7.17.03: My Bower of Neuroses ‹ Blog

The neuroses parody the virtues.
Mason Cooley

My Bower of Neuroses

July 17, 2003

Just for the hell of it, here’s a list of things that scare the crap outta me...

Water and everything in it. Just because I like to be near the ocean doesn’t mean I want to be anywhere on or in it. Not only do I swim like a paraplegic porcupine, but I go into earsplitting, chest-compressing hysterics if I’m immersed in water and I cannot see to the bottom of it. Seriously, can you blame me? Scary things live in water. There are giant squid. And dead sperm whales. And dolphins that look a helluva lot like sharks. (I know now that it’s a dolphin, but oh my god I nearly wet myself when I saw this picture. Thanks to the Oxymoronic blog for the impromptu test of my bladder control.)
The Tomb Raider movies. Is it true they’re aiming for a trilogy? This could well be the end of civilisation as we know it.
Bugs with long legs. There’s nothing like walking by your cat and noticing that she’s staring really hard at something, and bending down to see what she’s looking at, and then BUGZILLA THE MIGHTY comes exploding out at you from some skinny crack in the wall, spindly legs thrashing like pistons, moving so fast that you have to do a Matrix-like somersault to get yourself clear of it. Rodents I love, smaller bugs I can handle, I can even take the occasional moth or two, but centipedes and millipedes and anything whose legs I can actually see without having to bend over is certain to send me up onto a chair.
Toilets. Think of everything that could be lurking in there. Things could come up through the hole… I’ve heard of rats that swam into people’s toilet bowls. And little tiny gators. And giant squid. And dead sperm whales…
Octegenarians who drive. ‘Nuff said.
Mirrors, pictures, dolls… anything that depicts or reflects a human face. When I was a kid, I was convinced that all the pictures on my wall were watching me. I was also convinced that my dolls would come to life in the night and kill me in my sleep. (I’ve never had a problem with stuffed animals, though. I always figured they’d protect me from the dolls.) As for the mirrors, well… this is very dumb, but I’ve always had this weird Bloody-Mary-style superstition that sometime I’ll look in a mirror and I won’t see my reflection but someone else’s face, a horrible and freaky face. Think The Ring face. Ew.
The trapdoor above my bathroom sink. It’s just waiting to fall in on me. Someday when I’m brushing my teeth it will fall like the wrath of the lord, and my poor little skull will be all cracked in and I will have to spend eternity haunting this apartment, because the people who move in after me will be too cheap to hire an exorcist to get rid of me. [tremble]
Doors. I have a real thing about closed doors. I always want to look behind them, mostly to make sure nothing evil and scary is lurking behind them and planning to jump out at me.
Crescendos. If there are any psychologists among my readers, please analyse this for me. This is the weirdest phobia of all. I hate it when music builds up to a crescendo. I’ll fast-forward, skip to another song, even turn the music off, but I will not sit quietly and listen to that damn crescendo. Crescendos scare the hell out of me; they make me feel like I’m in a horror movie and the soundtrack is trying to tell me to run! run! the monster is behind you!
The dark. Well, not the dark itself. It’s kind of a claustrophobic-dark thing. I hate being in confined spaces in the dark, but I’m fine as long as I’m outside. I remember one time when I was home alone late at night, and the power went out all over the neighborhood, and I was so freaked out I couldn’t find my way out of my bedroom (I’d be so helpless if I were blind), so I ended up sitting on the floor and hyperventilating until the lights came back on. Yes, I am that neurotic.
That moment between turning off the light and getting into bed. I have to get into bed fast, because the Bad Things are coming out now that the room’s all dark, and they’ll do something awful to me if I don’t get all my limbs onto the bed before they can grab me.
The fact that there are 58 Murder By Numbers fics on Fanfiction.net, but there are only 29 The Last Unicorn fics. That’s just wrong, dude.