CHILDHOOD FEARS

Human Fears, Volume 1

May 19, 2023 Limited Edition

…includes over 29 minutes of hair-raising video

A child’s mind is a sponge of tissue that voraciously absorbs all things that are fearful, threatening, and just oddly out of the ordinary. A shadow in a mirror. Furtive glances from a doll’s eyes. A shoelace caught in an escalator. Operating table disasters.

Things that cause fear come from all variety of places. And share mangled shapes. Campfire tales, yet to be resolved, not well understood, with grizzled beasts. A cold mountainside outhouse at midnight. Alien abduction. Buried alive.

Yet, some of the most disruptive fears germinate from within the young, developing mind. Kids spend enormous portions of their childhood actively engaged in the dimensions of both fear and imagination.

Are those fears made up? Sometimes.

Are they exaggerated? Probably.

Alive and breathing? Always.

If I imagine it, it is real.

Above all others, this rules the child.

This alphabetical list recognizes just some of those things that make a child, and on rare occasions, even an adult, take pause. One fear per letter, starting with A, the ‘George Washington’ of our alphabet.

A: Atom Bombs

Had I been born years earlier, I may not now have the honor to lead off this alphabetical journey into Childhood Fears with ‘Atom Bombs‘. It unquestionably merited the award as Lead Dog of Fears. The controller. The Big One. Numero Uno. The one fear a person can’t really think about too much without growing depressed and being consumed by fear and uncertainty. Had I been born ten years earlier, before the Atom Bomb mushroomed onto the landscape, I may have felt a convincing tug to tackle one of my ‘Runner’s Up’ fears for the letter, ‘A‘, which includes Anal Tears, Assassination, and Adam’s Apple.

I didn’t want to write about ‘Anal Tears‘, also called ‘Anal Fissures‘, as that can be a real touchy subject. I witnessed my first Anal Tear at the Congress Park neighborhood swimming pool complex while standing in the men’s community shower with my swimming trunks clinging to both of my toothpick thighs. The shower area had two long rows of twelve individual shower heads; six to a side. I was nine years old. An older man was showering three shower heads to the left of mine, and he was totally naked. Yikes! No trunks! Just nudity. My guess at the time, from looking up at his face, was that he was thirty. But I was nine, so I wasn’t sure.

I was standing and showering at a precarious distance from the naked elder, yet felt that I was probably safe. That’s what I thought, anyway. I mentally examined the distance and calculated whether or not I had a reliable escape route, should Mr. Naked turn to approach me. As I glanced over, I could not help noticing that this naked man had a goofy looking keister port-hole. It was just a glance. Nothing more. A glance. But once the bull’s eye port-hole of his keister caught my eye, I did perform a legitimate, but hurried, momentary stare. It was definitely shorter than a full-on stare. I admit I was nervous. I didn’t want Mr. Naked, now Keister Man, to catch me staring. And then have him come toward me to kill me. Plus, his keister bull’s-eye didn’t require a full stare to catch an eyeful. His keister hole looked like a squiggled, recessive walnut shell with a dimple.

I overheard him describe his affliction to the man showering next to him. His friend stood one more shower head away from me, on the other side Keister Man. Keister called it an ‘anal tear‘, which roused my curiosity, while also curing any desire that I could ever have to ever want one. He should have called it an ‘anal terror‘. Either way, it looked like an un-healed, reddish brown scar, swirled up into a tight bow knot. Kind of like a very tightly woven miniature cinnamon bun, but without the frosting. Just a tight cinnamon bun center cut, if such a thing existed. Nothing additional. Had it been otherwise, ‘Cinnamon Buns’ may have made this list of Childhood Fears, which it did not. So, if you peeked ahead to ‘C‘, you didn’t find ‘Cinnamon Buns‘ listed.

btw: I adore cinnamon buns and have made it through my life scar free without any fear of them. Other than a fear of having my cinnamon bun fall onto the dining room floor, roll away toward the north facing window to hide under the full-length, heavy, crimson drapes… and grow an iridescent shiny green mold.

I ended my post-swim community shower faster than I normally would, grabbed my striped towel, and headed to locker #223. I used the key that the teenage check-in girl at the entrance to the pool had handed to me when I arrived about two hours earlier. My plan was to dress quickly and get out of there. Keister Man walked by me seconds later, still naked as a jail bird, smiling like a Cheshire cat, while I shivered and shook like a wet Lassie. He suspected nothing fishy. He just smiled as he passed, said hello, and it turns out he wasn’t threatening at all. He was nice. He was just a nice human being person who happened to have a goofy looking keister bull’s-eye. He was all right. He wasn’t doing nothing wrong. However, his kind demeanor did not diminish my desire to not want my own personal anal tear. I knew that much. So ‘anal tear‘ isn’t what I was gonna write about for the letter, ‘A‘. It was Runner-Up #1.

‘Assassination‘ was another possible elective that came to mind, quite immediately, when creating the initial list of possible ‘A‘ fears, but I didn’t fear being assassinated. Not as much as I feared an anal tear; a bum keister bull’s eye. Plus, I knew that ‘assassination’ was only applied to heads of governments, or elected officials. I was in 4th Grade. A good student. An occasional ‘B’. But not the head of anything that I knew of.

And I didn’t, even now, want to draw attention to a concern I had about growing a huge ‘Adam’s Apple‘; aka: throat walnut. I’d seen plenty of skinny cowboys on teevee with throat walnuts so big that the first thing on them that would bump into the saloon door was their ‘walnut’. I didn’t want that for me, being of the skinny type, myself, at that time. I could have chosen Adam’s Apple for this exorcism, but I am sticking with ‘Atom Bombs‘.

Atom Bombs were pretty frightening, especially because they could wipe you out in a flash, without you ever knowing what happened. The defensive safety procedure forced upon us in elementary school, where all the kids in each classroom would single-file their way out of their home rooms, into the hallway, and then smash their bodies together, like sardines, with their heads facing the wall, and then strategically placing their clasped hands over their necks, seemed like it could work. But I always worried that my hands weren’t really positioned correctly. That the hallway monitor that checked on us didn’t really pay attention to my technique. And I’d be the one lost in the kerfuffle of the atomic explosion.

Then we were told that if an A-Bomb were to blow up directly above us, we would all be safe, because the blast goes ‘up and out‘ from where the bomb exploded. Not down. That was hardly reassuring, even though I only had a nine-year-old’s knowledge of blast physics.

There is a famous saying that we’ve all heard, ‘It’s better to give, than to receive.‘ That seems especially on-target when it comes to dropping Atom Bombs. But it’s in poor taste to talk about Atom Bombs in that way. Wait. That was the wrong famous saying when it comes to Atom Bombs. The correct famous saying was supposed to be ‘Better them, than us.‘ No, that has the same horrid meaning. Wait. Once more. Here it is. The pilot of the Boeing B29 SuperFortress bomber, the Enola Gay, upon looking back after the drop, after the 43 seconds of gravitational plunge, and following the detonation 2000 feet above ground, said, ‘My God. What have we done?‘ That’s horror. And that’s how we’re starting this alphabetical journey.

Okay?

We need to keep moving. After the pretty picture below, let’s all advance to letter, ‘B‘.

B: Black Widows

All right. Good. You’ve arrived at letter, ‘B‘. Everyone here? Okay. Good. Welcome. Welcome. Just be mindful of your tuffet. Whatever that is. Kids don’t know words like ‘tuffet’, this one buried in a nursery rhyme. More than that, the word ‘tuffet’ has yet to come up since early childhood. Is this a goof up? Maybe they say ‘tuffet’ in England. And Canada. Canucks seem to do whatever the British do. Their umbilical still seems snugly intact.

Known to midwest and mountain kids at a young age, black widows are the spider to avoid… even if the kid is not already deathly afraid of spiders. I never was. I had no problem with spiders. I still have a healthy respect for them. But I’ve got friends that hate them. Freak out when they see one. I’m glad I can usually avoid them with no anxiety expended. No fear! Well, actually, some spiders can turn my adrenaline faucet full on. Like tarantulas, which I understand to be much less dangerous than black widows. But tarantulas look as big as London black cabs with long, hairy legs. They mosey along as though they have a purpose.

The red hour glass on the abdomen of a black widow is its tell-tale. ‘Abdomen’, in spider-talk, includes the stomach. Minus the belly-button. Black widows don’t have belly buttons. Not even at birth. They don’t need them. Plus, when they are born, there are about a million of them at a delivery, so if there were a million belly button cords to keep track of, it would be quite a difficult task, and it could understandably be something that the new, black widow mother, might not want to tend to. Lucky for us, the red hour glass is supposed to be easy to spot. Which helps. Usually is. I’ve seen black widows without much color, though. And, I hate having to turn the black widow over to look for the hour glass. Especially if I’d just finished or are in the midst of finishing a glazed donut. Sticky fingers manipulating a black widow is taboo.

It really would have worked out much better if the hour glasses were printed on the back of the black widow spider. Not the back of its tiny head – the most forward of the spider’s three segments. You’d need a magnifying glass held real steady, and real close, to see an hour glass printed on the back of a black widow spider’s head. And then, if it were a cloud-free day and the sun was shining, you’d risk lighting the black widow’s head on fire. And while only a guess, I doubt that the black widow would sit still for that; for its head to be aflame. Like a wooden match. I’m simply suggesting, to you, My Loyal Readers, that the hour glass would be better positioned if it were printed on the back of that large, bulbous, third segment; the last segment. The one that word-assigners named the ‘abdomen’, for some reason. That’s screwed up, in my opinion. The abdomen of a person is the tummy, the midriff, the six-pack. The abdomen of a spider, however, is that large, third segment, where the rear end is located, which also spins silk. Right out of its ass. That’s a real good trick. Like an excremental pearl from an oyster. Spiders don’t make pearls, they make silk. And the silk webs they make are exceptionally strong and durable… comparable to Kevlar, which is stronger than steel. Spider silk spun out of their ass can be so strong as to stop a bullet, if weaved into a tight mesh.

Then there is the brown recluse spider, often associated with the black widow. That’s enough about the brown recluse.

The black widow spider is North America’s most venomous spider. Its venom is 15 times stronger than the venom of a rattlesnake, although its volume is fractional. Male black widows are harmless. And aren’t black. Male black widows are slender, fit, light brown, and don’t at all resemble their female lovers. It’s only the female black widow that looks like a small, glossy, black mint… that gives pain. A lot of pain. And much, much worse. More than pain. But being a female is just one reason why Scarlett Johansson plays the role of ‘Black Widow’, in Marvel’s Avenger‘s series, rather than Abe Vigoda (male). Abe, of course, died years ago, in 2016 (has it been seven years already?), but not from a black widow spider bite. He died from natural old age, in his sleep, at his daughter’s house. Although medically, no one dies of ‘Old Age’. Those who analyze dead people have to find the cause, the reason; like organ failure, perhaps a spleen or gizzard, not simply ‘Old Age’. ‘Old Age’ is too nebulous. Except that it wasn’t for one person. Recently. Factually, and with universal acceptance, the legally recorded reason for the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the one who just died at an old age (96), you heard about her, she’s Prince Harry’s grandmother, she died from ‘Old Age‘. The only one… the only person… in a lot of years… like 100 years.

My pal, Bob Willard, had a ‘pet’ black widow for over 13 years. There was a kinship. Maybe it’s because Bob Willard, and Black Widow, enjoy the same initials. Mostly, Bob had his little spider friend when he was living out on South Gilpin Street. 1863 South Gilpin Street. Denver. The last time I was visiting Bob while he lived out there, his little pet had its 13th birthday. It didn’t seem at all excited about it. Probably got tired of counting birthdays, just like the rest of us.

I never ever gave the following a thought, until now, but I don’t think that Willard had any aunts, nor any uncles. I grew up with him, starting from wobbly-knees, and daytime diapers, throughout all our growing up years, until his dirt nap arrived at age 69, and never realized that BW’s parents were both ‘only children’. Neither Jack, his father, nor Thelma, his mother, had any brothers or sisters. That’s a mind-blower.

Going back some years, Willard was living in his mom’s, mom’s, whitish-brick, single-story house, out on South Gilpin. The aforementioned 1863 South Gilpin Street. That’s Bob’s grandmother, on his mother’s side. But his South Gilpin grandmother died long, long ago. She was white-haired from the first day I ate German chocolate cake at Bob’s parent’s house. It was the first time I was ever there. Just a small tot of a kid. I have to say it was one of the best first days visiting at a new friend’s house that I ever had. His mother made a real good German chocolate cake, and there was a time, back then, when German chocolate cake was the cake. Whether freshly baked, store bought, or store stolen. Not now. No longer. But it was, then. So Big Bob’s grandma, on his mom’s side, had been dead a long time. That is, if her sand ran out as far back as the German chocolate cake celebration days. Bob was living in the South Gilpin Street house by himself. Only the memory of his grandma was there. It kinda smelled like her, though. Her ghost, I fathomed. If Bob’s grandma had a ghost. I believe that most ghosts don’t stink. They say, ‘oooo’, ‘oooo’. Always twice. Which has been proven. But they don’t stink. Humans can ‘sense’ a ghost, but not smell them. Not even a dog can smell a ghost.

