Do you have completely irrational fears? Not like a fear of being trampled to death at a Miley Cyrus concert or a fear of the moon falling into the Earth, because while those are odd fears and highly unlikely to happen, they are plausible. I am talking about fears that defy logic and reality. I am about to share one of mine with you and it all started on a summer day in the year 1985 when my Uncle Nat introduced me to the movie, Jaws.

I can’t think of a single movie that had that much of an effect on me. Going to the beach every summer always had a shadow of a shark looming in my head and I was content to just make sand castles for my micro-machines, drink Ecto Cooler Hi-C and get grit in my mouth from eating Doritos with sandy fingers. But when I was told to go rinse off, that music, oh that music started in my mind and I was ever so quick to get in and get out while other kids played in the surf. No surf fun for me. I saw what happened to Alex Kintner. 

Since that fateful day in 1985 I have had this lurking unease that a giant great white shark could appear at most any body of water to include lakes, ponds, SWIMMING POOLS, jacuzzis, baths, really hard rains, full sinks and toilets. I even had a dream that there was a free-floating shark roaming around my house and I had to hide in the fridge to escape being eaten. Then Rue McClanahan showed up and things got weird but that’s for another post. I need to stay focused.

Even today as a rational, working and (maybe) intelligent adult, I still get an unease that somewhere there is a swimming devil that wouldn’t mind chewing me up. This plagues my soul and got me thinking. Have you ever read the Stephen King book, Mist? I might be mistaken but essentially the military accidentally opens up a…something, and all these horrid creatures come out and kill people in the worst ways imaginable. What if (stay with me here) a parallel universe crossed with ours and air-breathing great white sharks that can fly showed up and could hide and attack when least expected! I seriously have thought about this. And I think it would look very much like this: