Today’s lunch topic was fear. It started with the bees swarming the fajitas, and went on to the usual spiders and snakes.
I don’t really have any of your fear of things type deals. I’m much to much in the old skull pan most of the time. In the conversation, I realized I’m alright with shit that co-habitates on the planet I’ve felt the muscle contracting cool dead but alive coil of a pet snake. I’ve made tarantulas smile for a camera close up. I vanquished mice in Pat’s old cellar, while she took refuge alternately from kitchen chair to a locked bathroom.
I’ve seen death. Too many funerals, wakes and dealing with loss. I’ve hated it, and it freaked me out, but the emotion wasn’t fear.
Nope. But, people, living human beings on the planet scare the ever-loving shit out of me. People are my phobia.
In my old place, living alone in the city, I would self-consciously lie awake at night listening for the sounds of the dreaded home invasion. Robbers, homeless, roving teenagers with time and restlessness. A fist or two-by-four, tinkling glass and my patio door breached. It was the vulnerability and the solitude. the creeping fear that no one would find my broken body for days or weeks. No one would hear my screams.
Although, with the houses being about two inches apart in my old neighborhood and my neighbor living above, they could probably hear me fart. Judging by our backyard neighbors, someone would have heard. They might have closed the windows and gone back to bed, but that wasn’t really part of my fear scenario.
Completely inappropriately, because I apparently have no impulse control, my jest at the lunch table was that now I fear domestic abuse. I’m officially an asshole.
Truth is my ultimate fear still lingers, and it is a fear of people. Speaking to them, interacting with them, you know, like having a normal life. Inside my head, I will always be the shy little girl who couldn’t pick out her penny candy and bring it to the cash register. The same freak of nature who was essentially too shy to even ask to go to the bathroom. To this day, I have Kegel muscles to rival a Thai hooker in a freak show.
Every now and again, I still have a simultaneous translation going on in my head like I’m speaking through a UN interpreter. I am capable of measuring every syllable before it’s spoken while speaking naturally. The plus side is I occasionally appear rather thoughtful and measured in an intelligent, wise kind of way. Rather than the actual, slow, social retard kind of way.
I’ve compensated for so long, and thanks to the insanity of going on stage, increasingly I’m getting to a more natural oneness, where words come out as they are thought. But, I still ask for and apologize for crazy shit. I think M. hates it when I ask permission to eat an item of our shared food, or thank him for something we both bought. But, really, how the fuck do you give someone shit for civility. Even batshit crazy civility.
The only puzzle to this little bit of neurosis and phobia is that I over think a whole lot of my words. Written, oral, screamed and whispered. Still and all, I’ve gotten in trouble for them. I’m clearly a very advanced shithead.
What scares the pee out of your urethra?