scary…in a good way

The Grudge. It’s that movie. You know the one. Sarah Michelle Gellar gets scared in Japan.

Those Japanese directors really get it. They know there’s one thing scarier than the run and get killed, my pretty that we have in the west.

Kids.

Kids are scary as hell. That Ring movie – stupid. Still, I couldn’t look at television static-snow for a year without getting a tick and feeling faint. Same thing with the Grudge. I don’t even remember what the story was about. All I remember is that little boy and how I had to watch the rest of the movie through a thick-bottomed tumbler of scotch because it made things just blurry enough to keep the edge off.

Subconsciously, people are afraid of kids. I’m convinced. That’s why all those Japanese films work so well. It’s why Linda Blair was 13 instead of 35.

Kids have always freaked me out.

Lately, it’s a different kind of freaky.

Like this.

Gabby. She’s four and from Virginia. She speaks with an almost-English accent and has been known to discuss Condoleeza Rice and whether her transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State was a good one. At a recent birthday party she requested an armadillo, please from the balloon clown. She once told her mother “You’re going to have to do something about the giant baby; the child is getting out of control.” (Giant Baby was younger sister who occasionally dumped spaghetti on her head and dive bombed, head first, from atop how’d-she-get-up-there- high pieces of furniture.)

Gabby scares me. Partly because you just know a kid who talks like that and makes sense can scan your brain with her eyeballs. Mostly….she scares me…..because I kinda think I want one like her. I’ve got the brood. (See: Disposed to sit on eggs to hatch them.)

Oh Lordy. Pass the scotch.