I want to believe

Last night I started watching the X-Files, season 2, on DVD. I always think I'm not going to be scared of monsters or aliens, but I am. I hate them because they can come into my house and kill me. Psycho's, too, I hate them, and I hate anything with a mask and a signature weapon eg. Leatherface. He has a mask AND a weapon. Masks on psychos are the worst. You can't pick them in the crowd during the day, but they can see you, and then they go home and get their knives and masks and then you end up in their freezer. I know it's completely irrational, because it's obviously completely unreasonable for some random nutjob to come into my house and cut me up, and that's fine, I know that, and sometimes I'm very grown up about it when I'm home alone and tell myself that it's ok. But every so often you see an episode of SVU or, in this case, the X-Files, and it's one of those "there's no motive, he is just pure evil" episodes where there is no motive and the killer is just pure evil. And then I get chucked right back to square one, terrified of crazed killers marauding the streets of the southeastern suburbs with a pickaxe looking for a new victim. Pickaxes are pretty scary, whenever I lie on my back facing away from my door I wonder if the killer will just rush at me and plunge the pickaxe into my back. That would be the worst. Actually, that might be ok because you wouldn't really know it was coming, unless you were like me and expected that kind of shit to happen 24x7. What's scarier is the psychological shit, the killers who fuck with you first. They lie under your bed and lick your hand and you think it's the dog but then you go to the bathroom and written on the mirror in your dogs blood is the sentence 'Humans can lick too'. Doesn't that TERRIFY you? Imagine lying down in bed, turning off the light, and seeing the words 'I'm under the bed' written in UV light on your ceiling. Yes, it's from a film, and probably not a very good one, but IT CAN NOW HAPPEN BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD HAS ALLOWED IT IN MY BRAIN. You will scream and scream but the killer has so many weapons and smarts that you will just be dead in a few minutes or even less and it will most definitely hurt you a lot. Killing and torturing makes me scared, rape not so much, but kidnapping for ritual sacrifice is also a very real fear despite being funny if they were wearing cloaks and devoted to Satan. Basically, killers who are reading this now know how to make me cry, if that's what they're into. Wear a mask, not a cloak, bring a knife, kill my dog and lick my hand. I'll positively lose my shit.

Skeptics beware, you too are at risk. I am in the privileged position of constantly being alert and aware of the signs and dangers, whereas those who just live their lives happily with no worries about being abducted and mutilated... well, I'm not going to say you deserve whatever happens to you, but you probably do deserve whatever happens to you. The truth is out there.

PS. The good, great, amazing thing about the X-Files is this. Hoo boy. I will obviously keep watching just for this and try to ignore the scaries.

where am i hiding?

So I lost my simcard the other night. My phone was playing up and I was swapping the card in and out of my phone into other peoples' phones and then, somehow, somewhere between the wine and the cigarettes, it disappeared. It'll probably turn up somewhere, in the cat's stomach, but in the meantime I am rendered uncontactable which, though slightly disconcerting, is actually kinda cool. No-one can reach me. At all. It's like turning the phone off, but it's totally guilt-free. I plan to make this a bi-monthly exercise, a forced one-week of exile from the land of communication. Of course, disappointingly, Facebook has become my default home page and I've developed some gross RSI from hitting the refresh button so often. And, even more disappointingly, it seems no-one really gives a shit that they can't get in touch with me. I managed to tell everyone who ever contacts me what had happened at once, in one room, with one sentence. That's a depressing realisation, when your entire (and once, may I add, illustrious and rich) friendship circle is sitting on one couch, and two of them aren't even paying attention to you.

So this is what's scary about life: being alone. Maybe. Having no-one mind that your phone is broken. Maybe. Having a small couch. Maybe. I say 'maybe' to all these things because it's not a universal fear, is it? Some people like being alone. Some people don't have room for anything more than an armchair. What really IS scary - universally - is being killed or attacked. These are broad categories (well, 'killed' isn't that broad, really) that can encompass many things. You might be attacked by bikies, rapists, monsters, psycho killers or spiders (this is not an exhaustive list, btw). You might get killed quickly by a bus (not that scary) or very slowly by someone with a large knife (quite scary) or very very slowly by many people with lots of knives and masks (the most scary). Masks and knives feature heavily in my fears, irrational or otherwise.

I think it's important to be scared. Apathy is just going to get you killed. Walking home late at night worrying about drunk people or heroin addicts might be a very real worry, but compared with a man in a robe and a mask (a-la Pig Man from SAW) a junkie with a spoon looks like Winnie the fucking Pooh. So, ladies and gents, get ready. Life is just one giant fuckin ghost train, a ride you can't get off, and every so often something lame happens, and every so often you get a little fright, but then every so often something so fucking terrifying and fucked up happens that you literally do wee in your pants.