Blessed by the Potato

My officemate went out for lunch and had Lamprey. I remarked something along the lines of “ugh, it’s a parasite!” “No, it’s fish!” Well, a parasitic fish!” which lead to looking it up to find out what it does eat.

I had to recoil at the picture of that gaping toothy maw in the picture. “That thing gives me the creeping horrors.”

The creeping horrors, I explained, is a complex and terrible feeling. Not just that it frightens me, but that I am quietly disturbed somewhere deep in the foundations of my self that such a creature exists in the real world, and is not merely the product of a sick mind in a horror movie. Indeed, that such a terrifying visage is so mundane that my friend just had one for lunch. It’s a slow, insidious feeling of subtle horror that gradually eats away at a person from within, at first a mere tingling of disquiet in the back of the head that the universe may not be such a friendly place after all, and ending with all rational thought submerged beneath quivering black jelly of pure evil.