The Summer of Fear

Numbers. Let’s talk numbers from the past year. I’m getting bad vibes from the number two. I’ve been through: two cars, two human deaths, two back injuries. On my second car, I’ve been through two semi-expensive repairs. What does it all mean? It means after also having to put my 18 year old cat to sleep last month, I feel like I’ve got another death hanging over my head, just waiting to happen.

So going through all of that is, oddly, not conducive to writing. You’re supposed to use emotional things like this to fuel your art, right?

My art is as dry as my gas tank before payday, and speaking of being broke as hell, this is as good a time as any to point out my “Buy Me a Coffee” spare-dime rescue mission over on the right side of the page.

It does prompt a shitload of thinking that precludes the art, though. I’ve done a hell of a lot of thinking over the past year. The past three years, really. I don’t have any helpful conclusions, this is not one of those Winking-Buddha-Secrets-of-Happiness blogs. (Not that I don’t sometimes read those on occasion). I know about as much as anybody, which isn’t as much as most people would like you to believe.

But one of the biggest fights of my life has been with my fears, and all the death that I personally have dealt with lately, not to mention those that have indirectly affected me through friends, have me thinking about those fears in overdrive.

The specific nature of each and every one of my fears is not terribly important to the “Big Picture” I’m advocating here, but I don’t think I could adequately demonstrate why this is so important to me without ticking off the nitty gritty details.

So what is this “Big Picture” I’m talking about? It’s not a cure for living life without these fears. I don’t have that, and I don’t want it. You know how some people talk about loving someone because of their flaws, not despite them? That’s how I think about it. You don’t need a way to live life without fear, or despite it. You’ll never get it to go away, and it’s not a chore to be done before you can do the thing you really want to do. What I think, what my goal is, is to live life because of fear. To seek out irrational fears and embrace them. When the thought of doing something scares me, I say to myself: That means I should do it. Why?

Because I know too many dead people who can’t. They will never do anything that scares them again. And that’s the most terrifying thought of them all.