My Point...And I Do Have One

have seen doors and windows open and close and furniture move around the room. Sometimes I think, “Cool, I’d love to see that.” But, most of the times, I wouldn’t. I’d get kind of freaked out ifa coffee table started dancing around, even if it was a goofy dance like the hokey-pokey.
    The house I live in now might have a ghost. I think I’ve seen the guy. When I first moved into this house, strange things happened. I’d lock a door and a few minutes later I’d see that it was unlocked. A sliding door opened. It could’ve been the wind, you say. Well then, my skeptical friend, explain why there was a man standing in the middle of my bedroom dressed in some turn-of-the-century attire. Actually, it turns out that the man was my neighbor who got lost coming home from a costume party at Ernest Borgnine’s house. But it could have been a ghost.
    I’m also afraid of space aliens and spaceships. I’m scared that I’ll be abducted by some UFO and then poked and prodded, which, from what I read, is what space aliens mostly do. Or what if they put some sort of chip in your brain that made you kill at their command or, even worse, made your favorite radio station the easy-listening one? What would be frightening, then, would be to come back and know that if you told anyone what happened to you, they’d think you were a nut. The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren’t any space aliens. We can’t be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we’re not all there is. If so, we’re in big trouble.
    Let’s see, what else frightens me. Oh, I know. The scariest thing in the world almost happened to me the other day. Just thinking about it makes me break into a sweat (or maybe it’s the hour and a half that I just spent on my treadmill that has caused me to break into a sweat; the important thing is that I’m sweating). Let me tell you about it. But first, a warning: If you are faint of heart, it would be a good idea to have a registered nurse nearby while you read this tale of near-terror. On the other hand, if you are a registered nurse, there’s no need to have afaint-of-heart person with you. All they’d do is fidget around a lot and make you nervous.
    I was at home, I was barefoot, I was about to put my shoes on … (Have I set the mood, is your heart beating fast?) Like a fool, I was just going to slip my foot into my shoe without looking. Luckily, at the last second I glanced down. In my shoe was … a huge spider—a big black-and-orange, hairy, crunchy spider. I almost put my foot right on it. Isn’t that scary? Isn’t that like something Stephen King would write? Stepping on a spider has to be the scariest thing in the world.
    Actually, do you know what would be scarier? If, after putting on the one shoe I then recklessly put my foot in the other only to discover that it was teeming with … 
hundreds
of spiders! All the babies were in there, a whole—let’s see, it’s a gaggle of geese, a school of fish, what is a group of spiders called? Oh, now I remember: a whole
snorkel
of spiders. That would be the scariest thing ever.
    Unless, let’s say you’re out camping in the woods, or not even camping, or even in the woods; you’re sleeping in your backyard. I don’t know why. Maybe you like the great outdoors, but you want to be close to home in case somebody calls. Or maybe you had a fight with the person you live with, and you ended up yelling, “Okay, that does it. I’m sleeping in the backyard tonight!” It’s only when you get back there that you realize it wasn’t much of a threat. But you have too much pride to go and sleep inside (even though your dogs look at you from inside through the picture window with an expression that’s a mixture of pity and confusion).
    So (and this is the scary part), you’re in the backyard and you’re just about to doze off when you start feeling something kind of funny—not ha ha funny, but creepy, weird funny. So you look inside your sleeping bag and there’s … a snake crawling up your leg. Aghhhhhhh!
    That just blows the spider thing away. It is not possible for there to be anything scarier than that.
    Wait, I just thought of something more frightening. What if you’re playing Frisbee on the beach and the person you’re playing with (either a friend or someone kind of attractive who just happens to have a Frisbee, and you’re flattered when they ask you to play with them—this part isn’t