Everyone has their thing. Their big fear. The thing that for some reason just freaks them the fuck out to no end. I never did. Now before you think I’m some big ‘ol tough guy, I can assure you I am not. I like to think I can hold my own in brawl, but that’s neither here nor there. I just never had anything big that I was afraid of and lord knows, I wanted to have something. As a middle child, you pretty much do anything you can for attention, so having a giant debilitating fear would have been instant-attention. I spent the first twenty-one years of life with zero fears. I was YOLO before that was even a thing. However in the last nine years, I’ve developed a legitimate fear/issue every few years and for the sake of making them seem smaller, I’ll let you all in the fears that keep me up at night.
- Lateness – Anyone who knows me knows that I extremely prompt. I think it was born out of the embarrassment of being the last kid picked up from school a lot when I was younger, but either way it’s become a full-fledged pathology. The level of anxiety that courses through me as a result of being late knows no bounds. I don’t know what I think is going to happen if I’m late, but I’m so crazy about it that I create false times for people so that when they are inevitably late, they are really on-time. I time my drive to work to the minute, and if stopping to get a coffee will make me late by three minutes (I have been told multiple times that no one cares if I’m late), I won’t stop. I guess it’s a good thing, but when you have already plotted out what time you are leaving work next week and determined where you are going to leave your car between your apt and your girlfriends apt, so that you can get a cab to get to the airport with no less than 45mins to spare for a 6:20pm flight, you have issues. Most people fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to planning. I. DO. NOT. I even gave myself a deadline to finish this article and I’m worried it will be late.
- Possum – Opossum. Possum. Whatever they are actually called, I don’t give a shit because I’m terrified of them. I don’t know where this fear even came from, but if I have to guess it’s repressed from when I worked in landscaping over the summer at my high school and saw a possum impaled on a fence, hissing. It made my skin crawl sure, but I never really thought about the animal again. Until December…If you haven’t ever seen the Animal Planet series Infested, do yourself a favor and check it out. There is an episode about a home infestation of possum that scared me to the point of tears. There were real-time weird tears streaming from my face over something I didn’t know I was afraid of. I can’t even look at pictures of the disgusting sons of bitches. If you want to know what my ultimate nightmare is, it’s possum falling from the sky. Some live. Some die, but they just keep falling. Sometimes I get slapped in the face by their gross tails, and other times I get bit a little bit. And for some reason I can’t get away from the possum rain. I don’t even like typing this, because now I feel like it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Alzheimer’s Disease – Of all my fears, this is the one I have the least control over, so I guess that makes it my biggest fear. Lateness is virtually always in my control, and I do everything in my power not to come across possum in real-life, or the internet, so I’m all set in that respect. Alzheimer’s disease could be coming for me and I don’t even know it. The idea of slowly losing yourself, your mind, and your memories of people, make the world a place I want no part of. If you can’t even die with your memories, what was the point of any of it? Is there even anything after we die? What if there isn’t? See, that’s the kind of line of thinking that comes as I start thinking of Alzheimer’s. I know my family has had some cases of Alzheimer’s bigger meaner brother, Dementia, so I guess you can see have a valid reason to be afraid of it, but is there really a good reason to be afraid of something that wouldn’t settle in for me for another forty years? Probably not, but I don’t care. I go out of my way to try and remember everything I do. I live by my filled-in calendars, so that when I’m 75, I can always go back to November 3rd, 2011. I take that a step further also. I save as many movie, sporting event and concert tickets stubs I possibly can, so that when my memory starts to go, I can always call back on the stubs to remember glimpses of the guy who sat here on a Wednesday night writing this.
Will Smith’s character in that abortion of a film After Earth said, “Danger is real, fear is a choice.” I think he’s full of shit (Will Smith, and his over/underacted character). I didn’t choose this. Sure, the younger me, wanted a fear to feel a sense of validation, but I can assure you, 30 year old me, definitely did not. The world is hard enough. Who needs to walk in a wooded area with trepidation that there could be a possum hanging by its tail waiting to poun-I’m not even going to continue that thought. I do think fears have value though. They keep you alive. Fear helps you to remember how much you like the opposite of those things, and to pursue a life full of those things. My dream life is to be on-time to memorable events with no large rodents. I’ll take that life any day of the week.
About Russ Stevens
Russ Stevens is an editor and writer at Rookerville and a guidance counselor at Nyack HS. He mostly writes about either loving or hating things. In his spare time, he performs Improv comedy with his troupe Priest and The Beekeeper and is a co-producer of their monthly variety show Pig Pile. He loves all the New York sports teams that are historically bad, and he hates lateness more than anything in the world.