It was in the big fish tank, which more accurately should be called, an aquarium, which was located in the living room, by the south-facing window, so it had a real nice exposure, where Willard’s pet black widow lived. There was no water in the aquarium. Just twigs, and leaves, and dirt, and debris, and Big Hunk candy wrappers. And part of an old Baby Ruth bar. It was one of the mini-bars. Not the full-size, throat-choker. And a couple other things had fallen into the aquarium, over the years, that no one seemed anxious to reach in to remove. There was an old, faded, restaurant receipt, from 1974. It looked like it was a Pizza Oven receipt. I never, ever, saw Bob Willard’s pet black widow spider move inside that aquarium. Or smile. Even on its 13th birthday. Teenagers of all species are so stubborn.

That house, out there on South Gilpin Street, is also where Willard was living when his cat, Hooper, disappeared in the winter time. It was between Christmas and New Year’s. Early 1990’s. Bob angelically called out, ‘Hooper’, from his living room stuffed chair, but Hooper didn’t meow back, or mew, or mewl, or clear a hair ball. Nothing. So Bob called out again, a little more forcefully. But he didn’t hear Hopper meow back, or mew, or mewl, or clear another hair ball. So, next, Bob said ‘fuck’, and got up off his comfy rocker, and mosied by the fish aquarium, housing the pet, black widow spider, the same pet, black widow spider mentioned in the previous paragraph, grabbed his winter coat, which was hanging by the front door, opened the front door, skirted out, kinda, and shut the front door behind him. There was snow everywhere, and it was cold outside, freezing, and the snow was dry, but thick at the same time, and weighing down the leaf-less tree branches. It was bitter. Big chunks of ice stuck in the wheel wells of the semi-buried, parked cars. The snowplows didn’t even bother to come down side streets like South Gilpin Street.

It was dark outside, an indication of night time, but the street light up at the corner, just one house away, was lighting stuff up quite a bit, due to the reflection off the snow, which was keeping the ground frozen. Willard called out, again, ‘Hooper…. Hooper.’ But no response. Alarmed, and annoyed, Bob said, ‘fuck’ again, and waddled to the sidewalk, and turned right toward the corner, where the street light shined, and then he saw, to his left, lying lifeless, and fractured, in the middle of the street, was a frozen Hooper waffle. Poor little Hooper had been waffled by a Mack truck. So into the street, Bob waddled to his waffle. Hooper was one of Big Bob’s best cats. Lots better than the black widow. But I shouldn’t rush to judge. Afterall, I wasn’t the one parenting either one of them. I wasn’t responsible. Or if I had been, Hooper, the waffle, may still be alive, and the black widow spider would have been gone, about 13 years ago.

If you are ever bit by a black widow spider, there’s preventative stuff you can do, to slow the dying, as long as you get on it, quick as a hazelnut rolling off the roof of a Monkey Ward catalog hen house. Don’t wait til you finish your golf game to seek help. You can look up stuff to do on the internet pretty easily these days. But to jump to the quick, as an adult you’re likely to make it. If you’re a kid, or an old fogy, well… we’ll see how it ends. That’s a bad choice of a word. At least, as a kid, or an old fogy, your green fees were below full price. Although they never reduce the price of the power carts, for some damn reason.

Little Miss Muffet,

sat on a tuffet,

eating her curds and whey.

Along came a spider,

who sat down beside her,

and frightened Miss Muffet away.

That is what they called a Nursery Rhyme.

C: Clowns

Perhaps the one thing that was supposed to be fun for kids, and then metastasized into horror personified, were clowns. Big shoes, colorful hair, red balloons, face paint, funny clothes… all meant to bring happiness and joy. And smiles. And laughter. And safety. Clowns at birthday parties were mildly commonplace. Although when asked if I would like one to be at my birthday party, I immediately cried, ‘No’, as my throat dried up at the mere suggestion, and my voice cracked, and was weak, and flimsy. I hated clowns. I was not alone being afraid of them.

Little did we know, as kids, that clowns were disturbed people, who had a vengeance due to being reduced to being clowns; getting odd jobs as a clown, to make some extra dough, to help feed a habit of one sort, or another. In other words, being a clown was the job of failures, who probably stole loose change from bedroom credenzas, unlatched windows, while staking out the layout, and the landscape, and the fences, and the shadows, for evil, late night, returns.

Even as kids, there grew a suspicion, and sense of evil, regarding some clowns. Kids were fully aware of the possibilities. They were consumed by an innate understanding, and an inward fear. There is even a word for fear of clowns. It’s called, coulrophobia. Psychologists around the globe know of it.

Clowns are an integral part of circuses, which have their own menagerie of strange behaviors. Circuses often include freaks, low-life’s with webbed fingers, or six fingers, or eyes that pop out of their sockets. Bearded ladies. Strong men that lift the impossible. Carnival barkers, dressed in something between a ring leader, and a clown. Fixed games that never pay out, like stacked, metal, milk bottles, impossible to knock over. Cotton candy, and snow cones, used to mask the behind-the-scenes sad truths. Fortune tellers. Each participant, each member of the circus family, in their own way, meant to distract. And in an instant, a child is missing. Gone. Possibly fed to the earth golem living under the roller coaster, or to the lion, to save on food bills.

Clowns are tortured souls with damaged psyches. Dolls dressed as clowns can be terrifying to children. Clowns are deceptions. They can live in graves. Or beneath roller coasters. In the bowels of an amusement park Fun House. In secret attics of opera houses. And they startle in Jack-in-the-boxes. A child’s toy that is meant to surprise, and shock. A mechanical clown that moves back and forth, unnaturally, on springs.

And clowns are key components to many murders, in many films; too many to mention. There is an entire catalog of horror movies that include murderous clowns. Sometimes with a hatchet. A stalking clown, with its white face, and red lips, and exaggerated curled teeth, is something to avoid, no matter what your age. If you are walking down a street, any street, even your own street, that you’ve walked down 1000 times, and what you see behind you, walking behind you, twenty paces back, is a stranger dressed as a clown, with a painted face, you have all the reason to believe that something heinous, scary, and final, could be in the works. With a quickened gait, and an up-paced heart beat, it is best if you can put the clown behind you, adding to the distance, and once you are able to turn a corner, to prevent a direct line of sight from the stalking clown, run like you’ve never run before. A clown is after you.

D: Dinosaurs

Perhaps the #1 attraction, worldwide, even universally, for kids… are the dinosaurs. They are the ultimate kid magnet. They even surpass snow cones, and cotton candy, and brownies. From the first time a kid hears about dinosaurs, the whole concept sounds impossible. Then, when they see a picture of one, they are captured for life. We aren’t threatened by them, per se, because they aren’t around anymore. Not even at the San Diego Zoo, and they have every single animal that ever got on Noah’s rescue boat.

We had a Museum of Natural History in City Park, in Denver, and it was a doozy of a museum. Not far from my house. There, in the high-ceilinged foyer, where day tickets were purchased, was assembled the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The baddest dinosaur ever. They also had assembled a stegosaurus, which was real cool, with big scales on its back, like Red Rocks. And there was an ankylosaurus. Those are the dinosaurs that look like battering rams. But, of course, it was the T-Rex that got almost all the attention. And generated the most fear. Most of us kids weren’t that afraid of the stegosaurus because it wasn’t projected to be fierce. And, we heard it had a brain the size of a garden pea. There was more attention placed on the steg’s spiked tail, than on its dinosaur teeth. The spiked tail was its weapon, which was awesome, but none of us kids thought about sneaking up on one from behind, and startling it.

But when kids went to the movies, where dinosaurs could come alive in all their ferocity, fear set deep into the furrows of our young foreheads. The stories in the movies let the cat out of the bag, and told us the truthful reality that these dinosaurs, these thunder lizards of terror, could return to life, could be re-awoken, and could roam earth, once more. No one would be safe. Pterodactyls would swoop up dogs, and children, and swallow them whole, while patrolling the skies. Parents could not protect you. The footprints alone, of some of the land monsters, were the size of a twelve year old boy or girl. With real sharp, unclipped toenails. The size of pick axes. Each tooth in their head was larger than a railroad spike.

It all capped, and culminated, with the movie release of Michael Crichton’s, Jurassic Park, in 1993. We weren’t kids any longer, but many of us had kids that suffered the experience. The fear. The terror. The reality. The certainty. The lifelong etched memory.

Dinosaurs will NEVER be forgotten.

E: Electric Chair

Could have gone with ‘Earthquakes’ for the fifth letter. The most commonly used letter in the alphabet. There are 12 of them in Scrabble. Next most is 9, for A’s, and I’s. But we lived in Colorado, and they don’t have earthquakes in Colorado. They used to say that we didn’t have tornadoes, too. Both statements were misspoken inaccuracies. And it turns out that Colorado never executed any convicted bad guy using an electric chair, but I didn’t know that growing up, and there was plenty of talk about them. Kids were exposed to the idea of the electric chair. Those specially-constructed, killing devices were favored by teevee shows. It was always a gloomy sight, to me. No one was eating popcorn watching an electric chair being fired up, after strapping in a convict killer. It was almost always convicted killers that were sent to Jesus via the electric chair. No kid that stole gum was strapped into one of those things. Even if they took two: Dubble Bubble or Bazooka. It didn’t matter. You could get locked up in prison for stealing gum, but you didn’t get the electric chair.

Apparently, there was some way to get on a list to become a witness to an electric chair execution. I didn’t want that for me. So I didn’t pursue signing up, and none of my friends did, neither. If you were a witness, they’d put you behind glass, staring out bug-eyed, as an observer, like watching a medical procedure, or a focus group, but instead, you’re watching electricity forced through a death-row inmate until his last gasp. Well, you didn’t really see the electricity, per se. You just saw the chaos it created. You just watched his hair stand up. And muscles tighten. And a lot of uncontrollable jiggling, and flinching. And then a relaxation. Takes about two minutes. Which means that if you drove your car to the execution, you didn’t need to empty all your change into the parking meter. And it was almost always a him, and not a her, that was strapped into the executioner’s electric chair. But not always. Some women got the juice, too. Like for hatchet murdering a husband. But always, like men, a killing.

In Colorado, we didn’t electrocute death row inmates. Because we had no Electric Chair? We considered ourselves civilized, and preferred good old fashioned, pre-electricity, medieval hangings, as the sole method of execution, until hanging at the gallows was replaced by gas inhalation, in 1934. There were 69 hangings and 32 gassings in Colorado before it was all stopped. 101 executions, in all. Same number as Disney’s, 101 Dalmatians. Which introduced Cruella, who was a bit disturbing, for a kid. But the puppies were really cool.

I have to say that no matter how terrible the idea of the movie was, Disney’s, 101 Dalmatians, some old crazy bag killing puppies to make coats, I loved the movie. I guess we assumed that she killed the puppies, rather than just skinning them alive. I think her preferred method of execution may have been drowning. Electric chairs for puppies had not yet been invented. And if there had been electric chairs for puppies, the jolts of electricity may cause the little puppies hairs to stand up on end, and Cruella may have rejected the frazzled coats of those once, cute, spotted puppies.

My mom had a meat grinder contraption that she got out of the closet on some occasions. Usually when she was going to make chopped liver. It was the heaviest kitchen device that she had. Weighed a ton. Looked formidable, had a kid known the word, formidable. And it was old. The cord was especially old. The cord was frayed. The electric wires were exposed in some places. I don’t know if my mom even knew about that. But that meat grinder grabbed ahold of me twice. And almost didn’t let go. The two instances were about one year apart.

The first time I touched the wires, not at all meaning to, I felt the 110 volts charging through my body; my entire body tingling at once, instantly. The tingling horror didn’t begin at my fingertips, and then spread up my arm, and continue. It was an instant complete body take-over. I think my teeth chattered. I was not in any control, and my brain may have shut off, and it felt like the electricity was in control, and then somehow, I was disconnected, and returned to normal, obviously shaken up. Lasted a couple seconds. Didn’t love it. So I knew right away not to touch those wires. And I didn’t tell my mom because I thought I did a bad thing. A booboo. And I didn’t usually tell my mom when I thought I did a booboo. Like never.

The following year, when my mom got out the meat grinder contraption to make chopped liver, again, I saw the frayed cord, and I didn’t touch it this time. Honest. The memory of the prior year was still in the memory part of my memory. Somewhere in my brain, would be my assumption. But I did touch the metal framing around the kitchen cabinet, and the wire from the meat grinder must have been touching the metal framing, somewhere, so the 110 volts of electricity grabbed me again, didn’t let go, and this time I was kinda thrown back, even though I couldn’t voluntarily let go. So there was about a second or so of 110 volts charging throughout my entire body, again. If what they say is true, that it takes two minutes to die from the electric chair, and if I were in that situation, and given a choice, I’d select the firing squad. And if Colorado didn’t allow execution by firing squad, I’d tell them that I’d prefer to just wait until they did.

