2:18 pm - Tues 11/04/03
Old Memories

Seeing rays of sunlight coming through the clouds scared me. It looked like "Heaven" in those scary Christian comics by Jack Chick (The ones where someone was always getting cast into Hell at the end of the story, because they'd had a beer at a party, or had thought about having sex, or had made the fatal mistake of being Catholic). I was afraid "Judgement Day" was coming, and if that were the case, I knew I'd end up going to "the bad place".

If I were out walking, with a stiff wind blowing at my back, sometimes I'd jump into the air, hoping that little bit of liftoff would be all I'd need to start flying. Equal parts "Superman" fantasy, and wanting God to prove his existence with a really cool miracle.

On Xmas morning one year, I got a talking G.I. Joe. I pulled the string a couple times, listening to him say manly things like, "Kill �em all, and let God sort �em out!" and "Would you like to touch my scar?" (Okay, I don't remember what he actually said, but I'm sure he said something close). But then in my enthusiasm, I yanked too hard, and suddenly GI Joe stopped in mid-sentence, string dangling impotently between his legs

David, my foster brother, five years older and always a "take charge" kind of guy, said he could fix him for me. So he took "Joe" apart, and of course, couldn't figure out how to put him back together again. I ended up with a shoebox coffin full of GI Joe parts; apparently, Joe'd had the bad luck to step on a landmine during his final tour-of-duty.

I remember someone mentioning the "Red Skeleton" show, and being very excited about it, thinking it sounded really scary. Of course, it turned out there was nothing particularly scary about Red Skelton, which was what the person had actually been talking about (Though when I think about now, his routine with "Gertrude" and "Heathcliff", the two seagulls, always made me a little nervous for some reason).

On the door of my bedroom, I had a "life sized" poster of Bela Lugosi ("Life Sized" if Lugosi had been five feet tall, anyway).

The eyes glowed in the dark, and many's the night those eyes would scare the living daylights out of me!

(Well, time to move back into the present, because I have to start getting ready for work, which is even scarier some days than Bela Lugosi's glow-in-the-dark eyes...)

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