Horror movies

Horror lite, even. I can't even think about Silence of the Lambs without getting upset. Even the trailers for the sequels had me all twisted up. I once saw a horror movie at the midnight movies during college, and I still have nightmares about it sometimes.

This is how sci-fi movies begin

What the hell is growing in my yard?



It looks like crushed ice. Has some creep been lurking in my yard this morning? The nerve! First he lurks, then he dumps out his Big Gulp in my 1.8 billion dollar landscaping.

Whoa! It's everywhere! No way that all came from a Big Gulp.

Hey! This isn't crunchy at all!

Ewwwwwww! It's all squishy and gelatinous!!!

Ewwwwwww! The Man! The Man! Come here! Look at this stuff! What is it! Touch it! Touch it! It's squishy!

Sez The Man: I'm not going to touch it. Are you crazy!

Ewwwww! Poke it with your shoe or something! Look--it's squishy!

Sez The Man: Ewww! It is squishy. Gross! WTF?

WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT?

Is it a fungus? Is it the spores of an alien life form come to body-snatch us or eat our brains? Why did they have to land here? Why couldn't they have gone across the street to the McMansion family? Why couldn't they have gone to the other side of the Potomac? Why couldn't they have gone downtown so we could get a day off work?

Maybe I can scoop it up with a snow shovel and kill it with bleach. Maybe bleach is food for them on their world.

Oh no! What am I going to do?

I am going to drink some coffee and go to work and when the dullness of my job calms me down (but before I lapse into a coma of boredom) I am going to email the landscaper and she is going to have a reasonable explanation for this.

It's fertilizer. It starts out granular, but turns into gelatin when it rains, which I wouldn't know because it hasn't rained here in about two months.

Whatever. It's still really, really gross. Jelly--or "aspic" (gag, swallow)-- that doesn't taste like fruit is unspeakably disgusting. Ew.

Eyeballs

Anything having to do with eyes gives me the heebie jeebies. Eye injuries, eye surgery, the sort of eye anatomy diagrams and models they have at the optometrist—or worse: diagrams or photos of eye problems—all of it makes me want to hurl. One of my bro’s has had lasik done, and my Dad just has cataract surgery, and it all seems to have worked out fine for them, but please, don’t tell me the details. It’s a mystery how I manage to put in contact lenses. Dogs have an interior eyelid and YB frequently naps with that one closed but the outer ones open, which is a freaky look.

I’ve been to the optometrist twice this week and had to suffer all sorts of miseries:

• There’s the air-puff eyeball pressure thing. I know what’s coming and I can’t relax. Because I’m so flinchy, they have to do it three or four times per side.
• And there’s the dilation. I flinch at the drops, so they’re hard to get in, then my eyes feel funny all day and I can’t read and it feels weird when I close my eyes, so no napping either.
• After that, there’s the thing where the doctor looks into my eyes with the bright light, and I don’t like that very much. Plus, she has to give me more drops (“This might sting”) and then even more drops (the last one is the runny yellow dye)
• And then there’s the refinement of my prescription. Better this one? Or that one? This one? That one? They all look blurry and awful to me, and by this point I have usually memorized whatever combination of letters they are showing me so my imagination fills in the part I can’t actually see.
  

The very best part of all is that I have both glasses and contact lenses. Ya can’t put in contact lenses when your eyes are dilated, and ya can’t check the fit of contact lenses when they aren’t in. My HMO has not figured out how to coordinate the contacts/glasses bit with the dilation bit (first check fit of contacts, then dilate and check prescription, Duh) so I always have to have two visits. Yesterday was dilation. Today was contacts. Because she didn’t like my eyeball pressure yesterday (just typing it makes me heave a little, because I imagine my eyeball exploding or something from excessive pressure), I had to redo the air puff thing today. Then I got the yellow dye drops. Then she checked my contacts. The dye made my eyes itchy so the contacts had to come right out, and they’re a nice shade of yellow. They are not supposed to be yellow. I may not have the stomach to use these again.

Getting breathed on

I hate it when I can feel The Man breathing on me. It gives me the heebie jeebies. Also, sometimes YB or GK breathe on me. Yuck.

Old people

I don't want to get old. I especially don't want to get old and sick. This makes me think about dying alone after a long period of prolonged suffering, perhaps after having lost mental function. This is not how I want it all to end. Old people remind me that I am going to get old and die, and I am not ready to face this because my life so far has been a big self-indulgent bust. I have accomplished nothing.

Nasty

When I'm really, really tired and I snuggle into bed and start burrowing into the pillows and discover a wet, slimy chunk of rawhide that YB has buried in the bed.

Creepy

• Death by drifting away on a raft at sea, sunburned and thirsty, drifting, drifting....


• Death by going down in a sinking ship.

Ick. Ick. Ick.

I was watching The War on DVR with The Man and one of the soldiers was interviewing about how he got hit in the arm while riding in the Ball Turret (I think) during a bombing raid and was going to get his arm amputated because he had osteomyelitis, which is probably not spelled right, and which is probably a bone infection of some sort. But then the chief of surgery at the army hospital decided to save his arm. Which is good.



So the surgeon puts the arm in a cast. Then he drills a hole in the cast and fills the hole with maggots and covers the hole with a wire mesh cage of some sort. And the maggots eat the infected tissue and the bone heals and the arm is saved. Which is great.


I am an educated person and I watch a lot of TV. I have heard of the maggot cure before. I have seen it dramatized (e.g., one the Sharpe's episodes) in fiction, but it is always done on an unconscious patient. Now I get to visualize maggots eating the flesh of someone who is both conscious and alive.



Yuck yuck and double yuck. I am very happy for the soldier whose arm was saved. Truly I am. But man oh man I did not need that mental picture. Ewwww.

Ick.

• Death by floating away into infinity in outer space


• slugs


• Death by being buried alive


• toenail fungus ads


• Death by drifting away into oblivion in a disabled submarine