Now That's Scary!

Halloween is coming up in a couple of days. What scares you?

My friend Sherry told me once that what scared her more than anything was Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People, specifically the ghostly carriage taking away the dead. I told her that Walt Disney had scared the crap out of me a few years earlier, when I saw The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow on the old Disneyland television program in the 1950s. That Headless Horseman…brrrrrrr….I couldn't sleep for weeks.

Anyway, those things are behind us now. It's hard to get scared by a movie when there's stuff on TV that's more scary, like news reports from Iraq. No, really, as a prior blog of mine stated, the gore level has gone up considerably on the home box, so it's competing with movies for big scares and total gross-outs.

What's scary to me now are simple things, like getting haircuts. This morning I was in the chair, having my head worked over by a young Asian woman. An hour earlier I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror with a pair of tweezers, pulling hairs out of my ears. Still, she ran her buzzers down my ears, because she'd seen more that I'd missed because of failing eyesight. That scares me: beautiful young women seeing how old I look. I'm just glad she didn't have to buzz my nose, because I pulled a white hair out of the bulb of my nose earlier, and you talk about gross-outs. Yow.

What also scares me is the talk of long waits in the Social Security office, because I'll be there in a few short years. Horrors of horrors: colonoscopies, cholesterol tests, diabetes screening; my feet starting to break down, my knees getting sore and weak, my back…shall I go on? I think not.

Anyway, keep your Halloween witches, ghosts, goblins and ghouls. Scare small children with them. The real scares are yet to come, kiddies.

Bobbing for apples with dentures. That's scary.