Never judge a book by its endpapers.

I've been pitched into a season of waiting. And missing out on little chances for things. Maybe it's all just the course of nature. A way of reminding you who your friends are and who they aren't. What you can and can't expect them to be. And how nice -- how awfully, awfully nice it is to be to able say what you mean without always, always worrying about what lurks between the lines.

When I watched Creepshow many years ago while babysitting, it was the last vignette with the thing in the box in the basement that scared the Christmas out of me. And when I went away to some weird nature day camp in the fourth grade, I was unable to play the guessing box game, because you had to stick your hand blindly into a big box and guess what was inside it. A dried out old tortoise shell. Shark teeth. Molted snakeskin. A monster. I couldn't bring myself to do it. There is nothing more frightening to me than the possibility that what I fear the most is exactly what I am about to discover.

I prefer to know the truth of things and face them head on. But even that isn't really true.