Day 1: 10 Things that Scare Me

The Scream Edvard Munch

It's that time again: National Blog Post Month, more affectionately known as NaBloPoMo. It's the month when I commit to publishing a post every day of the month, no excuses. This is my ninth year participating. My first NaBloPoMo post was way back on 11/1/11. I won $250 that year in a random drawing of bloggers who completed the challenge. Since then I've finished most years. Anyway, that's boring, but I hope you'll read along this month and write lots of comments in the comment section for me to respond to. Anything to avoid cleaning the dog's ears or going to bed at a decent hour.

I don't usually write to prompts, but today's prompt for NaBloPoMo turned out to be similar to a podcast I listened to the other day on NPR called 10 Things that Scare Me, which I took as a sign. The prompt is "What scares you the most and why?" It's way more fun to imagine myself on an NPR podcast, so I came up with 10 things. 

I have to say this challenge was harder now that it would have been 30 years ago. Back then I was constantly afraid of both everything and nothing I could name. I was afraid of being afraid, which means I suffered from panic disorder and bouts of depression that usually accompany that hideous, clinging zombie of an albatross. Some days I was afraid to even leave the house. I was a different person then. It's been at least 15 years since I threw off that life-sucker, so this list wasn't as easy to make as it once would have been. Cheers to that and here we go.

1. Falling. My number one fear is falling. In 1998 I fell face first into our brick hearth just a few days before Christmas. I won't describe it because in my experience it's disturbing for people to hear about it. I'll just say it's a silly accident that causes me to have panicky PTSD-like flashbacks when I think too hard about it. For years before that I had dreams about falling. All different kinds of dreams about falling. In some I even hit the ground and died. After that fall, those dreams stopped. I was lucky I didn't die. Now if I even trip a little going up the stairs my body reacts like it would if I had accidentally invited a vampire in for a glass of wine.

2. Walking my dog. For most of my life I've walked my dog(s) almost daily when the weather is decent. But I've stopped doing that the past year or so, because he's been attacked four times by pitbulls/pitbull mix, and I'm afraid he'll be attacked again and the next time his luck will run out. Crow is a big standard poodle. He weighs about 115 pounds. He's fat, but fortunately he's agile. His vet tells me he needs to lose weight. I tell her I'm aware we're both too fat, I know why, and yet I'm afraid of the cure. She gets it. It is terrifying when he's attacked. Three times my granddaughter has been with me, and once I had both her and my year-old grandson with me. Now I have a second dog. She's a sweet, 10-year-old border collie mix and she would not survive such an attack. I don't think my fear is unfounded, but I resent -- I don't have words for how much I resent that I'm afraid to walk around my own neighborhood and give my dogs and me some exercise.

3. Dying before I write a book. OK, please don't be a smart ass and point out that I could be doing NaNoWriMo this month instead of writing blog posts that will be read and forgotten by 40 people who might not even read past the first paragraph. The report card of my life does not show a 4.0 student, much to your surprise. Scrawled in red pen are the words "Not working at her full potential." To be fair, I did write a book once and I had a contract for that book, but the publisher screwed me and that was that. I didn't lose any money, but the book was never published. It's not a good reason for why I haven't written another one. Please note though that I've published 700 blog posts here on this old blog and that's probably worth at least three books. Right? 

As soon as I got out my phone
she refused to lie on her
TP bed. Of course. I couldn't sit
on the toilet forever, so this
is the best photo I
could get. Damn cat.

4. Running out of toilet paper. People, this is real. When I was growing up we sometimes ran out of toilet paper and money before the end of the month. And then we ran out of tissues and paper towels and all the used tissues had been dug out of the trash ... Thank you, Jesus, my dad always had beer and cigarettes though. It could have been a disaster. After LtColEx told me he wanted a divorce I started stockpiling toilet paper. I filled the back of his long walk-in closet with jumbo packages of toilet paper. Charmin was stacked to the ceiling. After he moved out, I didn't run out of toilet paper for months. Maybe it was years. I stockpiled a lot of TP. Even now I have a 16-pack in reserve, plus a second one Margaret Catwood claimed as one of her beds. (Those are a little smashed, but they would do in an emergency.) If I look deeper, this one is probably more precisely a fear of being too poor to afford toilet paper. Eat the rich. And Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

5. Dementia. Every time I forget a word. Or a name. Or where I parked my car. Or what day it is. Every time I call my granddaughter by the dog's name or vice versa. Or I get lost and wind up in the wrong state. Or I use "invite" as a noun. These things have happened, people! (OK, not the last one.) It's a legitimate fear. I was always the smart one, never the pretty one. If my brain goes, I've got nothing. Fortunately I've got a daughter with an ice-cold heart. She knows what to do.

6. Men. Not all men. Just a healthy majority. #metoo

7. Amputation. Imagine a little girl, about 10 years old, Lying on the floor watching an old black-and-white TV by herself. She can hear her mom and grandma talking and laughing as they are making pies in the kitchen. On the TV a man and a woman are standing in a bare dirt corral beside a house on a prairie watching as a man on a horse rides toward them. They are afraid. The horse gallops up to them, the rider jumps off, and as the woman screams and valiantly, yet fruitlessly, pulls at his arm, he wrestles the other man over to a stump and chops off his hands with a hatchet. Whack! Whack! It's over in seconds. The little girl is horrified. Terrified. Sickened. She turns off the TV and goes into the warm kitchen where her mom and grandma are rolling out rounds of pie crust. She sits on a chair and they continue talking as she silently relives the scene she's just watched. And I've had a fear of amputation since. 

Once I was walking through our local popcorn festival when a toddler in a stroller threw what I thought was her toy to the ground. I picked it up and handed it to her. Only when I looked down at what I was holding out, it wasn't a toy. It was her prosthetic arm. Fortunately I'd already had a lot of practice acting like everything was OK while I was panicking inside. Shudder. Don't laugh! It wasn't funny!

8. Balloons. What I want to know is who fucking invented balloons? I hate them. Hate. Them. Once again, I can trace my fear to a childhood trauma. I was at a birthday party. I was five. There were fucking balloons. One popped right on my arm. It hurt. It made a loud noise. I realized then and there that balloons were a toy of the devil. Balloons should go back to Hell where they belong.

9. Being found out. Impostor syndrome. Blah blah blah. I'd say it's an affliction of the mediocre, but I know plenty of people who are anything but mediocre and they suffer from it too. It's the curse of those of us who think too much. I wish I had a dollar (adjusted for inflation) for every time my mom told me, "You think too much." I would respond that it's better than not thinking enough, but she still scares me and she's been gone over a year now. I don't want her to stop this car. Anyway, it's hard to be a perfectionist and at the same time know that I'm mediocre at pretty much everything, but I've survived balloons so I'll survive this too. 

10. Donald Trump and everything he represents. I won't belabor this one. I know most of you agree. And if you don't, wake the fuck up. We're in trouble. The balloon has already popped.

That's my list. Do you care to share yours? I promise I won't mock you. Talk back to me!