Shots Across The Bow

Fear and a Kitchen Floor

I like reading horror novels and going to scary movies. Not the tacky slasher films and gore fests; they're not scary, just gross, not to mention misogynistic. One of my favorite scary movies was Magic, with Anthony Hopkins. Written by William Goldman (Princess Bride), it follows the Hopkins character's ascent to stardom and his descent into madness.

It's intense, scary, and fairly light on the gore.

Of course, I'm a big Stephen King fan as well, and although he really slacked off for awhile, the Dark Tower series stayed strong to the end.

But the scariest thing I've ever read was not from a horror story. It was in a Tarzan book. Tarzan was in the water fighting a crocodile and lost. The croc took him in the death roll and Tarzan passed out from lack of oxygen.

When he came to, he was in the croc's lair. It was pitch black, the air was fetid, the space was too small to move around much, water was seeping from the muddy roof, and Tarzan could hear the croc breathing.

Picture that in your mind for a moment. You wake up in a small, muddy hole underwater. There's no light; you can't see anything. The air is bad, not much oxygen and smells like rot, decay, and croc farts. You don't know the way out; you don't know how far you'll have to swim or in what direction to get to fresh air. You can barely move because the hole is just barely big enough for you to fit.

And we haven't even mentioned the dad gum crocodile yet!

I don't remember how Tarzan escaped, but I still have nightmares about waking up in that croc hole.

Now, I know what you're thinking; "What does all this have to do with a kitchen floor?"

Well,I'll tell you.

He's going to tell he's going to tell He's going to tell he's going to tell He's going to tell he's going to tell

The management would like to apologize for this spontaneous Monty Python flashback and assure you all that we are taking all steps necessary to insure that it will never, ever, ever happen again.

Probably.

I just started a home improvement project; I'm replacing my kitchen floor. The linoleum the previous owner put in was a noxious brown color, and to make matters worse, it was coming up in places. So I decided to replace it with something a little more modern and a little less drab.

Simple enough, right?

Well, if it was, I wouldn't be writing this little piece, now would I?

When I started to pull up the linoleum, I discovered that the previous owner had actually chosen that awful stuff, because underneath it was a layer of luan, and underneath that was another layer of linoleum.

And this is where it gets scary.

The first layer was bad enough, but after I started ripping up the luan, what I saw was so disgusting, so vile, that I don't think I'll be troubled by the croc hole any longer. Not only was the linoleum straight out of a Lileks book, but it was covered in a nasty, slimy, black mold. To think that stuff was hiding under my floor in the room where I made all our meals is just too nasty to contemplate.

But at least it will be gone soon. I'm taking the flooring out all the way down to the sub-floor.

Posted by Rich at January 16, 2006 2:40 AM | TrackBack