The first electric chair was used in 1890. It was invented earlier by a dentist. That figures. Probably wasn’t satisfied torturing patients with just invasive, painful, root-canal drilling. There have been some notorious executions by electric chair. One of the most famous was that of Leon Czolgosz. And it wasn’t because no one knew how to pronounce his name. Or spell it. Leon was executed in the electric chair at New York’s Auburn Prison on October 29, 1901, following his assassination of President William McKinley. He shot William McKinley twice, at close range, in the stomach/abdomen area, on September 6, 1901. President McKinley died eight days later from a gangrenous infection. Fast!

For my Macabre Readers, here’s one account as to how the electric chair works:

‘The condemned inmate’s head and legs are shaved on the day of the execution. After the condemned inmate is escorted to and seated in the chair, their arms and legs are tightly strapped with leather belts to restrict movement or resistance. A cap with a brine or saltwater soaked sponge is affixed to the inmate’s head, and electrodes are attached to the inmate’s shaved legs. The inmate is typically hooded or blindfolded.

After the inmate is read the order of execution and permitted to make a final statement, the execution commences. Various cycles (changes in voltage and duration) of alternating current are passed through the individual’s body in order to cause lethal damage to the internal organs. The first, more powerful jolt (between 2000 and 2,500 volts) of electric current is intended to cause immediate unconsciousness, ventricular fibrillation, and eventual cardiac arrest. The second, less powerful jolt (500–1,500 volts) is intended to cause lethal damage to the vital organs.’

Some executioner’s electric chairs were given fun sounding names. ‘Old Sparky’ was a favorite in Oklahoma. I’d like to add my suggestion of ‘Old Smoky’ if anyone is searching for an alternative name.

F: Ferris’ Wheels

From the Electric Chair to the Ferris’ Wheel. Okay. I get it. No one else would include Mr. Ferris’ invention in a list that includes Black Widows, Atom Bombs, and the Electric Chair. But I’ve been to a lot of amusement parks, and I’ve ridden every dangerous ride out there, and the most alarming for me is being caged in the claustrophobic, swinging cab of a Ferris wheel, stuck at the top, feeling weightless, as though in outer space, looking down at my mom, waving up at me, like she thought I was enjoying myself. I wasn’t. It was pure torture. I think my inner ear reacted negatively to the subtle motion. Made me dizzy. Made me believe that I was gonna fall. To my death. And when Ferris wheel rocking cups aren’t fully closed, kids do fall… to their deaths.

Some Ferris’ wheels have warnings that they should be avoided by people with neck, or back, problems. That’s woefully incomplete. But I would sign up for that even with a complete bill of health. Think Ferris wheels are fun? Think they are safe? Think I’m nuts to include them here? Well, read the following two accounts of Ferris wheel tragedies.

‘Five family members fell 65 feet to their deaths from a Ferris wheel Monday after the car they were riding in unexpectedly overturned at an amusement park, police said. Two members of the family in the car clung to handholds and survived without injury, police officer Yoon Jae-man said. Jeon Un-sung, 70, one of those rescued from the ill-fated car in the southern city of Busan, said “the slowly moving gondola suddenly stopped and turned upside down and family members fell in a flash” when the window behind the seats fell out of the car, according to Yonhap news agency. Among the dead were a 68-year-old woman, a 7-year-old boy and two others killed at the scene, police said. A 28-year-old woman who was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment died later.’

‘It was a warm late spring day in Clason Point on June 11, 1922, when 75 mile per hour storm winds toppled a 100-foot Ferris wheel, ripping the structure from its supports and tossing it onto the beach ten feet below its base. The freak accident killed eight and injured more than two dozen, as riders were tossed from the wheel’s baskets and crushed.’

Think those are two, ancient reports, and that Ferris wheels have improved? And are safe. Well, if you search, you’ll scroll for a long time before reaching the end of the reports of Ferris wheel tragedies. Here’s a clip, and it’s from 2017:

Give me a rickety roller coaster any day. Ferris wheels have been known to tip over from wind, run into by planes, collapsed from sheared off bolts, and malfunctioned due to human error, both in operational commands, and improper assembly. There are a couple of other ‘F‘ fears that could have made this list. One, most notably, would be ‘Fire‘. However, I’m sticking with Ferris’ Wheels, and rushing on to ‘G‘. Ferris wheels give me the creeps. Even today. And probably tomorrow.

But before exiting this ride, this rumble, this hamster exerciser, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the famous Ferris wheel, in Vienna, erected in 1897, still standing, still operational, fully functional, with enormous enclosed gondola cars, and featured in many movies, including The Third Man. Worth watching. Be wary, and Good Luck, if riding. You can buy tickets in advance.

G: Great White Sharks

Jaws was released to cinema, in June, 1975, and the result was an immediate, worldwide, total evacuation of beaches, everywhere on the globe. With screams, and more screams. No one returned to the surf for over sixteen years. Maybe that’s high, but its been almost 50 for me. The fear generated by that movie, that violated every nerve cell, has been documented from head to toe, for all the surfers, and all the paddlers, and all the midwest people that used to rent those big, round, clear, plastic-bottom, boats, that you could see through, peering down at little fishes, swimming about, at a cost of about $40 for a half hour, and all the snorkelers wearing different colored swimming trunks, and every shoreline swimmer.

But even before the 1975 cinematic event, great white sharks were known to be the most dangerous fish swimming under the surface of the ocean. And yes, they are fish. And yes, they have adapted quite well, arriving on earth 100s of millions of years before dinosaurs. Sharks have been around for 450 million years. They existed before trees existed, by some 90 million years. Which makes them much older than any mammals. And much older than any insects.

There have been five major extinctions on earth, and sharks survived all five. They aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, they may never go away. Long after man destroys himself, sharks will scour through, and dominate, the seven seas, unless the oceans boil away due to global warming, and we turn earth into Venus.

The natural predator of the great white shark is the killer whale, the Orcas, who travel, and hunt, in packs, and are one of the few ocean swimmers that outweigh the massive sharks. They overpower the great white, and ram it relentlessly from multiple directions. Breaking its body. Eating the flesh. It’s not even a close fight. Plus, killer whales has the word ‘killer’ in the name. Great whites have the word ‘great’, but ‘great’ is less than ‘killer’. It’s proven. We learned this difference as tots. Take pancakes, as the perfect example: ‘great pancakes’ aren’t as good as ‘killer pancakes’. Plain and simple.

Sharks avoid pods of dolphin. Big time. Which might surprise. But the intelligence of dolphin, and their coordination in attack, working as a pack, as one unit, just like killer whales, creates shark anxiety. And other than a few crocodiles, that’s the list of natural shark predators. FYI: a group of sharks is called a shiver. Which is a clever, and appropriate, name. Additional FYI: just for donut frosting, a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope of butterflies. That’s beautiful. That one gets an award.

Sharks rarely get sick. One reason is that they get to have more leukocytes than other animals. Leukocytes are white blood cells, which fight infection. Sharks have a lot of teeth, too. Lots of white blood cells, so it can heal itself from battle, and lots of teeth, so it can be its most aggressive, trying to kill. Disposable teeth. They have disposable teeth. They lose a lot of teeth cuz they are rooted in cartilage, not bone. Its like being rooted in a new, fresh, soft, pliable Bit-O-Honey, rather than an old, break your teeth off, hard-as-a-jaw breaker, piece of Bit-O-Honey. A typical great white has 50 teeth in its mouth, waiting to do their work, but it has five more rows of teeth, at the ready. And it manufactures more teeth throughout its 10-30 year life span. Its just making teeth, non-stop. Not us. We can’t do that. I’m pretty sure. Some sharks have 3000 teeth behind their shark lips. But that is not the most teeth carried by one organism. That record goes to, you didn’t guess it, the normal garden snail. It carries 14,000 teeth in its cute, mush face. And there is an aquatic snail that has 20,000 teeth.

Cowboy Bonehead Reader: Are you talking straight squash, here, or curly squash? Why so many teeth? Do their teeth suck? Who counted? I’ve eaten snails before, they call ’em, foy grass, or something like that. And I don’t remember bumping into any teeth problem when I ate one. I didn’t like the snail I ate one bit. I’ll eat day-old rattlesnake, unseasoned, before I’d eat one of those mushy, snot balls, again.

Response to All Readers: Let me first offer an apology to each, and everyone, of you. And I’ll answer Cowboy Bonehead’s question. Well, actually, the teeth of the aquatic snail are small. Like diamond specks. They exist, though. But they also happen to be the strongest, biological material, on earth — stronger than titanium. But snails don’t attack sharks that we are aware of. We have no film footage of a rout of snails attacking sharks. Generally, man is more afraid of sharks than they are afraid of snails. A group of snails is called a ‘rout’. But as ‘rout’ implies aggression, probably wrong here, it’s disingenuous.

There is a word for being afraid of snails. It’s called, ‘molluscophobia’. Which isn’t that interesting, and not very specific. I give that one a low mark. Whoever decided that word, took the day off, and should return some of the paycheck. Fear of sharks is called, ‘galeophobia’. Another dud. Probably the same guy.

Here’s sort of an unrelated ‘fear of’ word: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. This is one of the longest words in the English language. And, no, it isn’t ‘fear of hippos’. It means, ‘fear of long words’. Really.

H: Haunted Houses

Kids constantly grew up hearing about two horrible things, either one of which was destined to happen, but so long in the future, that kids didn’t need to worry about it. Which helps that it was clothed that way. The two horrible things were: heart attacks, or cancer. The #1 killers. No gore. Quite silent. Not exactly the quick work of snipers, like being killed in a sudden motorcycle accident. Or dying in a plane crash. Or an unfortunate beheading in 7th grade wood shop. Or slipping at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Each is nasty in its own way. But heart attacks, and cancer, weren’t a likely problem for children… but haunted houses were. Haunted Houses were near the top of a child’s list of problems. Because we all know that they are real; because every town seems to have them. With that recognition, ‘Haunted Houses‘ earns the entry for the letter, ‘H‘.

Few things conjured up more fear, more scare, for a child, than a haunted house. Those things can have anything inside of them. And usually have more than one terror. Supernatural. Ghosts. Flying axes that embed in wooden doors. Eerie sounds. Cobwebs. The walking dead. Cold tombs. Burning fires. Rabid dogs. Blood dripping from the ceiling. Screams! Severed hands scurrying across the floor. The teevee role of a constant midnight test pattern.

But there was one house, in our neighborhood, in particular, that was haunted, and didn’t exactly match those cliches; accurate, and certain, as those cliches are. Our neighborhood had a house, one block away, from me, on 8th Avenue, on Cook St, on the SE corner, that had been the scene of a triple hatchet murder. Or that’s what we heard as kids. Happened many years earlier. None of us was born yet. It took placer back in the black and white days of Denver.

The story says that a deranged uncle snapped, and went out of his mind, leaving himself with no more nephews, and one fewer niece. Three kids. Killed. Wrath. One block away. And also killed was their mother. The sister of the deranged one. Frisell’s house was about five houses closer to it than mine, and that suited me fine. I mean I love Frisell. Always did. Won’t stop. But this was a haunted house that got that way through hatchet murders, and anything between my house, and that house, I was grateful for.

This was the one house at which no kid rang the bell on Halloween. No grownups rang the doorbell at that blood-soaked, corner house, either. Whomever was living in that house at the time, for all the years that we went Trick-or-Treating, which was about 20 years, must have wondered what the hay was going on. No Trick-or-Treaters? Really? We had a million and two kids in the neighborhood, all of them seasoned, experienced Trick-or-Treaters (never, even once, did any of them do a ‘trick’ – just the candy, ma’am). We hit every house within about six miles… well, more like six blocks… well, a few blocks when Trick-or-Treating. Okay. Let’s figure 15 houses on each side of the street, for two blocks. And then two other streets of two blocks. That’s about 180 houses, but no kid, any age, ever rang the doorbell, at that house, on the hill, on the corner, where there were spider webs in the way, where the triple hatchet murder of three kids took place, plus their mom.

I questioned, in my mind, as a kid, the whole story, the first time I heard it. I was with Frisell, and some older kid that lived across the street from Frisell, a kid named Kendall, told us. We basically never played with Kendall, so, in hindsight, I can’t figure how this all happened. But he called it a triple murder, but if there were three kids, plus their mother, that met Santa Claus, or Jesus, that day, I thought it would be called a quadruplicate murder, or some similar word with a prefix that meant four. So it’s a little suspicious. I admit I didn’t see it that way until I wrote it. But the truth about never ringing that doorbell, on Halloween, is 100% straight, Cub Scout, combed-hair, fingers-saluting, Honest-Injun, talk.

Those people saved a lot of money on Halloween. Maybe nobody lived there. I can’t say that I ever saw anyone around. Just a shadow I noticed one night, in one of the windows. It looked like there was a candle flicker behind it.

Back in those days, a lot of us heard about Lizzy Borden. But she didn’t live in Denver. She lived in a haunted house somewhere east of Denver. Her murder weapon of choice wasn’t the hatchet, anyway. She preferred the axe.

Lizzy Borden took an axe,

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

This is what they called a Nursery Rhyme.

