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Eyes Forward and Watch for Monsters Posting Date: Feb 17 2008 12:35PM When I was a little kid, I would go to sleep with my back to the wall and my eyes on my bedroom door because that was the way monsters, thieves, murderers, aliens, centipedes, scorpions, werewolves, vampires, mummies, atomic bombs, cobras and sasquatches would enter my room. My ears would play tricks on me and I would hear the lumbering footsteps of the killer troll coming up from our basement, hunching his way through the kitchen and dining room, then turning left and heading to my door to disembowel me and poke my eyes out. The only way for me to ward him off was to stare with fierce dedication at the spot in the doorway where I expected his grotesque face to appear.
And it worked.
Not once was I disemboweled. I still have my eyes. My stare was a magic force field that protected me from harm. And since it clearly worked, I kept doing it. Every night. I stared until the monsters and murderers knew I meant business. Only then did I drift off to sleep.
As I grew older, I began to realize that perhaps my faith in the power of staring was misplaced. I figured out that swift and sudden attacks from evil meanies could come from any direction, so staring straight ahead might not be the best idea. In fact, I figured out that any willful and intelligent assault, the kind likely to come from a vampire, say, or Big Foot, would probably be designed to come from exactly the place I wasn’t looking. We veteran monster-fighters like to call this the “Sneak Attack.”
This was when I implemented a new policy. I called it the Head On A Swivel Policy. Since you don’t know from whence a werewolf will strike, best to keep your eyes moving. No staring. Stay alert and aware of your surroundings, in front, behind, beside, above and below. You can never be too safe. Werewolves are everywhere.
Oddly, it seems I am one of the few people around who live by the Policy. Instead, people seem to be much more like my six-year-old self, staring straight ahead, never blinking, never checking the blind spot. Apparently, they still believe that trouble will come at them straight-on and only straight-on.
You see it when you’re creeping through the parking lot of the drug store behind a Ford Crown Victoria or a Buick LeSabre with its left turn signal on. Invariably, there is a line of cars behind you, a bunch of pedestrians passing you on the right, and a small, very old man in a hat behind the wheel of the creeping vehicle. He is oblivious to everything but the monsters directly in front of him.
You’re driving down a residential street. Ahead of you, walking five abreast, are a bunch of kids with their parka hoods up and their backs to your forward progress as if adolescent knees can actually win in a battle with the business end of Kia Sedona. Apparently, the only dangers are directly ahead.
You’re in the grocery store, pushing your cart with its bag of organic baby carrots and a McCain freezer cake. The only thing left for you to get is toilet paper. You turn the corner and find the way completely blocked by a shopping cart holding six loaves of Wonderbread, a case of Coke, a family pack of Jell-o Jigglers and two small children. You would have room to squeeze by on the left, but the young mother in charge of the cart is comparison shopping one-dollar tins of tuna. You wait. She stares at the cans, unable to detect your presence. You jiggle your cart. She stares at the cans some more. You wave, but you are not directly in front of her, so you are invisible. To this point, you are the only one suffering from her lack of awareness.
But then, poetic justice happens.
As she continues to stare at her tuna, a sasquatch leaps over a pyramid of Oreo Cakesters and pulls her arms off. You turn around and decide to get to the toilet paper by going down the next aisle.
It pays to look around. |
