The Redhead is going out of town tonight, Internet. I’m going to be home all alone. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s walking around naked time. I’m probably going to get a little paranoid and lonely. I don’t care for being alone. No sir, I don’t like it.

I never do well with being alone. Sure, during the day it’s acceptable, sometimes even preferred, which is what makes my relatively bipolar stance to solitude at night even more crippling. During the day I find it wonderful, getting to engage in any number of activities without interruption, from recording to writing to rescuing the Princess Zelda.

Night time is a different story. I don’t like being alone at night. There’s no revealing childhood trauma (or drama) that caused this, it’s just a simple fact: I don’t like being all alone overnight, and when I am I tend to experience the entire Lord of The Flies insanity arc in one evening.

This is definitely a new thing, something that developed after I moved out on my own. Throughout high school I would spend my summers in Lake Geneva, often alone at the cottage for weeks at a time while the rest of the family was back in Chicago. I was never worried then. In fact, I was excited. I got to live like a completely independent adult, making my own meals and using my fake ID to buy Icehouse. Lake Geneva has always been a haven, a safe refuge where I feel invincible.

It was when I moved away, far away, that it began. Maybe 9/11 was a part of it. A week after the attacks I had moved to Los Angeles, a city with Helicopters CONSTANTLY in the air. Many of those first nights I would wake up in a panic as a chopper buzzed our apartment on a dead ahead course to downtown LA. Maybe it simply had to do with the concept of living in a far a way city where everyone’s a stranger. I could get completely lost 4 blocks from home. My only knowledge of LA was from movies featuring gang shootings, break ins, and “gimps” locked up in basements. Yeah, Los Angeles feels totally inviting. Regardless, the paranoia of being alone at night is here now. I went from living with a roommate for 4 years to living (in sin!) with the Redhead before we were married. I have never actually lived on my own, save for those stray weeks in Lake Geneva or when my roommate would go home for a month in the summer. Even then the Redhead would usually stay over (in sin!).

(It was all her evil influence. I was studying to become a monk before she came along.)

During one of those summers when the roommate was gone, our apartment was broken into. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had ran to the bank and liquor store before the Sox game began. Gone less than an hour, I was shocked to come home and find the front door to the apartment crowbarred open and all of my drawers dumped on the floor. What did they take? A fake Rolex (it was a “Rollex”) bought in Nogales and a laptop that hadn’t worked in 2 years. Still, the paranoia got stronger that day, and that evening I couldn’t decide if sleeping with my bedroom door open so I could see the front door or pushing my dresser in front of my bedroom door was the better move. I already had my James Bond replica BB gun under my pillow. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, but in the dark it could pass as real, especially if simply shoved into someone’s back. I was also pretty drunk, the ultimate vicious circle in my being alone.

I’ll usually drink during a night I’m alone, because it always starts out as a great idea. I figure I’ll get a steak, no vegetables, a bottle of wine, and make myself a big manly meal to enjoy my temporary bachelorhood. Maybe there will be a Sox or Bulls game on, but if not, I’m happy with watching some grandiose action/adventure movie, like Braveheart or Lawrence of Arabia. Maybe a sprawling Western. Unfortunately, I also develop a “now’s my chance!” type of attitude about being along for a night, and I’ll end up watching half a game, half a movie, playing Mario, going to the roof for 10 minutes, and drinking profusely. I’ll start to think that because I have the night to myself I can do “anything,” making me want to do “everything,” but eventually leaving me with having done “nothing,” at least to completion. Except for getting drunk.

Now I’m drunk, and it’s time to go to bed. Sometimes a fun combination, but not in this case. Now I am left with a stimulated imagination, hypersensitive ears, and the memories or every scary movie I’ve ever seen, particularly Communion, Fire in the Sky, and the Exorcist. Abduction/Possession: that’s what gets me. Air conditioning pulling doors shut or a creak in the ceiling from my upstairs neighbor will cause me to shoot upright in bed in an instant, half-expecting an alien or demon to be standing above me. Monsters under the bed are easily avoided by jumping from the bed to the doorframe, but aliens and demons have advanced skills and abilities that could paralyze me and leave me vulnerable to their evil intentions.

(“Good morning, Tucker! Ready for another probing?”)

The night of the break-in I heard what sounded to me like jiggling at my front door. Frightened, drunk, but also angry at the absurdity of being a grown man and scared of monsters, I clutched my Walther P99 replica BB gun and went to listen at my bedroom door. It was most definitely the sound of someone trying to work a door handle. Mustering my courage, I decided to blast through my bedroom door and cause a loud noise, thus alerting the intruder to the danger waiting for him inside my apartment. I made my move. I smashed the bedroom door open, gun at the ready, only to come face to face with a pitch black empty room. I couldn’t see 2 feet in front of my face, so when a bookshelf with 3 plants in vases that rests on the wall adjacent to the bedroom door gave way, it was rather unexpected. My courageous entrance to the living room was immediately met by the loud, loud, sound of 3 vases shattering at my feet and a shelf falling to the floor behind me. I had knocked them over with the bedroom door. There I was, standing naked in a pitch black room with a BB gun in my hand and glass everywhere around my feet. I heard the jiggling of a door handle cease, as what I now recognized as my neighbor’s front door opened and shut across the hall.

Okay, so obviously there is the danger of break ins, kidnappings, and murder in Los Angeles. It’s not Candyland despite the outfits and attitudes of most of the citizens, but winding myself up to expect the worst just because I can’t have my baby next to me for one night is going too far. I can handle this. Sure, it’s a rare thing for Red and me to be separated for more than 2 days, on account of our undying love, but it’s something I have to get used to. I gotta man up.

Still, I’ll be alone tonight and I’m not looking forward to it. Maybe instead of drinking, I’ll get stoned. Nobody gets paranoid on that stuff, right?

End of line.