I: Insect Swarms

There are over 1,000,000 insects occupying earth. Maybe more. I’ve even heard 10 quintillion: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. So, I’m just being conservative in my figuring. Some of the insects are helpful, I guess. Kids are told that. We know that bees make honey. And honey is one food that never goes bad. And Post cereal used honey a lot when we were kids. There was no cereal that had honey that I wouldn’t eat. Not a single one. You can even eat 1000 year old honey. Supposedly. I haven’t. I’m not going to. Probably. Why eat old honey when you can just have mom go to the store and buy it fresh? Makes no sense.

Some insects are dangerous, for sure. Like hornets and wasps. Their individual stings are something to avoid. Take my word for it, if you want. I never got stung by either a hornet, or a wasp. Maybe a wasp? Some insects are fast moving. Some can fly. Some are slow moving. Some can’t fly. There are all kinds of insects, with all kinds of descriptions, and they can create all kinds of problems, and we need to take them seriously. But one thing is constant. They are all small. Big enough to see, generally. Some not. Loud enough to hear, in some cases. But mostly small, so they should be devoid of generating a lot of kid-fears.

And then some asshole invented the electron microscope. Why? Still, no one has given a straight answer. But he invented it, and we’re all paying for it one way, or another, right now. Whether it’s through your taxes, or how your bank balance works. We’re all paying.

The first thing they did with the electron microscope is to magnify little insect faces 1000 times. Or whatever the number. Man, those insects are all supremely ugly, and scary. Below, in the colorful photo montage, you’ve got an ant in one of the boxes, and a fly in one of the boxes, and one of the boxes has an orange background, and one of them has a female praying mantis. The male praying mantises aren’t green. Oops. That was kinda a giveaway. These exact monsters land on you, and buzz around your house. Great. Just great. They aren’t just neighbors. They live in the same house, and don’t pay anything! Maybe they think we live in their place. Maybe they think the houses are just out in the environment. Maybe they don’t know that we are the ones building the houses. Maybe they think we’re living in their place!

Perhaps the exception is the ladybug. Even blown up 1,000,000 times, the ladybug would still be a little cutie pie. Eats other bad insects. too. And a spider, or two.

Kids aren’t so much taught about insect swarms, than we heard about them, first, from the older kids in the neighborhood. The older kids in the neighborhood were telling us this stuff before we were ready to hear it. They usually brought up bees. But the real smarty, older, neighbor kids, they also knew about locusts. Sounded terrifying. Like miniature dinosaurs flying around banging into your head, and hiding in your hair, and eating your face, while crawling in your mouth, and up your nose holes. There was no mention of ears, though. Maybe ears are ugly to insects. That’s ok with me.

A swarm of locusts is something for a kid to hide from. I remember as a kid there was a swarm of grasshoppers, not even locusts, more acceptable to mankind, in Washington Park. There were more grasshoppers in the park that day than there were kids! And it was a real popular park, too. You had to wait to use the slide, that day. And forget about using the swings. But that day included a frightening experience, is all I can say. The swarming grasshoppers weren’t attacking me. But they did bounce off of me, and there were clouds of them, and the ground looked alive, there were so many of them crawling around on the green grass, and through the white clover. The grasshoppers flew, filling the air. The grasshoppers crawled all over the ground. Making it alive. The grass and clover it crawled over, moved. And came alive. The air moved. Everything was moving. Everything around you was alive. And buzzing real loud. You couldn’t think. There was no escape.

You never find yourself in that situation, unless you’re in that situation. You don’t experience everything around you being alive, and everything constantly moving, unless you’re caught in a swarm.

J: Jack-O’-Lanterns

I went to a Halloween party when I was a kid, a third grader, at a house that I wasn’t that familiar with, as it was not near my house. The house was extraordinary, however. I knew that much. Even a kid could tell. From the outside, it looked like an old castle. And rather than a cement slab walkway from the sidewalk to the house, it had a winding flagstone walkway extraordinaire. It was incredible. Later, I learned that the style of the ‘castle’ was called a tooter; which I then learned even later, still, was also called a Tudor.

The people that lived inside were wealthy psychiatric doctor friends of my parents. Their names were Aaron Paley, and Evelyn Paley. My mom grew up with Evelyn in Leadville, Colorado. But she wasn’t a Paley growing up. She had some other name. Aaron, however, had always been a Paley. Happened to him at birth. When they married, they used psychology on each other a lot. Practicing at home.

Leadville was a small mining town, still is, and also the highest town in elevation, in America. Still is. Over 10,000′. 10,152′. Highest incorporated city in North America. That includes Guatemala, I think. Maybe not. Often not. When they say ‘South America’, you know what they mean, and it doesn’t include the tampon string attached at the top called ‘Central America’. So the people from Leadville are pretty proud of the highest elevation honor. You don’t hear as much about the mining. And if you write about Leadville, you feel compelled to pass on the news of the elevation. It gives Leadville a purpose.

The two Paley doctors, living in Denver, (Evelyn left Leadville), had a son my brother’s age; his name was Bob. Still is. Unless you’re reading this after he died… say around 2020. Maybe a few years earlier. And the Paley’s later, like three years or so later, had a daughter my age. Her name was Judy. Still is. Judy is an odd name in that you think of it as a common name, but none of you, in Readerville, can name three Judy’s. It’s just not that common of a name. It is much more rare, than it is common. It’s not like it’s Cathy. Which we tend to allow to be counted if it’s spelled, ‘Kathy’. We do know that statistically, ‘Kathy’s’ are generally taller than the shorter ‘Cathy’s’, but other than that, we are pretty forgiving with the Cathy’s/Kathy’s.

My mom drove me, and my brother, to the party at the Castle House. She had to drive for half an hour to get there, and then she stayed, too. My brother usually hung out with Bob Paley, and I usually hung out with Judy. Maybe it’s because everyone knew of Judy Collins, or knew the name, ‘Judy Collins’, that everyone thought there were a million Judy’s. That’s just all background stuff.

The Halloween party took place in the Paley psychiatric doctor’s large basement living area, nicely finished, and there were couches, and chairs, and bookcases, and books, and a big round earth globe, on a stand, that you could spin, and a TV, and snacks on the tables that you could just take, and a big punch bowl, with a stack of orange and black cups. There was scary Halloween music strumming. And there were a bunch of other kids, too, but I didn’t know but two of them, other than my older brother, who, by the way, ditched me the first second we entered through the front door, which was curved at the top. Never before had I seen a front door with a curved top. Man, was that cool. That was real ‘Castle Living‘.

I watched the entire party, hiding myself, protected, sitting near the top of the carpeted stairs, that led down to this dungeon, because lining the entire basement Halloween party room were about twenty Jack-o’-lanterns. They cast the only light in the room. Those Jack-o’-lanterns scared the hell out of me, with their life-like, heart beat, flickering. I don’t know if I had an overly active imagination (that’s what my mom said), or if I was just the biggest pussy ever born (that’s what my brother told me). But either way, there was no chance that I was gonna get within reach of the flickering row of Jack-o’-lantern killers. And make no mistake about it… they were killers. Each one of them.

The thing about Jack-o’-lanterns is that they are carved to be a face. The pre-carved, native gourd is roughly the shape of a large human head, with like a horn, or a stump, or something, on the top. The gourd is roundish. Once carved into Jack-o’-lanterns, they come alive as illuminated heads without bodies; something to which I was not accustomed. They had holes for eyes. They had holes for noses, too, like skeletons. They had wide mouths with horrifying, sharp teeth. They glowed like they were demonic. Looking back, it was probably mostly due to their glow. The orange cast. They weren’t alive anymore with their candle blown out. Without a candle flame, they just looked like they were ready to be thrown into the trash. Where they belonged. With my friend, Willard’s, black widow spider.

It probably didn’t help that there was a real famous story about a headless horseman, who was out to kill a kindly schoolmaster, which occurred in a scary sounding town, called Sleepy Hollow. It also didn’t help that the headless horsemen often carried a pumpkin, Jack-o’-lantern, in his hand, waving it all over the place like a maniac, and cackled like a witch. And his horse would rear itself up, and spit fire, and its eyes glowed like burning embers, and it all took place in the darker shadows of a dark forest. The possibility that this deranged horseman might clamp the Jack-o’-lantern onto his exposed, bloody, sinewy neck, to fashion a new head, didn’t help things. And I pretty much knew that every kid at that Halloween party knew about the headless horsemen, yet I seemed to be the only kid smart enough to envision that this maniacal killer was about to reassemble himself in Evelyn Paley’s basement room with the earth globe. Judy didn’t even realize it. The fact that the stairs were carpeted was a blessing, because I could have gotten a couple big blisters sitting there for hours, had the stairs only been polished white oak. Or some sort of an ash, or a black walnut. Even teak. Hard wood hurts.

I remember, with elevated blood pressure, that I was banging my knees together pretty hard for a long time because I had to go to the bathroom real, real badly, but there was a scary Jack-o’-lantern living in the only bathroom that I knew about. Eventually, so as to not ruin the carpet, or soil my underpants at Judy Paley’s psychiatric mom’s Halloween party, I got up the nerve to go into that bathroom, and the first thing I did was blow out the candle in the Jack-o’-lantern, effectively disarming it. Wow. That was a good lesson. As a kid, that was one of my longest times going #1. I felt much better after that, and felt castle-like after realizing that the antidote to a Jack-o’-lantern’s power was just blowing out the candle. I felt like I could make a muscle in my bicep after blowing out the Jack-o’-lantern candle. Even though my muscle was too puny. I didn’t think I was ever gonna get one.

No parents, neither mine, nor either parents of all my friends, told me about blowing out the candle. I figured it out all by myself. It’s something that I’m sure saved my life. Did I tell my own kids about blowing out the Jack-o’-lantern candle? Nope. They had to learn to deal with Jack-o’-lanterns the old fashioned way. From fear.

K: King Kong

There are not a lot of childhood ‘K‘ fears to choose from, unless we shift to the Greek language, where everything starts with ‘K‘. Almost. But I didn’t want to skip the letter ‘K‘ altogether, advancing to ‘L‘, hoping it went unnoticed. So here is why I picked King Kong. Because he’s one of the coolest monsters ever, and although he’s a monster dressed as an oversized ape (in 1933, but some say ‘gorilla’ but their arms go down to the ground, and King Kong doesn’t rely on that stance), we cheer for him, and we want him to win, because we like him. He’s terrifying, yet, we like him.

King Kong can make a kid shake with fear because of his big screen enormity, impossible strength, and the on-screen violence. That is, the kid is shaking unless he is already out in the lobby, looking at the candy behind glass, contemplating Dots vs Twizzlers vs Milk Duds, but in actuality — waiting for the movie to end, scared out of his wits. It’s not that King Kong is scary, really, because he’s obviously completely made up. But… get into the movie, follow the deep development and subtle screen time: Fay Wray, King Kong, their dating relationship, their struggles, their feelings, the color of her hair, her lips, his playful growl, the look in their eyes, their tenderness, the violence he encounters, her instinctual mothering, desires that are so hard to disguise… and then what happens at the end. It’s a masterpiece movie. I’m talking 1933 King Kong. I don’t need to defend picking King Kong. There’s no better ‘K‘ fear, than King Kong. The person… and the movie.

Most people, let alone just the kids, don’t realize that ‘Kong’ is a family surname. His parents were alliteration nuts, naming him ‘King’. King played the role absolutely flawlessly. Developed his own interpretation. Was allowed that freedom of artistic expression. The original 1933 movie, King Kong, even now, is ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the #1 horror film of all time. King had a little known, older brother, who didn’t get into the movies, who was supposed to be even bigger, and stronger, than King. But upon meeting Fay during tryout day, it was clear that there was no chemistry between the two. And she had already signed her contract. Sparks did not fly the same way that they flew when King and Fay first met one another. And of course, on-screen chemistry is critical to the success of a movie. Hence, King got the role. Plus his older brother’s name was Lenny Kong. Got teased a lot. He never made a film. Even as an extra. Certainly no cameo. Didn’t like Milk Duds. Which is just wrong.

Sort of related, but sort of not related at all, there is an intersection in Mountain View, California that is the crossing of two streets: Fay Way and Jane Lane. I always thought whoever lived on that corner was lucky. But I doubt I would take them seriously if I ever met them. And then I thought, how about Fay Way and Lois Lane? I keep looking. No luck. Post me if you know of one such intersection.

King’s movements in the 1933 movie were frame by frame stop-motion animation. Move a leg an inch… take the pic. Move it some more… take another pic. Move an arm… take the pic. Shift an eyeball… take a pic. Sew all the pics together, and create motion. Willis O’Brien was the genius that built King’s motions. Each of King’s movements were captured in this manner. Today’s animation is 24 frames per second. When the 1933 version of King Kong was filmed, the number of frames of animation was fewer, and at times, Kong’s movements are a bit jittery. This is due to fewer frames created per second. The clip below includes final scenes from the movie… and will ruin the movie for you, Dear Readers… if you have not seen the ending. Be forewarned, if you play the clip below, the ending will no longer be secret.

