it turns out my mother was right about TV

this comes as a surprise to me as, even at the age of 21, i still cling to the childish delusion that she is not cool enough to be right about anything.

but she was right about too much TV fucking a child up.

my brother and i started watching the x-files behind my mother's back when i was ten. i think it started as a kind of chicken game to see who would get freaked out enough to cover their eyes first. . . it was always me. . . i spook too easily.

one way or another though, i got addicted, and abandoned captain planet and the smoggies for the x-files as my one hour of TV per week. . . i think of it as a kind of 'coming of age' in my life.

yet while i remember idolizing agent scully, and lusting after agent mulder (which may or may not have been the beginning of my being drawn to tall, dark, complex, older men) i remembered little to nothing about the actual story lines.

I've recently started watching all of the old episodes online during my study breaks, and all of my inexplicable fears have been suddenly explained.

for example. . .

my irrational nervousness about using the bathroom (eat your heart out Freud) can be traced to a number of x-files episodes, like, the giant half fluke worm half man monster that lives in the jersey sewer system and at one point escapes capture and crawls into a porta-potty to hide. or the episode where an ancient sea monster is washed up in a storm and lives in the pluming of a survivor shelter. or the poltergeist behind the shower curtain in another episode. . .

my embarrassing fear if Dumpsters is more than likely due to the episode where the wild women jumps out of a dumpter to attack a homeless man, or a much later episode where the garbage monster of suburbia kills people in the night for falling out of line.

cornfields, especially at night have always freaked me out, and while i can't pinpoint this to any one episode, scenes taking place near or in cornfields never end happily

power outages, while i don't believe in alien abduction because i think it's dumb that aliens would travel all that way to put on a light show and stick things up our bums and noses, whenever the power goes out or the radio does something funky i always get these images in my head of brightly lit rooms and surgical implants.

the really sad part about all of this, is that it all still freaks the hell out of me even now that i know where i got it from, and that perhaps in spit of myself i am still hell bent on watching all these episodes that give me nightmares. . . this time without covering my eyes, or my brother nearby to use as a decoy in case of monster attack.

PS: i am not sure if whether to credit my parents or the x-files with the icy terror in my heart right now over certain little fascists in black suits who want to privatize everything. . . actually i am pretty sure that's just common sense.