But if it's just the same to you, I can live without the accompanying light show that has been a part of this week's storms. The lightning, the thunder, the wind, you can keep it all.

I think we're all entitled to an irrational fear or two, and thunderstorms are one of mine. I have friends who, when a thunderstorm is rolling through, will sit on their front porch and watch it. I would consider these friends saner if their hobby was jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

They say things to me such as, "Why are you afraid of thunder? Thunder won't hurt you."

I know thunder won't hurt me, but lightning might. Lightning is sneaky.

"The safest place to be during a lightning storm is your car," they say. The theory here, I suppose, is that the rubber tires on the car will ground the lightning and keep it from getting to you.

As a result of this theory, I've decided to never leave my house during thunderstorm season without carrying along a tire.

Some people say they love sleeping during storms. Not me. I can hear an approaching storm as far away as Birmingham, and I'm wide awake. I especially dislike lightning at night when I'm trying to sleep because of the strobe effect it creates in my darkened bedroom.

I usually turn on a lamp to get away from the constant flashes of light. Plus, as a fan of murder mysteries, I know that killers often strike during thunderstorms. I suspect they think that the sound of the thunder will muffle the noise they make prying open your front door and that the rain will wash away any evidence they were there. The lamp helps me see them coming.

Worse, thunder and lightning are just a short step away from hail. Hail is just a short step away from tornadoes. And tornadoes will take a house and reduce it to a bunch of kindling in a matter of seconds. Imagine what it can do to the car you're hiding in to get away from the lightning.

I've already been chased to the basement of the newspaper building once this year, in March when tornado warnings were issued in Gainesville, and that's enough to last me a good long while.

As a child, I was curious about the weather, and my mother has always suggested that I was afraid of bad weather because I knew so much about what caused it. You know, all that mumbo-jumbo about cold air masses meeting up with hot air masses, the kind of stuff your science teachers talked about that put you to sleep in school.

I always liked this explanation because it made me seem like such a bright, intelligent child. A more accurate explanation, though, may be that I don't like flying monkeys.

You've all seen "The Wizard of Oz." The tornado in that movie didn't reduce Dorothy's house to a bunch of kindling. It picked it up and threw it to a whole other land.

In Oz, I might have gotten used to the Munchkins and their funny voices. And I might have gotten used to the Wicked Witch of the West and the way she comes and goes in a cloud of smoke.

But, I'll be honest, her flying monkeys scared the bejesus out of me as a child, and I ain't really crazy about watching them today. Yet that's what I think of when a thunderstorm approaches.

So I have this irrational fear. What can I do about it? Years ago, after telling a preacher friend about my fear, he began to talk about Noah and the great flood. And he suggested that maybe there's a spiritual reason behind thunderstorms.

It might just be, he said, the Big Guy's way of reminding us he's still in charge.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays in The Times. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com. Originally published July 13, 2008.