King Kong is correctly considered… THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD. And none of the earlier original Seven Wonders came close. A list that includes buildings: the Colosseum in Italy, the Taj Mahal in India. A list that includes walls: the Great Wall of China. A list that includes ancient ruins: Petra in Jordan, Machu Picchu in Peru, Chichen Itza in Mexico. And finally a statue on a mountain peak: Christ the Redeemer in Brazil. To me… King Kong is THE FIRST WONDER OF THE WORLD. The greatest wonder of all. Skull Island, King’s KOA campground, should be everyone’s next vacation destination.

Word has it that there is a lot of monkey business going on there.

L: Lizards

Cold-blooded. That’s a spooky word. Requires a hyphen. That makes it a double-spooky. Not a lot of those words. Double spooky’s are rare. And immediately sets them apart, as though those words should come special with an asterisk. Yet, cold-blooded is just a heating, and cooling, issue. It’s a thermostat problem. That never gets repaired, so it’s an inadequate heating condition for life, for lizards. That’s what all lizards are. That’s what all reptiles are. Cold-blooded. It means that the animal cannot generate warmth from inside, where their guts do their business. Cold-blooded animals need the warmth of the sun for their body temperatures to rise high enough to allow for activity. ‘Sun is to the lizard, what coffee is to mankind.’ That’s a little known Nas Lemons quote right there. More animals than lizards are cold-blooded. In fact, if you’re not a mammal, and if you’re not a bird, you’re probably cold-blooded. And if you’re reading this, and you’re cold-blooded, I hope you’re wearing a sweater.

So, geckos are cold-blooded. Same with salamanders. I never minded geckos. I always hated salamanders. I think salamanders are poisonous. Which doesn’t mean venomous. It means that if you touch them salamanders, whatever gets on your fingers is an irritant, and if you wipe your eyes, you’ll be unhappy, probably tearing up.

But there are lizards more dangerous than a salamander. In fact, a salamander isn’t even a lizard. It’s an amphibian. Lizards are scaly-skinned reptiles (usually), like snakes, but they have legs, unlike snakes, and their eyes move, unlike potatoes. Which are a starchy vegetable, and not part of this panel. Furthermore, potatoes aren’t scary, unless Willard’s mom made them, and then you might want to take pause, and say, ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Willard. I’m stuffed.’ Even if you’re not. And you hope Mrs. Willard doesn’t take that to mean that you are too full for dessert. Even if it’s just a 10¢ cherry popsicle from the Frozen Brownie truck traveling down the street.

I drove for Frozen Brownie, but I’m not going to go into that. Instead, I’m gonna get back on track regarding lizards, and show you some horrifying pictures. But first, here’s some words that come to mind regarding lizards: pre-historic, reptilian. That’s enough. Basically, they are like today’s dinosaurs. Even though dinosaurs are now considered to have been predominantly warm-blooded. Yikes! This stuff gets difficult to keep straight. And they now say dinosaurs became birds. What?

Today’s largest lizards are Komodo dragons. The male can weigh 150 pounds. But their bite is relatively weak for their size. A crocodile of a similar size has a bite close to 15x as powerful. And FYI, crocodiles aren’t lizards. It’s another example as to what makes biology tough at times. Could a Komodo dragon beat a gorilla in a fight? No chance. Gorillas are much, much stronger, and powerful. King Kong could whip a Komodo any day of the week.

M: Masks

I didn’t consider the Lone Ranger’s mask to be a scary mask. It wasn’t presented that way. It didn’t disturb me. I’d seen the Lone Ranger’s clean shaven face every week for about two years. He had a nice face, for a guy that rode around all day, on the back of a horse, named ‘Silver’. I’d seen that exact same mask about a hundred times being sold in the drug stores for about 15¢. Came with a real crummy rubber band attached by two real crappy-looking staples. Willard bought one of the Lone Ranger masks once, rather than candy, like an idiot, and the thing snapped the second he tried to stretch it around his big head. It snapped while we were still right there in the store, about two feet from the cash register, before we were even outside.

The manager of the store didn’t have a stapler handy that was already opened. But he had one on the shelf, but it was an $8.50 stapler, and Willard had that look, like maybe he’s gonna steal it. I said, ‘No, Bob.’ I said, ‘Look. Why don’t you just buy another mask for 15¢?’ So he did. And the rubber band on that one snapped before he got the thing even half way around his head. So, Bob could have bought 30¢ worth of candy, which is way more than we ever buy, and I wondered how he had so much money. He threw both masks in the trash can in the store. That was our first lesson in ‘What you break, your keep.’

The manager wouldn’t even give Willard one of his 15¢ back. But he did offer Willard a Bit-o-Honey, and Willard took it, and said, ‘Thanks. But don’t you think I should get two, since I bought two of those crappy masks?’ Willard didn’t take nothing from nobody. So the manager must have seen the logic, and gave Willard another Bit-o-Honey.

Same thing with Zorro’s mask. It didn’t disturb me. And Zorro had a nice face, too, along the lines of the Lone Ranger’s face. And Zorro spent a lot of his day riding around on a horse, too. His horse was black, and its name was Tornado, which I always liked as a name. If the Lone Ranger’s mask, and Zorro’s mask, combined, comprised all of the masks that I’d seen growing up, I would not have picked ‘Masks’ for the purpose of this exercise in fear. Probably would have picked ‘Mannequins’. Those things were known to come alive at night time, and wreak havoc, and eat children. Every kid knew that mannequins had some serious evil.

Of course, the first thing that comes to the mind of most people, when bringing up ‘masks’, are Halloween masks. And there are, indeed, over 22 different scary Halloween masks. We have all seen a lot of scary masks. But in truth, they are generally lifeless. They are rubber a lot of the times, and the things smell bad when you’re wearing them, and the visibility is poor, and you need good vision to properly Trick-or-Treat with any speed. I learned early on in the Trick-or-Treat days that I was better off going as a bum, or a hobo, maybe with a little face paint, than buying a drug store rubber mask, for Halloween.

For me, though, the most scary masks were the ones that showed up on The Twilight Zone. One of my favorite shows ever. That’s all. Creepy. Scary. Unpredictable. Fabulous. For safety reasons, I watched The Twilight Zone in our teevee room at home, in the familiar, comfortable surroundings, and if necessary, I could always leave the comfortable teevee room to go to the kitchen, to find better safety in front of the icebox, which they changed the name of it to refrigerator, for some reason. The Twilight Zone‘s episode #145, in 1964, was named, ‘The Masks’. I’m not going to tell you what transpires in that episode, the macabre synthesis, and ruin it for you. But masks, whether they be in The Twilight Zone, or ones we make for ourselves, have properties. I’m just going to show you some shots of the masks below, from episode #145, and it’s for you to decide if you dare to watch it. Then, if you do, imagine being a kid watching that thing. And if you want to get something to eat in the icebox while you’re watching, that’s ok. I’ve done it several times. Sometimes it took me so long to get something from the icebox, that by the time I got back to the teevee room, The Twilight Zone was already over. But that only happened about half the time.

The Twilight Zone was all about shock, surprise… and for a kid, fear. When Rod Serling died, it was a shock to my system, the first of its kind regarding someone I never knew personally. He died from complications of heart surgery, June 28 (1975). It’s a memorable date. At least the month and day, June 28. A date shared by the birthdate of close friend, Paul Woods, the death of my father-in-law, and of course, June 28 (1975) was the 61st anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his lovely wife Sophie, in Sarajevo, in 1914, which led to The Great War, that killed about 20,000,000 people when it was finally over, if it really ended, not counting the argued continuation with the advent of World War II, that killed another 60,000,000 folks. June 28 (1491) was the date of the birth of King Henry VIII of England. He fits the subject matter here, in that he was quite well known for producing horror, allowing two of his six wives to be beheaded. Gruesome endings.

N: Nightmares

Nightmares became known to kids at a real young age. For some reason, we heard about them. And realize that their emphasis is terror. Not of anything ‘real’. Not of anything ‘tangible’. But instead, something delivered in dreams. While in a warm bed, normally.

It turned out that a kid can’t escape, scot free, all the terrors in the world; the beasts, the violence, the shadows, the haunted houses, the demented killers, and all the rest. A child can be totally whacked out worrying about just going to sleep at night! In his own bed. Where safeness should be guaranteed. WTF? Really? We can’t escape from the madness, anywhere?

You can tame some of them fears, get some control. That’s about the only thing, growing up, that is important. Controlling the terror. And the terror can be physical, or of the mind. Dementia. That’s a brain disorder. Not a mental illness. Physical. Brain shrinkage. It happened to Willard’s brain. His dying was sort of a nightmare, because none of us that were close to him were surprised, yet none of us that were close to him were able to do anything to prevent it. But that’s not a kid’s nightmare. And it wasn’t manufactured in a dream. Willard can’t come out and play any longer.

I only had a nightmare once. It was that scary-clown-marionette-in-the-storage-trunk dream. I write about it in one of these panels. You’ll run into it later on. The maniacal marionette only wanted to kill me. It would fly out of the storage trunk, and latched onto my neck, and suck, and rip, and mutilate, if I moved. He would scratch deep gashes to get blood dripping from my face. And cackle wildly as the red pool formed around my feet. That’s the nightmare dream that god gave to me. Ever had that one. Not fun.

Bad dreams can freak a person out; and can paralyze a kid. It’s what it did to me. It made me sweat without doing any exercise. Confused my body. Took over. Held on like vice grips. And squeezed. Not juice. Blood. My blood. And squeezed fear. My fear.

Above, and below, are a few images of nightmare material. They can be in color. Or black & white. In focus. Or blurred. They often include people. But can also be only a location. Just as fears come in all shapes and sizes, so do nightmares. Their surroundings can even seem benign.

Nightmares are the subject of a vast genre of movies. Many include the word, ‘Nightmare’, in the title. As a public service warning. Even today, I can’t watch horror movies. Just can’t. I don’t even try. I know the result. Fear. Terror. And usually, a quick trip to the concession stand, often at the climax.

The trick to going to sleep at night, and avoiding nightmares altogether, ends up being quite simple. I guess they didn’t want us to know. But I figured it out. The solution is to just stay awake. It’s that simple, and yet, no one ever told us. Parental cruelty is limitless.

O: The Outer Limits

I’m not gonna trap myself and debate which teevee show was better between The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. 1959 is when the first ‘Zone‘ aired. Limits started in 1963. Zone generally lasted one-half hour. Limits the full 60. Both were chilling. Both impacted kids like a gut punch to the mind. While both expanded it.

There is no better way to expose the impact of The Outer Limits than to show clips. Take a break from writing. Here goes:

P: Psycho

Went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Shirley Moss, a girl one year older. She lived on 8^th and Madison Street, so that was only one block over, and 2/3 of a block up, from my house. Her house was a red brick house; the dominant brick color in the neighborhood. Her dad had a wooden leg, and a normal, human flesh leg. I never heard what type of wood his wooden leg was whittled from, but I knew one or two things about wood, because my dad had a huge wood shop in our basement. So, I was pretty sure Mr. Moss’ wooden leg wasn’t made of balsa, or pine. I think it was made out of baseball bat wood, but I would just be guessing.

I had a scrum of trepidation going to see Psycho, because every kid had trepidation going to see Psycho. I had heard that the movie made some people go crazy, just watching it, and I also heard that they would run around crazy, afterward, like their head was chopped off. Like a Sunday chicken on Zuckerman’s Farm. Zuckerman owned the farm in Charlotte’s Web, but come to think of it, I don’t recall chickens actually playing a role on Zuckerman’s Farm. But chickens from any farm are reputed to run around for about half an hour, or more, after having a complete neck-lance, with their heads removed. Except for Mike the Headless Chicken. He ran around for 18 months. That could have been what they call, a nuisance!

On September 10, 1945, which was a start-of-the-week Monday, Lloyd Olsen, and his lovely wife, Clara, were killing chickens, on their farm, in Fruita, Colorado, which is just off of I-70, about 18 miles, from the Utah border. There was no I-70, in 1945, though. Fruita is located just outside of Grand Junction. And the two most reputable things about Fruita are, dinosaur bones, and Mike the Headless Chicken, which has a statue erected, standing straight, in the center of town, still, to this day. Lloyd would decapitate the birds with a wood-gnarled, Monkey Ward hatchet, and Clara cleaned them up. She wore Monkey Ward gardening gloves. But one of the dozens of chickens that suffered Lloyd’s attack hatchet, that Monday, didn’t behave like the rest of the decapitated fowl. He was a stickler.

“They got down to the end, and had one who was still alive, up, and walking around,” says the couple’s great-grandson, Troy Waters, who at the time was a farmer, himself, in Fruita. The decapitated chicken kicked, and scratched, and ran, and didn’t stop doing stuff without its head, and especially didn’t fall over, dead, as a chicken with its head cut off is supposed to fall over. It’s all supposed to end with the chicken being doornail dead. That’s the expectation.

The headless chicken, later named, Mike, was placed in an old apple box, on the farm’s screened porch, for the night, and when Lloyd awoke on Tuesday morning, to rooster’s crowing, he stepped outside the screen door to see what had happened. He peered down into the apple box contraption. “The damn thing was still alive,” said Troy Waters.

