The Lava Lamp disturbs me. They always have. They speak to something primal inside me that I don't like. So perhaps it's not really the lamp that disturbs me but rather my own feelings that are so base and ugly that I keep them buried deep; hidden from even myself.

          But the lamp itself acts like a word-association exercise. I glance at it and am instantly uncomfortable. I can feel a loathing rising to the surface that is inexplicable in the simplicity of the lamp itself. The strangest part to me is the delight that they give other people. It's hard to believe that I alone dislike the lamps but that really seems to be the case. Others are willing to plunk down upwards of $100 (or maybe more, I don't know) for a "specialty" lava lamp. My daughter and son-in-law were delighted when they finally found and could afford the exact one they had wanted. Even then I couldn't understand their elation over the purchase.

          At Christmastime my sister announced that she had found the perfect gift for her grandson and in just the right colors: a Lava Lamp. She inquired if my own sons liked them and I told her truthfully that they did. I did not anticipate her gift of one for them but there it was, wrapped and topped with a giant bow. The boys were overjoyed and researched a bit to discover that the yellow "lava" in their lamp is some kind of wax. The liquid is purple. Although my sister informed them it makes a great night light, they put it in the living room where they could enjoy it more. Where I see it more.

          I wish I knew why they bother me so much; I don't understand it. The first time I saw one I was fascinated by it's existence but repulsed at the same time. The "lava" glows with the light that heats it, pulsates, swells, elongates and slowly stretches upward, writhing. As it cools sufficiently at the top of the lamp to gain density and sink to the bottom it produces globs that slide viscously pass the upward moving fingers, entwining, frictionless, shaping themselves to the presence of the others. Up and down they move and at both the zenith and the base of their journeys they slide into one another, becoming one, congealing, to begin the process once more.

          Often the upward moving column will stretch away from the not-yet-hot-enough main mass and break , sometimes forming a small "marble" of lava that has a life of its own until it, too, joins the main mass. When the shapes stretching downward break loose, they form "eggs" of lava rather than round balls. All of those shapes make me feel slightly nauseous, assaulting my sensibilities, congealing my gut to something palpably gelatinous. It makes me feel queasy. The color of my son's lamp is even worse. The wax stretching upward turns from dead-yellow to glowing red as it bloats and distends toward the top.

          Even knowing this much, I wasn't prepared for the other manifestations the lamp goes through. Now on our mantle, I see it each morning when my son turns it on and I'm usually there when it first starts to warm up even if my son is not. It's even worse then. When the wax is cold it stretches upward in non-smooth shapes that look like torn ligaments. It blobs inconsistently at the top like a brain with a stem stretching down. It slowly morphs into masses that look like tissue. Aborted tissue. I've looked carefully at only one human placenta. The mass in the lamp duplicates its appearance. But even worse, every time I glance and find the tissue mass at the top I think of the baby goat. The one that was mummified at birth.

          My daughter's doe had triplets but one was dead. Rather than assimilating the mass as the body normally does, the doe's body absorbed the moisture and left the rest of the tissue. A perfectly formed little goat that we had to help deliver since it was a solid mass. My children were involved in a dairy goat 4-H project at the time and the birth of the mummy was so unusual that we researched it and my daughter produced an award-winning display on pregnancy/birth anomalies. It featured the baby goat forever embalmed in formaldehyde in a large pickle jar. You can carefully inspect it's little hooves and it's bone structure covered over with stretched, moisture-free ligaments, muscle and skin. Unlike ice-mummies, this baby came with the fragments of tissue left from the birth process. Pieces that should have sustained and nurtured the fully developed baby. Tissues duplicated in appearance by the lava lamp.

          Two days ago I found yet another phenomenon in the shapes it forms. Air bubbles were caught in the wax creating dark spots in the hotter, red blobs and thinning the wax to translucent skin or translucent bone and giving them shapes inconsistent with what is normal. The globules so affected were lighter weight and had a tendency to "hover". They looked like little skulls and disembodied "ET" heads. They were unnerving and I turned the lamp off.

          But if I had told you that the lava lamp either makes me feel sick to my stomach or makes my stomach knot up in a hard ball, you wouldn't have understood. If I told you it reminds me of dead babies or mummies you wouldn't have understood that, either. Our associations are ours alone which is why beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And why ugly is personal. And why I hate Lava Lamps.