I do not fear failure, nor do I fear mediocrity. I do not fear premature death or what will remain of me when I’m tossed into the metaphysical question mark of the afterlife. I do, however, fear serial killers standing outside my front door, ready to break in at any given moment of my peaceful slumber.
A week ago I was walking over to a friend’s house on Lane Avenue around midnight. Being a generally ill at ease person, I decided to bring my CD player with me so I had something to sing along to while I walked through the dark streets and alleys of off-campus Columbus.
Whilst sauntering and singing along shakily to Kathleen Edwards, I looked cagily around me – watching the streetlights, taking up surveillance of dark corners, cars and trash cans.
In the dead of the Monday night silence, I suddenly heard a cowbell or what one could only conceive was the sound of empty metal being struck. It could have easily been a cowbell or even a falling pot hitting the ground.
However, before I even considered any of these options, my first thought was – and I’d like to emphasize the primacy of this thought over other possibilities, “Oh. It’s the Cowbell Killer.”
Before I thought “What was that?” or even “Huh. That was strange.” The first idea that came to mind was a man walking around Lane Avenue circa 12:11 a.m. banging a cowbell every now and then just to warn his victims that he was around and that yes, he was coming.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that plagues my evenings and disturbs my attempts to sleep in peace every night of the week.
I have no idea when this kind of paranoia completely overtook my brain, but I’ve never been known for being a particularly levelheaded person. I’m the oversensitive friend of yours who always asks, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I’m the suspicious stranger who wonders if the reason you took the last napkin from the dispenser is because you purposefully didn’t want me, Steve Lynch, to have it.
It wasn’t until I moved off-campus that my paranoia began to include knives and chainsaws. In the first few weeks of living in my off-campus house I lied awake for hours, with windows wide open, wondering what that dull thump was, where the screeching came from, and what the shadow by the garage was.
By October my brain had begun modulating this sensory data into more terrifying pictures. When my roommate closed his window late one evening, I was convinced that a robber had entered our house.
He opened our ground floor window, crawled in, was stealing our GameCube ( “I haven’t even beat ‘The Legend of Zelda’ yet, the charlatan!” I thought to myself), and was preparing to come up the stairs to kill me.
It seems the best plan I could muster to combat the intruder was to put up an away message that said, “I think there’s someone in my house that doesn’t live here.”
Forget waking my roommates up or even possibly investigating the situation. My passive alert to the online community was all I needed to fight the good fight.
Situations like those previously stated occur frequently. If I lie in bed and hear a scratching outside, I assume it’s a gigantic cat alerting me to his presence before he pounces down the door and bounds up the stairs to my room.
A thump on the roof means an assassin ninja has jumped from the apartment building next door onto our roof; it’s only a matter of time before he swings through my bedroom window.
The sound of bottle breaking in the alley is an enraged murderer preparing his jagged tool of destruction meant for my termination. In the convoluted folds of my brain, any sound has a sinister beginning and I am destined for every bad end.
No matter how distraught, upset, or exhausted I am, my vigilance to capture any change in the aural landscape never wavers. I will immediately fumble for my glasses, stare wide-eyed out my bedroom window, and peel back the blinds for minutes on end if I sense any impending danger.
You better believe that I have a detailed, multifarious plan of action for any possible siege into my house or bedroom. These plots to snuff me out will never be culminated, believe you me.
I suppose that the lessons I learned over the past few months about off-campus survival don’t only involve fiscal responsibility and self-sufficiency.
Rather, keen observation and alert listening skills used to detect the subtly evil forces in the lurking nightscape will get you much farther than paying your electric bill on time ever will.
Stephen Lynch is a senior in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected], or by scratching softly on his bedroom window.