“It’s part of our weird family history,” says Christa Waters, Troy’s lovely wife. Might have had tooth braces when she was a young teen. All pretty, and everything.

Troy Waters had heard the story of the headless chicken when he was wee. Everyone in Fruita, and near Fruita, had head the story. Later, his bedridden, great-grandfather, Lloyd, came to live in his parents’ house. The two of them had bedrooms next to one another, and the bedridden old man, sometimes sleepless, would talk non-stop for hours.

“He took the chicken carcasses to town to sell them at the meat market,” Waters says.

“He took this rooster with him – and back then he was still using the horse and wagon quite a bit. He threw it in the wagon, took the chicken in with him, and started betting people beer, or something, that he had a live headless chicken.” Made some money to buy himself a refreshment, and a sodie pop, for Clara.

Word spread, because that’s one of the things that words can do, around Fruita, about the headless bird. The local newspaper dispatched a reporter to go interview Lloyd, and two weeks later, a sideshow promoter from Salt Lake City came a-calling. He carried with him one simple proposition: Take the headless chicken on to the sideshow circuit – and they could make some real American dough.

“Back then, in the 1940s, great grandpa, Lloyd, and great grandma, Clara, had a small farm, and they were struggling,” Troy Waters reflected. “Lloyd said, ‘What the hell – we might as well.'” Lloyd wasn’t an everyday rhymer, but he sure was that day. And so the journey began.

First, Lloyd, and Clara, and their mindless fowl torso, visited the University of Utah, where the headless chicken was put through a battery of tests. Rumor said that university scientists surgically removed the heads of many other chickens to see whether any would live. It was there, and then, that Life Magazine came to marvel over the story of Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken – as the chicken was branded, by Hope Wade, Troy’s mom. Then Lloyd, Clara, and Miracle Mike, set off on a tour.

They went to California, and Arizona, and Hope Wade took Mike on a tour of the south-eastern United States when the Olsen’s had to return to their farm, back in Fruita, to collect, and bail, the harvest.

The headless bird’s travels were carefully documented by Clara in a scrapbook that at one point was preserved in the Waters’ gun safe.

After word got out, people from around the country wrote letters – a few dozen in total. Not all were positive. One rude letter compared the Olsens’ to the Nazis. Another letter, from somewhere in Alaska, asked them to swap Mike’s drumstick in exchange for a wooden leg. Some of the letters were addressed only to “The owners of the headless chicken in Colorado”, and yet, those letters still found their way to the Olsen family. Delivered right to their Fruita farm, country mailbox; which shows the fame of Lloyd, and Clara’s, headless chicken.

After the initial tour, the Olsens’ took Mike the Headless Chicken to Phoenix, Arizona, where disaster struck in the spring of 1947. “That’s where it died – in Phoenix,” Waters says. The bird suffocated to death because Lloyd had misplaced the syringe he used to suck liquids out of the damn thing’s esophagus, so liquid pooled up, and killed Mike. It was a drowning. That was a sad day.

As for Psycho, it was indeed a scary movie, one of the scariest ever, but I championed through it, with Shirley Moss hiding her eyes in my shoulder, more than once. Norman Bate’s mom, Norma, reminded me of Mike the Headless Chicken, except Norman’s mom hung around for 10+ years following her death. Not just a measly 18 months.

Q: Quicksand

No kid in America, upon first hearing about it, doesn’t get excited, and enthralled, even mesmerized, with quicksand. It just sounds so tame. So non-invading. So simple. So childish. It’s not a word that you forget. It sticks with you, for life. It’s one of the coolest ‘Q’ words that we have. But it’s a word filled with deception, because there’s nothing ‘quick’ about it. Instead, quicksand creates a drawn-out, agony of doom.

When you see its menace play out in terror, on the large, in-theater, movie screens, you’re smitten. It is compelling. It’s not a terror that forces you to avert your eyes. There is no gore. There is no blood. There is no maiming. There is no decapitation. There are no visible injuries. Quicksand does its job without leaving so much as a scar. Yet, it kills its victims. It traps arms, and squeezes legs, and crushes torsos. And in the end, because it has to end, it slowly circles about, like a vortex, and fully encloses the victim’s head, pulling it down, farther, into the bruised earth, with a silent, earthly peristalsis. That can’t be stopped. The cause of death is suffocation. And difficulty breathing.

But you won’t find ‘suffocation’ on a coroner’s report. Because there is no coroner’s report. For there is no body. There is no ‘victim’ to be found. The unlucky, entrapped hiker, is lost. Gone forever. The child that rides his, or her, tricycle into the invisible, slow swirl of sand, is never heard from again. There is no evidence of their disappearance. The small child dies, breathless, fully intact; but dead, none the less. Their small nose, whatever is its shape, is the last appendage available to be seen, before the nose is gone, forever. Perhaps there are some bubbles.

Quicksand was not one of those childlike worries that required imagination. It’s not supernatural. As a kid, you know for certain, that this danger actually exists. Perhaps anywhere. It is unforgiving. Once it grabs your foot, and begins its pull, it is inescapable. Quicksand is so prevalent, so much of a danger, so likely to be encountered, that we are all taught, as young Cub Scouts, to instantly relax, lie on your back, and worm your way out, should you be so unlucky, as to feel its death squeeze. The two-person, buddy system of scouting is a direct result of quicksand. If a scout ventures out solo, they are in dire danger of encountering quicksand. The greatest safety, once entrapped, is for your ‘buddy’ to extend a rope, or a stick, with prayers for recovery.

Quicksand is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Or should be. Lots of movies have scenes depicting this devilish danger. A silent killer. Leaves no trace of human involvement.

There are places that quicksand lives that are known, and marked with warnings. Places like marshes in the southeast of America: Florida, and Louisiana, and the coastal waters of the Carolina’s. But, also, quicksand is a known, and marked, danger in the canyon lands of southern Utah, northern Arizona, and New Mexico. But to a child’s mind, it can be lurking anywhere.

There are only three ways to get ‘swallowed’ by nature. One is the earth opening up via sinkhole. Another is falling into the crack created by an earthquake. The most prevalent, however, is quicksand.

wasn’t difficult to imagine walking through a dense forest, or on the shores of a lake, and suddenly being sucked under the earth, dragged under, swallowed by quicksand.

Quicksand is the only ‘swallowing’ danger out in the wild.

However, scouts learn that if you do find yourself engulfed in quicksand, the only chance for survival is to lean back so that the weight of your body is distributed over a wider area. Moving won’t cause you to sink. In fact, slow back-and-forth movements can actually let water into the cavity around a trapped limb, loosening the quicksand’s hold. Getting out will take a while, though. Physicists have calculated that the force required to extract your foot from quicksand at a rate of one centimeter per second is roughly equal to the force needed to lift a medium-sized car. One genuine danger is that a person who is immobilized in quicksand could be engulfed and drowned by an incoming tide—quicksand often occurs in tidal areas—but even these types of accidents are very rare.

R: Rattlesnakes

Growing up in Colorado, we shared the state with Diamondback Rattlesnakes. Not all states are rattlesnake states. If you want to avoid them entirely, try Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire, or Maine. Otherwise, you’ve got them, too.

We have all heard the warning sound of a rattlesnake. We all were made aware not to reach up on unseen ledges, on rocks, especially in the sun, where rattlesnakes warm their cold blood in bliss… unless disturbed by a groping hand. Then, ‘snap’, no rattle, no warning, just bite.

Apparently, being afraid of snakes is genetic. My hand goes up quickly. I’m on that list. Probably front row. I don’t really need to even write anything here; just put up a couple pictures, and that’s all it takes. This fear of snakes goes back to the days, years ago, when people were orangutans, unless your particular family oozed down the reptilian evolutionary branch.

What I learned about rattlesnakes, I learned from Willard. He had no problem with them. He’d go hunt them. He had rattles in his sock drawer from rattlesnakes he’d captured in the wild, in the mountains, and took their rattles as trophies. The rule when we were kids was that rattlesnakes grow a new rattle each year, and as rattlesnakes are purported to be able to live for 10+ years, even up to 25 years, that’s a lot of rattles. Newer information, not known or reported to kids when we were kids, is that rattlesnakes grow a rattle each time they shed their skin… and that can happen several times in one year. So a rattlesnake with three rattles, could be a one year old. Almost a baby. And because young rattlesnakes have not acquired the experience as to how much poisonous venom to inject into their victim, they blow their entire immature wad, and you’ve got a big problem.

There was another rule, still holding, that said that a rattlesnake can strike at its victim about 2/3 the length of the snake. So a three foot long rattlesnake could strike a distance of two feet. Because I rarely (never) carry a measuring tape with me in the wild, and since if there is one rattlesnake, there might be two… hundred of them around, I just evacuate, and go sit in the car. So my adrenaline doesn’t flood out. I can feel my eyeballs dilate when I see a rattlesnake.

To me, a worm is a brethren of a rattlesnake. A bosom cousin. So I’m not a fisherman. Except three times I did fish. Caught nothing the first time. Spent about fifteen minutes, so it wasn’t that I wasn’t committed. Caught a six inch monster steelhead trout the second time fishing, and took a photo as proof, in case anyone thought I was exaggerating. The last catch was a deep sea salmon in the ocean waters near Alaska. Took twenty minutes to reel in that load. The muscles in both of my arms got pumped up, filled with blood. That’s the only time that ever happened to me. Took a couple hours to relax my arms. If Jesus wanted to get rid of snakes, I’d convert.

S: Spontaneous Combustion

First heard the words ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ out of the mouth of George Kawamoto, a neighbor kid, two years older, that lived at 863, two houses away. That’s that circumstance that only a few people get where their body just explodes into flames for no apparent reason. Like the picture above. And in that picture, you can tell that the chair has some issues and may need replacing.

George’s house was blonde brick, and so was my house, but the dominant color by far was red brick. Not stucco. Not wood siding. Brick. Red brick. Frisell’s house was red brick. Willard’s was red brick. And Willard’s was a duplex, and they had both sides, and both sides were red brick. It was a mirror-image, red brick, duplex. And Cassidy’s house was red brick. He lived in the house right across the alley from me. In the back. And the house next door, another direction, was also red brick. The red brick houses were a more scruffy texture than the blonde brick houses. But there were some blonde ones in the neighborhood every once in a while. One person painted their red brick, black, but some black peeled back, and you could tell it was red brick hiding bare beneath there.

I thought George Kawamoto was the coolest kid in the neighborhood when he told me, and some of my neighborhood friends, about Spontaneous Combustion. We were outside of Kawamoto’s house, shooting green peas, with 7.5”, grade AA grade, heavy-plastic, pea shooters, at the tiny bell on Kawamoto’s roof, and why it was up there I never asked, but I always wondered about it. The pea shooters were really, really, a lot like just having wider, extra-duty straws, like the ones that came for free when you bought a Slurpee, but for some reason the pea shooter extra-duties cost about 80¢ apiece, which seemed like a rip-off. At that time, 80¢ could buy you about anything you’d want. I think 80¢ could get you a dollar’s worth of brownies. So it seemed like a LOT for a crummy pea shooter, even if it was an extra-duty, and said ‘pea shooter’ on the side.

Then, after shooting the green peas, with the extra-duties, at the impossible to hit little bell on the roof, we stopped doing that, and sat down on Kawamoto’s lawn, on his hill, looking down at the street, and that’s when Kawamoto chose to tell us about Spontaneous Combustion. The kids he told was me, and Frisell, and Willard, and the kid I mentioned earlier that lived across the alley from me, named Gene Cassidy, and Crow was there, too.

I don’t think Crow was there for the entirety of the pea shooting, though. I don’t know where he was. I’ll just say, um, that he was… uh, …at the dentist. How about that? Nah. But I really didn’t know, or I’d remember, and then you’d know, too. Let’s just shift, and say he was tying up newspapers in their red brick garage, back by the alley, for the upcoming paper drive, the following week, at school. The Crow’s always brought a lot of stacks of tied-up newspapers to the annual elementary school Paper Drive. They had a station wagon! So they had lots of room to haul the newspapers over. Old newspapers just made my mom’s car all dirty on the inside, so we weren’t a big cojones family when it came to the elementary school Paper Drive.

Spontaneous Combustion sounded cool, and scary, at the same time. The idea of it made me a little nervous, but this was the first time, with this sort of thing, that I felt comfortable that the odds against something like this happening to me were about 5 or 6 to 1. So I was good with that.

T: Tarantulas

There are weird people walking across earth who have purchased tarantulas to be their pets. Maybe they are ‘special’ people. With ‘special’ senses. Because convincing evidence suggests that tarantula’s don’t bond with humans. At all. Not even the tiniest bit. Not even with weirdos. And there is additional, strong, strong evidence, that tarantulas have no ability to recognize human faces. None whatsoever. Not even the Mexican Redknee tarantula can recognize a human face. They exhibit no clue about the subtleties of the human face. The curvature of the nose. The sensuous appeal of human lips. The cupid’s bow. The batting of eye lashes. The wrinkles that erode the forehead, and take a massive toll, on overall facial quality, called ‘aging’. The lunula. Oops. That’s the half moon on your fingernails. Lunula don’t adorn, nor belong on, the human face. I meant, the philtrum, that center cleft depression above the upper lip, and below the center t-bar, separating the nostrils in the nose. Tarantulas don’t give a hoot. Any more than any human should be able to lose themselves, in rapture, staring into all eight eyes of a tarantula.

