Let me take you back in time.

When I was little I was terrified of bathrooms. Or to be more accurate, of toilets flushing. First there was that dark passage into faraway and mysterious sewers. Then on top of that there was the flushing sound, which drowned out every other noise. These two things together meant that any horrible monster could rise up out of the toilet to get me.

So what I did to prevent this happening, see, was 1. put the lid down and B. lay invisible bricks on top of it.

Then I was able to flush. But still with terror. Absolute, sheer, utter terror.

In public restrooms it was tougher. At school I wouldn't even flush if I was in there alone (the whole room, I mean). I remember doing this (or not doing it) in 2nd grade, when my classroom was down this hallway on its own, for some reason. So I could kind of do it with impunity. I remember that being a vast relief.

The bathroom that was the very worst was the restroom in Penney's at the Seneca Mall. It was right near the elevators, and the machinery would turn on and be just deafening and I must've jumped high into the air like a skittish little hedgehog.

I mean, I would run like you run from things in your dreams (when you can run in your dreams), your heart basically 3 feet in front of you, that quick scooting run where you're making tiny little movements, conserving motion, to just get some distance away as fast as you can, like even just around the corner.

At some point I became convinced that there was a monster living under my bed, of course. You had one too. But my monster had a laboratory and a lab coat. He was, of course, covered in brown fur. Under the lab coat.

This came from my seeing one commercial for something where this woman in a very '70s luxury apartment was frantically trying to close her sliding glass door against a furry hand.

He also had a henchman: a seaweed monster-man whom I'd seen, again in a commercial, walking up out of the ocean. This was the monster I was trying to keep from getting me via the toilet. The seaweed monster was also somehow my neighbor Mike Talboys. His purpose: to bring me back to his master, who wanted to marry me. (Seaweed monster always secretly wanted me for his own, too.)

And if the lab monster could not marry me, he would kill me.

Remember, I was like 7.

Sweet dreams! XO