What Was I Afraid Of?

What Was I Afraid Of?

Anyone familiar with the Dr. Seuss story (also on a ca. 1961 LP record) about a "kid" who encounters a pair of Pale Green Pants with nobody inside them? Well, he goes around for quite a while with the bejeezus scared out of him, until he and the pants encounter each other in a Snide field (picking Snide, of course!) and realize that they are more alike than different from each other, and there's really nothing to be afraid of. [My favorite part of this story is imagining how that pair of pants looks riding a bicycle.] Thereafter they greet each other warmly (see above).

What Am I Afraid Of? So many things that I could type continuously for a year and a half and never run out of ideas. Then I'd take a fifteen-minute break and go back to it for another year and a half, and so on.

For today, I'm going to limit the list to ten, not in any particular order, just stream-of-consciousness. The big guns probably won't even come out today; who knows? To start, the assumption is that I'll simply eliminate anything obvious, like bad things happening to kids and family, grand catastrophes, health horrors, people knocking at the door whom I don't know and them breaking in all angry because they know I'm home and not answering, or outright financial ruin and starvation.

1. Clowns of all stripes, dots, circus, party, parti-color, Harlequino and Columbina, figurines of same, etc., just any damn scary clowns; go to hell, all you frigging Evil Clowns! And imagine making a mint on this kind of business; I wish so much I'd thought of it! ihateclowns.com Oh, with the possible exception of the girl clown on the PBS show "The Big Comfy Couch," Lunette. I think she's great. FYI: If the opportunity presents itself, do not watch the two-part movie of Stephen King's It. Or your clownliking gene will be permanently mutated and you will quickly buy a tee-shirt at ihateclowns.com.
   
2. Caves and any other underground space.
3. Dreaming about not showing up to exams, or even worse, dreaming of finding out after a whole quarter or semester that I was supposed to have been in a course I didn't even know about, and I've done none of the work, and there's no time to catch up before finals. It doesn't matter that I've been out of grad school for about a thousand years.
   
4. Not meeting ancestors after death. I know they're there, and I will feel so gypped if I can't find them. They have a lot of explaining to do.
   
5. Santa Ana winds. Wind. Air blowing. Bushes and trees rubbing up against building walls and making scary noises. Wind whipping me through a car window. Which leads to my hatred of convertibles.
   
6. Horses.
7. Anime mouths and hair. They are just too scary, especially the way the mouths have no expression and no variation in tempo, just open wide and shut, open wide and shut, even when the character has stopped talking.
   
8. My boys' bathroom. Health Department citation!
   
9. Falling up. I never fall down stairs, I trip up them and slide back. Idiotic.
   
10. Teeth falling out.
11. Hog Pigs (definition to be provided in next episode).
12. Mom's beet Jell-o.

See??? I promised ten, but went to twelve. Uh-oh, I fear I've started something huge, because I'm just getting warmed up. Never mind. I don't have time to keep going right now. But you should be afraid. VERY AFRAID. Because in the future I'll just keep adding to the list, and none of it will make sense to anyone but me.