A Phobia is Born

Did you watch the 2-hour finale of CSI last night? Woof! I usually watch these things rather passively, since I've become a bit jaded with all the gore and graphic realism portrayed in these types of shows. Ho, hum. I watch with half an eye while paying bills or skimming through a magazine. Well, they sure pushed all my buttons last night. The character Nick was kidnapped and buried alive in a plexaglass coffin by a madman who blew himself up when they delivered the 1 million dollar ransom. WITHOUT first telling Grishom where his guy was buried. Throughout the episode they show Nick inside this plastic box, hardly able to move, all his agonies captured via a web cam feed. His predicament intensifies ten fold once the plastic box develops some cracks from the wieght of the earth on top, and dirt starts trickling in over his feet. More horrors as a colony of fire ants storm in, "eating him alive." They show macro closeups of the biting jaws tearing at pieces of his flesh. Nick does the only thing he can and stuffs pieces of cloth into his nostrils and chewing gum in his ears. Lips and eyes are shut tight in a terrible grimace. He's covered with ants everywhere, especially all over his head. It was truly awful. He gets saved in the end, of course, just as his air supply runs out. Drama, drama. Definitely a nail-biter. The thing that really made me shiver is that in real life, this poor sod was ACTUALLY CRAWLING with those creepy buggers. And he WAS confined in that tight, coffin-sized space, even if it was just a television program. I sure hope he got hazardous duty pay. You couldn't pay me enough to do what he did.

I'm not really scared of the ususal spiders or snakes or heights, within reason, but I do have a real-life phobia of being closed in small spaces. It all stems from a time back in high school when I went on a night time hayride with a bunch of other teens. That part was fun. Afterwards, there was a hay maze we had to crawl through. It was really tight quarters, and there we were in the dark, head to toe, crawling through twists and turns on our bellies. The kids in the front were too slow for some of the ones behind, who were getting scared in this narrow tunnel. Then the idiot in front of me pulled out his Bic lighter and LIT IT. Even now, writing it down, my breathing is rapid. I can see that image in my mind's eye, and feel the panic I felt then. People screamed and he put it out right away, but in that instant, the thought of that whole bank of hay bales catching fire with all of us inside being burned alive left me with a case of claustrophobia that has never gone away. The "what ifs" of that night haunt me even now, nearly four decades later.