Don't Be Afraid of the ... Light!

Scared of the dark nuthin'!

It's regression therapy in this week's Camino a Ítaca. An age-old fear has returned as our pockets are being openly picked. Click over to read the original article in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

As a young boy on the vast stretches of the northern Canadian prairies, I remember being afraid of the dark. As my mother tucked me into bed at night, I would insist on having a nightlight reassuringly glowing somewhere in the room to keep the howling coyotes at bay, both real and imagined. If I felt my mother was feeling particularly generous, I would even ask her to leave a light on in the hallway. These were during the long winter nights of northern Canada when the sun sunk below the horizon from its lazy arc around four o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t return again until I had already been in school for an hour or two the next day. It’s a fear that eventually disappeared as I grew older but has recently come back to haunt me.

Age regression occurs when someone reverts to a younger state of mind. This retreat may be only a few years younger than the person’s physical age but in my case it seems to jumped several decades, and in the process seems to have become warped and somewhat inverse.

My fear is no longer turning the lights off, it’s turning them on.

I now question almost every mundane household task and chore. It might be when I’m about to turn on the kettle to boil some water, throw some clothes into the wash or try and figure out exactly is the best time to turn on the dishwasher so that my family has enough plates for dinner. It’s an ongoing neurosis that has become like a tense taxi ride in a foreign country where you are trying not to be too conspicuous as you watch the meter tick out of the corner of your eye, hoping it hasn’t been rigged.

At first I tried to adapt to the puente, valle andllano system, surely to the dismay of my neighbors as the spin cycle accompanied them in their dreams. But now, the ongoing energy crisis has even seen this system become obsolete with increasing violent fluctuations that no longer always coincide with the traffic light system that had been introduced with so much fanfare. Thus forcing the consumer to have to consult the webpage of the Red Eléctrica Española every day if they want to know exactly when the electricity that powers their lives will be cheapest.

Imagine that you walk into a bar at midday and have a caña (little beer). Satisfied with the service and the tapa of Spanish omlette you receive, you return the next day to that very same bar and order the same thing. When you finish, you lay your money out on the bar only to have the barman tell you that the price has doubled. In your astonishment you remind him that you had been there yesterday and paid half and he tells you, "That was yesterday, today is today." You then reach for the menu and see that the price listed doesn’t even coincide with what you had paid the day before and again ask the barman and he tells you, "That was the price when they printed the menu." 

That was then, this is now.