Monster

I know I'm not the only one who used to be deathly afraid of stepping off my bed too close to the edge. If I had to get out of bed for some reason in the middle of the night, I would jump out as far as I could so that the monsters that may or may not have been under the bed couldn't grab me by the ankle and pull me under. I knew that there probably wasn't anyone under the bed. I knew that if there was someone under the bed, chances are they'd wait til I was sleeping to grab me and tear me into pieces. Duh. That's what I'd do.

When I was a kid I hated horror movies. HATED them. I once saw Freddy Kruger rip the tongue out of a guy's face. For 2 years after that I slept with the covers over my head. My older sister successfully kept me from sneaking into her room by hanging a giant flag of Freddy in front of her door way, until my mom made her take it down. Even then just the knowledge that the image of Freddy was somewhere in that room kept me from snooping. Freddy can come alive out of almost anything you know!

When I finally faced my fears in highschool - Freddy was the first monster I confronted. I watched every single Nightmare on Elmstreet. And Freddy turned out to be kinda funny. So I continued my quest to face the best monsters of Hollywood. Next, came the vampires, whose sexy immortality fueled my immagination for years. I understand the popularity of vampires. Teen vampires bore me. Remember Anne Rice? She wrote bloodthirst without all the garbage about vampire/human love. Vampires shouldn't be nice. They should be killers! Humans are just meat! This was a necessary lesson for me. So when at long last the zombies slowly dragged their oozing corpses into my life, I could understand the theory.

Everybody has a favourite monster, and mine is a mindless mob of festering drones. Devestation of the human race is a preoccupation of mine, and zombies give me a good pretext for avoiding crowds, shopping malls and the mindless automatons that frequent these places: just in case. Zombies are my number one reason for getting in shape. I run up the stairs of my building to train for that day when the human race gets infected with whatever virus causes the dead to return to life to eat brains. When they come - I hope I'll be in good enough shape to run to the nearest armory for supplies.

But what does our favourite monsters say about us? Do I use my love of zombies to keep the general populous at bay (just in case they want to feast upon my massive nogin?). Does my best friend's love of vampire romances mean that she secretly has a thing for bloodsucking immortals? Maybe. To each their own.

All I know is that in my mind, it was never really a monster under the bed. It was a real person, with untold desires to do heinous things to me if I had the gall to get out of bed before morning. The fear was not of Freddy, or Dracula but of real men with the capability of consience to really be heartless. Zombies aren't scary. They move slow, and they're stupid. Its the droves of mindless consumers who really scare me. Real people are fast and surprisingly clever when it comes to fulfilling their questionable cravings.

So excuse me if while you and I are standing in a crowd, I seem distracted. I'm just working out my escape route and looking for something I can use as a bludgeon, just in case.

G