Vampires, aliens and car payments

Even though everybody likes to blame their mother for things, I would like to take this… Even though everybody likes to blame their mother for things, I would like to take this opportunity to engage in a j’accuse moment starring my father. Sorry, Mom. Maybe next week.

When I was younger – much, much younger – my dad would take me to movies. He loved watching movies and my mom didn’t, so he was always gathering one of my siblings or me and dragging us to the cinema where we would, almost inevitably, wind up at a horror movie. As a sensitive, wimpy child, I was always freaked out by horrifying scenes of blood, possessions and disembowelments, and my father seemed to intuitively sense this. Leaning over in the excessively air conditioned cinema, he would murmur, in his thick Massachusetts accent, “Kevin! Don’t freak out. It’s just ketchup. It isn’t real. Now, watch this beheading.”

That’s how my father smashed the fourth wall for me and taught me to love horror movies. The advice, however, never really worked. I was able to watch horror movies or read H.P. Lovecraft stories by quietly thinking “ketchup, ketchup, ketchup” when things got too intense, but I still got freaked out. My dad had hooked me on the equivalent of methadone for fiction; it was something that allowed me to maintain, but never allowed me to advance.

The strategy was particularly bad when it came to books. Aristotle explained that the triumph of literature as an art form was that it was created by one mind as a product purely of the mind and then recreated and consumed in the same manner by another mind; unlike other arts like music or painting, literature was entirely in the head. Maybe that would explain why I found myself unbelievably freaked out when I was 12, alone in my parents’ house, taking a bath in a partially renovated bathroom, reading “Communion” by Whitley Strieber – the absolutely awful and amazing allegedly true account of one man’s multiple alien abductions – and totally wigging out.

Maybe I should explain. I’ve always loved baths, a trait I blame on J.D. Salinger and his out of control tendency – particularly in “Franny and Zooey” – to have characters give lectures while taking baths. I always thought that it seemed like such a willful, bohemian thing to do. And so I got into baths – which is why I took to the bath with a fear-inducing book when my house was empty in the middle of the night. Even though the bathroom was being renovated. Even though that meant everything was wood and exposed pipe. Even though that meant no one would be home in case the aliens came and abducted me and did horrible awful things to me. Horrible awful things. Involving probes.

I’ll never forget that bath. It was a mess. And there’s nothing worse then freaking out about an entirely unrealistic problem. I wasn’t worried about someone breaking into the house while I was in a bathtub, unable to defend myself or my family’s possessions, I was worried about aliens breaking into the house while I was in the bathtub. Maybe the reason I was so freaked out was because my fear was so stupidly unrealistic I was actually a little embarrassed about it. Typical me, I suppose. I can’t even properly worry. People worry about car payments, classes, cancer. What do I worry about? Aliens. Maybe vampires.

I will admit that recently I’ve been unable to worry big, as I like to call it, because of the fact that I’m taking an absurd amount of classes. All I can think about, actually, is class. It sort of feels like I don’t even exist anymore, you know? It’s just one of those semesters where all you’re ever doing is work, and the minute you catch up on your reading, there’s an exam and then there’s some ridiculous presentation