It is a hot and muggy day today. I am grabbing a couple of minutes here to write because the radar indicates I will never make it home before the storm rolls in. The calculus is this, the the storm is 10 miles away moving at 40 mph hour. My home is a 35 minute uphill walk from here through totally residential neighborhoods. Odds are good that if I don’t accept the ride I have been offered I will get soaked. No options exist for shelter on that 35 minute walk except one lone covered bus-stop.
Mind you I don’t’ mind getting wet. I am also not afraid of getting drenched. I have plastic bags to shield all the electronic and valuable paper stuff in my purse from the elements. What I am afraid of is the potential of getting fried by the one billion joules of energy containing in a single lightening strike which is desperately and urgently trying to find its way to ground.
Dying, lightening, flying, being rejected and being alone…all qualify as top ten fears. Having kidney cancer, hell that wasn’t even on the radar. Okay, my guess is that we all can agree to a fear of death being in most people’s top ten dreads. Even the most fervent of believers (in whatever or whoever) have to have some iota of doubt. The fear of death is borne of uncertainty and/or the potential for meaninglessness. There can also be a bit of fear of pain wrapped into the consternation we humans have regarding death, either pre or post the onset of the body’s failure. Most people can intellectually accept my fear of death.
The fear of lightening, well only a select group of us will hold onto that fear. Even my own grandmother gave me grief about my mostly irrational fear of lightening. (Admittedly I have had this fear since a young age). My grandmother would hold up her arm and it had a thin brown strip of a scar its entire length. That was what she claimed was left from when lightening struck her as she was out in the garden as a much younger woman. She used this visual aid to basically make the argument that your time comes when it comes and lightening isn’t the thing that you should tremble at.
I was good on flying up until my good friend Darvon drove me to the airport at the end of my freshman year at MSU. On the ride there we smoked a joint the size of Delaware. I felt “just fine” until the plane was taxiing to the runway. Then encased in that aluminum cigar tube, I realized I was headed into the sky and that if something went wrong there was basically nothing for me to do but die. It was, as they say, a moment of stoned righteous clarity.
Hey I have dealt with this one. Thank you God for the benzodiazepine that is Valium.
The rejected and alone thing came from being overweight, isolated and ridiculed as a kid. As God is my witness it was not until I was in my last two months of high school that I even had a hope that I would really develop a relationship. Still, when the real relationships came I just stone screwed those up with insecurity and insensitivity.
Part of this fear comes from doing the work I do. Each day I see people who have burned their bridges with family irreparably, or who have outlived every peer they ever had. When you talk to these people there is an ache that is palpable for which there is no balm, for which there will never be a respite. No I am too social. I don’t want to be in this box.
I don’t come back to the loneliness fear as often as I do to lightening or death or even flying, but it is in the top ten.
Maybe I should get a good therapist. Maybe I should just suck it up. Whichever, I have to go my ride is here. Bye now.
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