25 X 2002 - 23:36 - verba35

Again a Buzz. For this one you have my English teacher and her rather vague assignment, "Satirize something you know well," to thank.

All right, so it's not that vague, but it makes me feel better to say so.

You've seen Buzzes before -- basically involves freewriting using a lead sentence -- and here's the special information:

It's late now, and I think this reflects that. I don't dream happily. Most of my dreams involve blood and screaming or just a lot of running away and cutting and knives and, really? it's just generally not a good thing to get too close to me when I sleep. Ie thrash, not surprisingly. Even the dreams I do enjoy have a disturbing amount of screaming and running away -- a call for psychiatric help? Perhaps. Or maybe it'll clear itself up. Whatever the reason, my subconscious is clearly not happy. So here goes: this is dedicated to my subconscious, with fear and loathing.

Nothing will ever scare me as much as the irrational, the half-rational, those fears born of the land of ghoulish nightmare. Thoughts jar me from my sleep as I flutter between wakefulness and dream, and I'm no longer sure what fear is reasonable and what is not.

Is there such a thing as a reasonable fear? I live on an earthquake fault, or if not directly on, then close enough (three miles to the San Andreas and ten to the Hayward) that the sand that lies under my home (as it does most of western San Francisco -- that's why the famous hills of the downtown area give way to the gentle sloping flat down to the ocean -- sand blown in from the sea) will tremble much more violently than the seismograph ever shows. Can I think about this? not and continue to live, so there is no threat from living in an area of creep. Tourists from the Midwest are always surprised that there's no thought of it, that I do not live with the ever-present danger in the back of my head. Of course I have water bottles stashed everywhere in my room, around the house, many gallons in the parts of the house we think least likely to crumble. (The list is comforting: doorways, arches, thick loadbearing walls.) But fear is ridiculous until the ground begins to shake, and even then there is no time for fear.

Spiders -- now those, I don't like. I can do something about spiders -- which these days means avoiding them, most of the time. I draw the line at sharing my bed with spiders, however; not only does it reflect poorly on my housekeeping skills, but it also tends to leave me with huge bites. Out they go.

What makes me tremble? A multitude of things: losing my sight. Losing my hearing. Having my hands cut off. Forgetting how to write. Nerve damage that will prevent me from reading. Dying and then being violently, deliberately mutilated. All of these leave the familiar sting in my mouth...

But there's then the fear of dying completely alone, of having no one to close my eyes and fold my limbs, and perhaps this is too where my fear of mutilation comes. Oddly, I wouldn't mind being donated to science or being an organ donor. Call it ghastly, but after the eyes are closed, I don't much care what is done then. My mind grows increasingly adept at its film of an unremarkable death and the horror it seems is felt at that lack of a final contact.

Perhaps it isn't me -- perhaps it is Charon, poling the Styx and calling through me, reminding me that without a coin I will not make passage for a hundred years. The rational fear is sometimes easy to overcome (although the presence of fagbashing in the back of my head is not to be denied). After all, denial and the simple rightness of the fear is enough to calm the dissonances of unease. But the irrational, or the half-rational... these are inescapable; even in my dreams they pursue me on swift wings, more powerful by far than anything I can muster for my defense.

I have created, then met, my fears, and I think I have been losing...