Tarantulas, also, don’t ‘hear’ the noise that swan dives from the human head, called the ‘voice’. They don’t care. Tarantulas don’t even have ears. Tarantulas can hear, however. Sort of. Through the hairs, which aren’t called hairs, on their leggy leg legs. Their legs are called legs, but the hair on their legs is called, ‘setae’. It’s the setae that helps the sensitive little beasts detect air motion. And those hairs, setae, really key in on spider web disturbances. Nothing like an old pull, or ‘twang’, on the spider web, to wake up the slovenly spider. They are really, really good at detecting, and responding to, the ‘twang’. But back to ‘hearing’, the question arises, quite naturally, ‘Can a tarantula hear in outer space?’ There answer is not confirmed, but it’s likely that the answer is, ‘No’. In this regard, tarantulas, and humans, share a branch from their evolutionary pasts. As though we are from the same limb of the life tree.

If you hung a little picture of yourself in the cage, where the tarantula patrols the ground, in hopes that the tarantula will become emotionally attached, it’s not going to happen for you. Tarantulas just are not that into you. Mirrors? Yes. They seem to like mirrors. Unlike us. Or at least, unlike me. I’m not a mirror fan. To this degree, the ontogeny of the individual tarantula diverges from the ontogeny of most, individual sapiens. Maybe there is no recognition staring back at them from inside the mirror. Maybe they don’t recognize themselves. Maybe they don’t care about appearance, nor hygiene. After all, generally speaking, their brains are smaller than most human brains. Maybe similar to MAGA brains.

In the USofA, tarantulas seem to have adjusted marvelously to the southwest, and to the midwest. They have been successful as movie stars, too, infiltrating Hollywood, in the 1950s. Tarantula! was released to the big screen, in 1955. It’s the b&w terror, captured directly to film. The believable story of a typical, sleepy, hot, Arizona town, called Desert Rock, that was menacingly attacked by out of control monsters.

But at least it was a dry heat, in Arizona. We all have that to be thankful for. And less asthma.

The tarantula has the ability to bite you. But it has no teeth. How can that be? How can it bite you, without teeth? With no cuspids, nor bicuspids, nor canines? It can bite you, because it has some serious fangs that deserve mention. It’s through its fangs, forcefully jammed into the body of its prey, that the paralyzing venom is pumped into the victim, dissolving the innards, so the tarantula can slurp the nutrients. Like a milkshake. Better equipped, by nature, than mankind, they don’t need straws. But the truth, now known, is that the tarantula’s first defense is not the fang/venom approach. They only use that approach as last resort. Their first defense is shaking off the irritating hairs (setae) from their legs (legs), which are a formidable irritant when breathed, or touched. Don’t let them get into your eyes.

We had a Halloween party, in 1982, at our redwood cottage, in Woodside, California. To decorate a Halloween ambience, Paula and I put large, scary, black rubber rats, and large, scary, black rubber spiders, and long, scary, creamsicle-colored rubber snakes, in the corners of the living room, and in the corners of the front porch. In the middle of the living room floor, during the festive decorating activity, was one of the large, black, rubber spiders. Looked like a tarantula, or at least, like a wolf spider. It was enormous. Size of an adult fist. Paula bent down to pick it up, with the intent to put it in one of the scary corners, maybe in some webbing, but at first touch, the thing moved. I watched it happen. Scared the living wits out of me. This thing was alive! My first thought was to run out of the house, and down the country road, as fast as I could run. It was too big to stomp on; my second thought. What if I missed? What if I sprang my ankle on it? What if it attacked me, injecting venom through the searing pain in the neck incisions, where its fangs repeatedly thrust, and retracted, and thrust, and retracted, until I fainted from blood loss, and my hearing ceased, and my tongue lost all purpose? While I was thus confused, and uncertain, Paula walked to the kitchen, got a plastic quart container, and covered the spider monster with it. It just fit. So, there in the middle of the living room floor, was the quart container, on top of the monster, preventing its escape, or more importantly, its attack. The hairs on my arms stood up, like setae, reacting to the circumstances. I could feel them leaping from the pores. Even my hair arm wanted out. So it wasn’t just me.

The lid of the quart container would be impossible to attach. There was no way to get the quart container lid back onto the container without the black monster, on the worn carpet, getting loose, and rampaging all over the place. The legs of the terror were moving. It was ready. Like warmup calisthenics. Like getting prepared to jump ten feet, given the opportunity. It was Paula that came up with the idea of sliding an album cover underneath the quart container. She asked me, ‘Which album cover do you want me to use?’ I screamed back, in terror, at the top of my lungs, ‘I don’t care which album cover. Just get rid of the thing.’ So, Paula picked the one album cover that I wouldn’t have wanted her to pick, slid it under the quart container, lifted it up, along with the trapped terror, took it all outdoors, and released the monster down the road, a couple of houses away. At least, that’s where she said she released it. My vision was just returning when she came back through the front door. This was a narrow escape.

The Halloween party was a success. Paula’s new friend, Alison, dyed her hair orange. I’d only met Alison once before that. I met Alison’s husband, Paul, at the party, for the first time, too. We’ve been friends ever since. Below is a picture of Paul as a lad. He became an artist. So did Alison. Paul draws logos. Many that you’ve seen. Like the Post-It notes logo. And San Francisco Symphony logo. And the green Gourmet Gardens logo. Alison paints swirly, abstract, paintings. At least one of which was reviewed as a $1,000,000 painting. Which you probably haven’t seen. It’s locked up. In her studio. I think. Her birthdate is October 29, so the Halloween party had a couple black and orange frosting cupcakes that said Happy Birthday on them. With little plastic, black spiders rings as adornments. You could wear those little, black, spider rings on your fingers, but they kinda hurt because the plastic pinched too tightly. Felt like fangs.

U: Under Bed Monsters

I got a real bad stiff neck for the first time in my young life because I laid in bed, frozen, for about over an hour, in the morning, petrified, because I knew for sure that the scary clown marionette in the big storage trunk, under the ping-pong table, was just waiting for me to make my move. Yes, it had come alive. This I knew.

The storage trunk was about five feet from my bed. And it was between me, and the door, to get out of the room. I couldn’t move. There was no ability to move. I yelled, ‘Mom’, a bunch of times, real loud. But my bedroom was in the basement, far from the stairs, on the entire other side of the house, really, so the human screaming voice couldn’t carry, or she would have heard me. For a long time, because of the strength of my developed larynx, they called me ‘Siren Sam’.

But I kept yelling, ‘Mom’, real loud, at the top of my larynx, because I knew she was upstairs. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t coming downstairs to see why I wasn’t upstairs for breakfast. But it was on Saturday, so there was no school. Didn’t she realize it was not at all in my behavior to stay downstairs, in the partially underground basemen, for that long? The basement rooms had windows, but they were up near the top of the walls. If someone outside wanted to see into our bedroom, to spy on us (my brother also lived in the same large, rectangular room), they’d have to bend over, almost to the ground, and peer through the flowers, the exotic iris’ and bonsai lilacs. Other basement windows had big bushes with a lot of brambles in front of them, or ancient paint.

It didn’t help that the clock on the basement, bedroom wall, a black cat whose scary eyes clicked three-steps back and forth, left-center-right-center-left-center-right-center…. while the tail was a pendulum ticking off the seconds. I hated that clock. Scared the hoohoo out of me. But I never told my mom. The cat’s eyes glowed. What kind of clock was that to have in a kid’s bedroom? And it isn’t like we knew how to read time, anyway. Well, truthfully, we did, but it was just a horrible clock to be on a basement, bedroom wall, with kids living down there that had active imaginations. Which pretty much means all kids. Yet, this clock was the rage. Seen it in a ton of magazines. All you gotta do is search for ‘black cat clock’, and you’ll see. Instantly. Voila.

So, frozen in bed, like I was handcuffed to the prison cell cot, on that Saturday morning, a familiar problem arose. It turned out to be a life saver. You wouldn’t think that could happen, but it did. I had a stiff neck. I was frozen. The scary clown marionette in the storage trunk was alive. I was scared as a scarecrow. The black cat clock was mocking me. Making me more nervous. And then I realized that I had to go #1. Pretty badly. Whenever anyone would ask me if I had to go #1 or #2, I always said #1. It was a pat-answer. But this actually was #1, this time. Really. Why would I make it up now? Oh. I guess I would make it up now. But it was the real #1.

I calculated that I could probably get out from under the covers, and get to the door, past the ping-pong table, in about 1/100th of a second. I waited until the cat’s eyes were looking the other way, its directional right, my left, then I threw open the covers, bounced to the door, barreled on through, and raced down the hallway like a Lamborghini, skipping past the basement bathroom… My ears were alert, listening for the heinous, chasing, killer clown, marionette. I turned the corner, hit my elbow, slammed the basement door, and flew up the stairs, past the kitchen, where my mom was smoking a charcoal filtered cigarette. Got to the upstairs bathroom in a nick of time. And didn’t go back downstairs the entire day.

This type of fear, of under the bed monsters, never repeated. It was a one time occurrence. Thankfully. I did make my mom go down to my bedroom with me that night, Saturday night. But my older brother was there, too, so things calmed down. It was my Aunt Gene that gave me the killer clown marionette on my prior birthday. It was a horrible present. But Aunt Gene was kidless, and had no idea what she was doing. Even though she claimed to know how to raise kids better than parents that actually had kids.

V: Volcanoes

Volcanoes are the most powerful naturally occurring phenomenon on earth. Although earthquakes deserve mention, their impact is much more local, more confined. Volcanic ash from huge eruptions can blanket the earth’s atmosphere, and have done so, and will do so again, in the future. Hopefully, not tomorrow morning. I have a tee time at 9:50a.

As kids, we didn’t have any direct experience with volcanoes. But we were taught about volcanoes in Science class, and even built volcanoes in class using large plastic bottles, adding dish soap, baking soda, water, red and orange food coloring… and vinegar. It was the most awesome science lab experiment we ever allowed to perform in school. So we knew that volcanoes existed, and heard about Mt. Vesuvius exploding in 79 A.D., burying Pompeii. They showed us pictures of people found in Pompeii from 79 A.D. with their mouths still open. Those unlucky people looked like grayish white, terra cotta, casting molds. The faces of some had horrified expressions frozen in time. That caught our attention. The teacher made a big deal out of Vesuvius. And the pictures of Pompeii were terrorizing. They didn’t require any exaggeration on our part to have a lasting impact.

There was also a 1951 movie, Bird of Paradise, where a pretty women has to sacrifice herself to the volcano gods, and jumps to her death into the cauldron of the active, island volcano. How they filmed that, kids didn’t know. Looked real, for sure. Was she a death row inmate forced to jump into bubbling lava, down inside of the volcano, to pay her debt to society? What the heck did she do for that to have to happen? Could there have been some other explanation? I, personally, did not detect any trick photography. Willard said it was real. And he had a pretty good eye. Never needed glasses.

Earth has 60 active volcanoes today. Earlier in its creation, 4+ billion years ago, earth had many more active volcanoes. Hundreds. Today, which is a Thursday, the largest, and tallest, known volcano in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars. It is a whopping 72,000 feet tall. Five times the tallest mountains in Colorado, of which there are 58 peaks above 14,000 feet. Olympus Mons is two and a half times the height of Mr. Everest, and the size of the entire state of Arizona. But it is no longer active.

Another volcano in the solar system, Io, pronounced ‘I – Oh’, not ‘E – Oh’, is a moon of Jupiter. One of its 80+ moons. And its third largest. The largest moon in the solar system, which happens to also orbit Jupiter, is named Ganymede. Which is larger than our moon, and larger than the planet, Mercury. Were Ganymede to orbit the sun, rather than Jupiter, it would be considered another planet. But it is Io that steals NASA’s attention, as it has more volcanic activity than any other body in our solar system.

When we were kids, scientists did not believe that a world almost 500 million miles from the sun could be anything other than frozen, and lifeless. It was quite a surprise when present-day volcanic activity was discovered in 1979, from photos from our spaceship, Voyager 1. While Io has active volcanoes that do expel lava, the bluish eruption in the photo below are sulfurous gasses, miles high. And a lot of sulfur, and sulfur dioxide are also expelled, which give Io it’s yellowish/orange coloration, and earns Io the nickname: the Pizza Moon.

