makes you hide under the covers and sleep with the lights on for a month, it sticks with you for a long, long time. We’re working on what, now? Thirty years? Thirty five? More?
It sticks. Trust me.
Ok, so maybe I am the only person, other than Laura Ingalls, who was terrified, freaked out and mentally assaulted at the thought of good-natured, sweet, gentile, patient, unassuming Mr. Olsen taking Mrs. Olsen’s head off with a sword and then answering the knock at the front door with an apron covered in blood.
Maybe I am.
It wouldn’t be the first thing, nor I regrettably admit, will it be the last, that freaked me out while having little or no effect on those around me.
No effect other than making them roll their eyes and mutter comments under their breath that they didn’t think I could hear.
I heard them.
All of them.
Well, most of them anyway.
Or I imagined them which, in my world, amounts to pretty much the same thing.
(For those who are unsure as to whom I speak, Laura was not a real person … well, she was, as she was an actress, but her character was just that … a character … made up by the ever talented, though now dead, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have read ALL of the Little House books, unashamedly, multiple times over and do not remember this particular scene in any of them. I could have blocked it out, though, because that is what I do with disturbing images that terrify me and make me wet the bed because I am too afraid to put my feet on the floor, opening them to whatever may be underneath it, to walk to the bathroom.)
It wasn’t a scary show, but then neither was The Waltons and the episode when Elizabeth (whom I disliked a great deal anyway) was becoming a teenager, made me feel the need for serious, long-term, ongoing therapy.
Knowing these things and, knowing as I do what a fraidy-cat, chicken-hearted, scare-baby (thanks Pollyanna, for scare-baby) I am, it is with horrified trepidation that I await the soon-to-be-received Netflix selection of True Blood that is even now on its way to my terrified-by-association mailbox.
The very thought of blood in my mouth makes my usually absent gag reflex perk up and sing the hallelujah chorus.
And still yet.
I can’t imagine what I was thinking.
Yes I can. Peer pressure. I succumbed to it. Pure and simple.
I was recently introduced, by a friend, at least she was disguised as a friend, to Joe Manganiello, aka Alcide. Well, not personally introduced for if I had met him in person, I would be bragging daily in that “I’m better than you can ever hope to be because I have met Alcide in person” tone.
I don’t know exactly how to brag efficiently because I don’t have much to brag about, but were I to meet that man in person, I would learn quickly.
Or at least fake it persuasively.
And I would become adept at lying, which is pretty much the same as faking it persuasively, but oh dear me … the stories I would tell.
But all of that hinges on the the possibility that I had been introduced to him in person, when in reality, I wasn’t.
I had not heard of him before. I don’t watch TV, watch the news, read the newspaper or otherwise partake in life as it happens outside my own definition of reality.
Sometimes I wonder why I don’t just strap a backpack filled with toast-chee crackers and hot mama sausages to my back and live my life in the mountains in a way that would closely resemble Grizzly Adams … or, more aptly, Mad Jack and Old Number Seven.
So anyway, after a brief diversion, I get back to the point; this video, filled with vampires, blood, gore, blood, violence, blood, sex, blood and a gruesomeness that I cannot even imagine … oh, and blood, in the mouth no less … is on its way to my home.
I was told that this Alcide character didn’t show up until the third season, but to have a single solitary clue what was happening, I had to watch it from the beginning. I have doubts, however, given my reaction after five minutes subjected to “The Living Dead”, which is not an HBO production, that I will make it through the first episode.
That statement is notwithstanding to the fact that the email from Netflix with the photo associated with the show nearly made we wretch.
I have striven to be tough, more immune to outside influences, harder of heart and body and more like a living, breathing human being.
I really have.
But I’m not sure I accomplished what I set out to accomplish.
I wanted to be popular.
Like my sister.
I wanted to be good at sports.
Like my sister.
I wanted to have the ability to watch horror movies in the eighties with MY boyfriend instead of running out of the theater crying inconsolably.
Like my sister.
Just ask her. It was a proud moment in her life. Actually proud moments because she went on nearly every date I ever had.
But that is neither here nor there. Actually it is or I wouldn’t have brought it up, but it shouldn’t be. I’ll just say it that way.
And she, the sister I wanted to be like, watched “The Exorcist” with her friends while I cowered in my room with a thin wall between me and the TV and belted out show-tunes to keep the sound of the movie from my ears. It was pathetic and likely still the topic of dinner table conversations of those who partook in that particular episode of my life.
And people wonder why I am warped.
I suppose, too, that they will be wondering why I am in the hospital on an overdose on stolen Xanax after only a few minutes of watching the pilot episode of True Blood.
Then they will remember this post and say “Oh … yeah … well, I’m not all that surprised” as they bite into their warm, six inch, flatbread, tuna with provolone, spinach, avocado, red onion, black olive sandwich with jalapeno on the side from Subway.
Then they will go on with their lives while I gulp down Thorazine and fight off night terrors.
Peer pressure.
Do as I say, not as I do and avoid it at all costs.
I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one on an ancient typewriter
Abby, howling with ecstasy or insanity … either one works
A Photographer's Heart 
