The ghosts decided to look on the Web for ideas about how to improve their quality time.

The ghosts tried bowling, but they soon realized that it wasn't the thing for them to do.

You probably guessed--correctly--that the ghosts would have trouble lifting a bowling ball. Ghosts are spirits, after all, and spirits are wispy. Things easily go right through them (supernaturally, the converse is also true). However, ghosts are still able to hold things, even very heavy things. It may have something to do with concentrating energy around the object to hold, or perhaps the effect is achieved through reverse interaction with the Higgs field, whereby the object to be held loses all mass during the time the ghost holds it. No one knows for sure, although particle physicists may soon supply the answer after numerous observations of collisions in the next, more powerful, generation of particle-beam colliders.

It nevertheless takes concentration for ghosts to lift things, and the heavier the things are, the more concentration they take. The ghosts would have to really want to bowl to be able to lift a bowling ball.

Our protagonists, however, didn't feel like bowling at all once they saw the evil and corruption of the bowling underworld.

They just couldn't muster the energy for something they didn't have the spirits for. The ghosts thought they were just too spiritualistic for the harsh realities surrounding bowling.

The ghosts then tried to find a "life" by doing something more spiritualistic, so they went to church.

The ghosts soon realized that there was nothing they could learn in church that they didn't know already. These ghosts were such veterans of the spirit world, that they had even been to heaven on vacation, where they got to meet Jesus Christ, and ride some of the rides.

As an alternative to the all-too-familiar spirituality of Christianity, the ghosts tried yoga, but found the exercises a cinch. They were ghosts, after all, and ghosts bend and contort like smoke.

Perhaps the worst thing about their yoga experience is that one of the ghosts actually popped while sitting on his pallet of nails.

So, you might think that no matter what the ghosts did, there was something wrong with it for them, but they did finally find a pursuit that harmonized quite compatibly with their essence. It was something with a perfect blend of the physical and the spiritual, something with soul, and that was music.

Click the following picture to hear ghosts jam, and then click the browser "Back" button to come back to the story when they're done.