Protecting my Family

Last night my wife asked me if I've been leaving the basement door unlocked. Yes I have.
We hang out there now. We've set up a sweet little youthful oasis in our basement, escape from the perpetuity of parenthood, where the music is always loud, the air is sweet and damp, sin is condensing and forming mold somewhere.

It's funny when I think about it. One of us will go downstairs for a little bit. The kids will be hanging with the other of us in the living-room or sun-room. The floor will begin to vibrate, and if you were an adult, you would recognize the faint tinny hum of heavy metal, of hip-hop, of 90's grunge, as if a car were passing. The speakers are huge. I love to feel the ground shake. Love to itch the inner-most reaches of my ears with noise just barely painful.

Last night my wife asked me if I've been leaving the basement door unlocked. Yes I have.
It makes it far more convenient to get to the basement after I've been reading outside.
Upon answering, I understand immediately how idiotic this is. We have invested headache-inducing amounts of time and money to get the house alarm installed, then to have the phone fixed, then to have the alarm fixed, then to have the phone fixed. It is silly to give all the roaming serial murderers a free way in, one which leads to a great stereo system that they would probably like to blast painfully (it wouldn't wake us) in order to get pumped up. I would recommend Eminem's new album. It would probably get them nicely in the mood if they needed it.

So I went downstairs, naked. The basement is creepy. I poked my head in, making sure the murderer was not already in the house. If he was just about to come in, I would see him open the door, and his jig would be up. But by now, he could have easily hid himself in the pillows on the couch, in the massive pile of crap we have to sort. There was a noise that probably was just the rats upstairs trying to eat each-other. The murderer was well hidden. I locked the basement door. If he was there he had no escape. Now he would have to kill us brutally just to leave. The alarm had effectively become an alarm that we were now safe. Why would a murderer want to trip an alarm just to leave everybody unharmed? He wouldn't. He would want to kill us, brutally of course.

I placed a bag of cat-food on the top step. If the murderer tried to walk up these steps in the dark, it would fall down the stairs and spill cat food. It would make enough noise for me to get up and find a chair to hit him with. Every time I think of something like this a fight scene will play in my head, starring me. I lose frequently. I wonder what this means. Just writing about it, and there goes that fight scene again.

I lay awake for a while last night, listening for the sound of cat food on stairs, somebody saying "What the hell!?"