W: Witches

The first exposure to witches, the witch that brought the whole witches’ issue into the home, everywhere in America, street after street, block after block, house to house to house, was the Wicked Witch of the West, in the movie, The Wizard of Oz. 1939. Which didn’t look twenty years old when I saw it for the first time, when I was eight, in 1959. It looked better than most of the other stuff that was on teevee. Once a year, always on a Sunday night, we’d get to eat in the teevee room, to watch the movie, when it aired, and have Swanson TV dinners. Swanson lead their wildly successful dinner tray campaign with Fried Chicken, in 1953. It immediately established itself as the standard. But I always asked my mom to get me the Turkey Dinner, with the label that said, ‘Mostly White Meat’. For years, that label made me feel like the dark meat was inferior. But I growed up, and I changed, matured more than an eye drop, developed a broader palette, and I don’t believe that the dark meat of a turkey is inferior to the white meat, any longer. It took a long time to climb that mountain, though. Sometimes, now, I even choose the dark meat. Unless I’m making a white bread, and mayonnaise, turkey breast sandwich, with cranberry sauce. Then, I prefer the white meat.

I even ate the peas, and the carrots, that came with the Swanson Turkey TV dinner, along with the puddle of mashed potatoes, and every scoop of liquid gravy, and every dress of dressing, to show my mom my appreciation, for a real gosh-darn, tasty, hot, aluminum tray TV dinner. The cranberry cake dessert was the first thing I ate, and its little compartment square was slicker than a winter’s cat’s ass when I was done with it. And when my brother and I were done licking our aluminum trays, my mom would just carry them out from the teevee room, to the kitchen, toss them into the trash, under the sink, and that was it. No cleanup! Except for four forks (mom, dad, me, my older brother), and my dad’s coffee cup, and my brother’s milk glass, and my milk glass, and my dad’s water glass, and my mom’s water glass, and my mom’s coffee cup, and her coffee cup saucer. My dad didn’t use a saucer. He didn’t need to because he only spilled things on his tie.

You’d think with its gigantic popularity, and with its broad universal appeal, that The Wizard of Oz would have been the 1940 Academy Award winner for Best Picture of the Year. And every other damn award they could heap on the pile. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture of the Year. Judy Garland didn’t win Best Actress, as Dorothy. She wasn’t nominated. The tin man didn’t win Best Supporting Actor. He wasn’t nominated. And neither was the scarecrow, nor the cowardly lion, nor the wizard. Toto? Forget it. Toto was a dog. He had no speaking lines, and didn’t play a mime dog, so… fat chance for Toto. And as for the green-skinned, mole-chinned, ugly-as-sin, black, pointed hat, broom-riding, flying-monkey loving, cackling, tornado chasing, witch… she got nothing, too. She just melted away to oblivion.

The Wizard of Oz didn’t go home empty handed at the Academy Awards that year, though. It took home two, naked, man-figured trophies: one for Best Original Score, and one for Best Song, about a rainbow. Whoopee! The trophies showed no genitalia, but we know each was a man, because they both had the musculature of a male, and came with a man’s name, ‘Oscar’.

The 1939 movie releases had a couple of other biggies. Other than The Wizard of Oz. There was Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart. It had 11 nominations. Didn’t win Best Picture. Only had one win; for Best Story. That was a bummer. There was another film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. With Charles Laughton. Didn’t win. Had two nominations. Took home zilch. That was a disappointment.

There was another movie that snuck in there, in 1939, that didn’t go unnoticed. It was called, Gone With The Wind, and it’s still called, Gone With The Wind, and it won a record nine academy awards, in 1940. Some of its haul included Best Picture, Best Director (Victor Fleming). Best Actress (Vivien Leigh). Best Supporting Actress (Denver East High School graduate – Hattie McDaniel), Art Direction, and Cinematography.

Although today we first get our taste of witches from the movies, witches have been around even before movies were invented. Like 1000s of years before. And the first ones weren’t called, ‘witches’. And they weren’t considered sordid sorceresses, nor evil enchantresses. Instead, they were called, ‘Wise Women’, and were the healers in the biblical times. They also cooked the food, which had its own degree of magic. Times changed. Later. much later, came the Salem Witch Trials, in Salem, Massachusetts, a settlement of Protestant Puritans, from England. Those trials took place from February 1692 to May 1693. Convicted witches were burned at the stake. The only known way to be absolutely sure of their demise. Driving a stake through their heart wasn’t reliable. Filling their mouths with salt, and sewing their lips shut, wasn’t reliable. Garlic belts had no impact. Those were tough times.

X: X-Rays

Well, I was blessed with having no fear of xylophones, and the only other ‘X‘ word I knew at the time was X-rays. It’s still like that. I haven’t changed. Oh sure. I know two more ‘X‘-words now: xenophobia and X-Men. But not back then. Furthermore, I wasn’t really afraid of X-rays other than we were all taught not to be exposed to them too many times, or our bodies would disintegrate into a puddle, and our brains could catch fire. Other than that, this will be the shortest entry. My apology.

In hindsight, however, seeing the bones propping up our fleshy bodies, revealed by the x-ray, and especially viewing our skulls, still is frightening. The holes where the eyes belong, but are missing. Tooth roots revealed. Fractures. It’s all a bit unsettling. And if you are zapped with X-rays in excess, it will kill a child, and will kill an adult. Maybe not that minute. But soon. Probably before the weekend softball game. X-Rays are a serious, lethal business.

What X-rays reveal is the structure that keeps our bodies upright. Our bones. Our skeletons. Otherwise, we are oxygen-breathing amoebas. And what kid isn’t afraid of a skeleton? Or being an oxygen-breathing amoeba? I know I was/am. I was especially leery of those lost, and confused, skeletons that walk around tormenting everyone, looking for who knows what. Those, I avoided. Some even carried weapons… like those skeleton warriors fighting Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. I don’t recall which chapter in the bible this occurred. But it might have been yanked. Probably to protect young, forming minds.

Y: Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets and I shared some similarities when I was a kid. We both liked Coca Cola, for example. The original. Although the yellowjacket’s palette went for Diet Coke, too. Mine never has. But they liked full-octane more. They also liked garbage cans filled with discarded food that I discarded. Specially the ketchup. So they are big on food remnants. I only sometimes ate leftovers. So our food preferences were similar, but also not identical. I think neither one of us liked salad. Maybe potato salad. But there were some real obvious differences between us. They could fly, had six legs, stung like a mother, repeatedly, were always angry, were always a nuisance, and should be avoided as much as possible. I was only two or three of those things.

Yellowjackets are also similar to bees, and wasps, and hornets; but they are more aggressive than each of those. Bees are friendly in comparison. Bees are the friendly, flying, stinging insects. If you look real close, they have little smiles. Wasps are more aggressive than bees, and their smiles are harder to detect. Yellowjackets wear the championship belts of nastiness. They have no smiles at all. They don’t even smile at their own kids.

I’d been stung by bees a few times as a kid. First time, sitting on our hill, on the side of our house. We had a large beehive up in the pitch under one of the eaves of the house. But it was pretty high up there. You couldn’t get near it. But it meant we had bees, and my mom had flower beds with tulips and irises, so she was catering to their hunger. One day one of the bees landed on my neck. I could feel it smelling me. Maybe it was freckle-hunting, but I didn’t come with any freckles. Truthfully, I didn’t know what the heck it was doing. I was just sitting there with half a peanut butter sandwich. And a cookie. And then the bee landed.

The house cleaner was over that day. Her name was Lucille Hunt. She had the same birthdate as me, except she was older. She was outside with me, and saw the bee land on my neck. She didn’t freak out, so I didn’t freak out, and she said to just hold still, so I just holded still, because I liked Lucille Hunt, and I trusted Lucille Hunt… but the bastard bee stung me anyway. And then the bastard bee’s guts, and furry body, were stuck to my neck, dead. Lucille brushed it off me. To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. Of course, I felt it. I also felt like I grew up a little bit that day. I got my first stink, and I didn’t cry like a big baby, or even a small baby, or even an unborn baby. I didn’t cry, period. I was happy to learn that I wasn’t allergic to bee stings.

But if the flying stinking insect on my neck had been a yellowjacket, I would have freaked out. If we had a yellowjacket hive, or whatever they live in, I think my mom would have hired someone to get rid of it. They can live in the ground, too. Lucille told me that I should be thankful that the bee that stung me wasn’t a yellowjacket. I took note of that. Lucille said that yellowjackets sting over and over, and don’t die. When a bee stings, it loses its guts, which stick to the stinger, now inside your skin. Yellowjackets don’t work that way. They can just keep on stinging. So that’s what they like to do. Like shooting bows and arrows.

Fortunately, like bees, yellowjackets do buzz, so it helps us kids detect their proximity. As soon as a kid hears the buzzing of a flying killer, we take notice. So do adults. Well, at least I do. I have buzzing insect radar, or something, built into my brain. And I’m thankful for that. And I’m really thankful that I have never been stung by a yellowjacket. Although I know that if it did, it wouldn’t hurt. Because if one ever landed on me, I would have died from heart failure right then, before being stung.

Z: Zombies

Zombies have big appetites. They are always looking to eat someone. It’s like that is all they care about. There’s a lot more to life than that. Oh, yeah. They aren’t technically alive. They walk around, dead, with their arms out in front of them, in an obvious unnatural position, like they are air drying their hands. They are rude. They need to clean themselves up a little bit. They all seem to walk with a limp. But they are very social animals. They almost always travel in groups. There are a couple of names aptly applied to groups of zombies: plagues and hordes. So just as there is a name for a group of witches, called a coven, for zombies, go with ‘hordes of zombies’, or ‘a horde of zombies’. And their clothes often need darning, washing, and pressing. You get the feeling that they just don’t give a shit about their appearance. Which is horrifying in this day of personal hygienics. They could get sick with such lax attention to their well-being. And they are scary to kids, too. Plus, they have a ‘Z‘ in their name. And that’s always special.

True zombies, not the make-believe movie kind, can only be killed one way. Or two ways. Well, there is an ongoing argument over that. One way, a proven way: attack their brains, and scramble them up a bit, like pithing a frog. That makes them fall over, and flail around, and then they die, for real, and can’t get back up. They have no ‘get-up’ balance once their brains are scrambled.

The other argued way to kill zombies is to attack them with a carbon steel machete, and hack, hack, hack, hack. And then hack some more for good measure. And then a few more times, to be sure. But you’re always a little uncertain with these monsters of the graveyard. So, it wouldn’t hurt to also scramble their brains with long pokers. Through the nose works well. And then whack their heads off. And throw a rock on the head. And maybe throw some dirt in their eyes. They hate that. You’ll need a fairly long machete blade to keep your distance. Some uninformed folks from out of town, I guess I heard maybe from Zurich (another cool ‘Z‘ name), tried to use the blade of their classic Swiss army knife. The one with the toothpick. You could see from across the grassy knoll that that wasn’t going to do the trick. Too short of a blade. Got too close to the zombie. Next thing you know, the hero with the classic Swiss army knife was grabbed, was eaten, and spit out. Zombies are like jackals. One attacks, then a horde converges, and they all gorge themselves. Like it’s a dinner party with no plates.

The most famous of all zombie movies is still Night of the Living Dead. Which came out a few years after being a kid, it came out in 1968, but it brought together an appetite of undead corpses that seemed to take direction well. (‘Appetite’ may also be used to describe a horde of zombies.) No one zombie was trying to take all the gory in the making of the film. The zombies shared equally. There didn’t have to be reshoot after reshoot. There wasn’t enough budget for that, anyway.

This concludes our alphabet. And ends this exercise.

Fears: Neighborhood air raid sirens. Disturbing sounds. Abandoned amusement parks. Dark alleys. Nightmares. Nuclear war.

As bonus coverage, the following Runner’s-Up Fears are presented to you, Dear Readers, to do what you like with them. Add your own. Tell your friends. Fears in bold were the selected choices.

RUNNER’S-UP

A – Adam’s Apples, Anal Tears, Arachnids, Assassination, Atom Bombs

B – Bee Hives, Beheadings, Black Widows, Blackheads, Blindness, Bug Eyes, Buried Alive

C – Caves, Cavities (teeth), Centipedes, Clowns, Closets

D – Dentists, Devil, Diarrhea, Dinosaurs, Doctors, Dolls, Dragons, Dummies

E – Earthquakes, Eels, Electric Chairs, The Exorcist

F – Ferris Wheels, Fire, Fractured Bones

G – Gangplank, Graveyards, Great White Sharks, Grim Reaper, Guillotine

H – Hangman’s Noose, Haunted Houses, Hornets, Hospitals, Hypnosis

I – Insect Swarms

J – Jack-O’-Lanterns, Jock Itch

K – Kidnapping, Killers, King Kong

L – Lava Flows, Lizards

M – Mannequins, Masks, Mosquitoes, Mutants, Mutilation

N – Needles, Nightmares, Nuclear War

O – Old Age, The Outer Limits, Outer Space

P – Parental Death, Praying Mantis, Psycho

Q – Quasimoto, Quicksand

R – Rabies, Rattlesnakes

S – Satan, Scorpions, Skeletons, Snakes, Spontaneous Combustion

T – Tarantulas, Tests (school), Tooth Decay, The Twilight Zone

U – Undead, Under Bed Monsters

V – Violence, Volcanoes

W – Wasps, Witches, Worms

X – X-Rays

Y – Yellowjackets, Yellowstone’s Camp Bears

Z – Zombies