What lies beneath.

Some might say that over the years I have managed to rack up a few neuroses and fears; and, while some are more prominent than others, they all seem to blend together in the symphony that is my personality.

At the forefront of this is my fear of the dark and the monsters therein.

I mention this because for the next week or so, I am staying with my younger brother at my folks’ place; and, it is really hard to be the brave disciplinarian in a house that (for the past 20 years) I have truly believed to be haunted.

To be fair, I do have a VERY active imagination, and any evidence of a haunting has been dishearteningly nonexistent. However, just because there is technically no proof of any supernatural activity, it doesn’t mean that maybe, possibly, sometime in the future, there couldn’t be one; and, in the case that a haunting should occur, I want to make sure that I am awake and ready to run away.

Because I have had troubles falling asleep in the past, as an adult, I have taken several proactive steps to thwart my imagination from creating a monster/vampire under my bed. Specifically, even if I have a very happy and carefree day, I have to know that these fears could still manifest themselves in my mind right before I turn off the lights, so, in an effort to maintain happy thoughts, I have taken to watching the WB’s comedy programming before going to sleep each night.

I figure this way, rather than thinking of the Alien/Predator behind the full-length mirror, I can envision myself as the seventh Friend, or the plucky next-door neighbor on Everybody Loves Raymond.

Luckily, this plan normally works like clockwork. Recently however, things are not going as planned and the WB has been airing commercials between comedy sitcoms for this terrifying horror film about a girl who gets possessed by the Devil and some promos for a show that prominently features scary ghosts and mean spirits.

Being a person of habit, simply changing the channel is not an option here. So I am forced to either turn off the TV for practically every commercial break, or, (if I accidentally see even a moment of one of these scary commercials), I have to keep watching shows until I calm down and forget about what I saw during the previous commercial break while at the same time avoiding the scary images in the following breaks.

This, I realize, is not normal.