So That's Why They Call It Liquid Courage

I have found something out that may get me the Psychologist of the Year Award. Never mind that I'm not a psychologist, but it's that awesome that they'd give it to me anyway. I have found the conclusive link that proves that fears are learned behaviors and are largely the result of our overly complicated brains.

Allow me to enlighten you: it came to me last night as I found myself in the woods in the middle of the night completely by myself. I'm talking totally alone, as in I could have been attacked by bears and nobody would have heard me scream, nor the bears munching on my delicious flesh. Yes, I taste delicious; kind of a combination of BBQ, onion, and cheddar cheese. What bear couldn't resist that? Anyways, I digress...so I'm out there in the forest, completely alone, and I start to get this weird creepy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The woods at night is not a good place for me.

I have a particularly active imagination (go back and read some previous posts if you don't believe me) and my mind loooooves to play tricks on me. It's a curse that I've carried my entire life. As a tyke, I'd lay awake in my bed, looking around my room at all of the black, amorphous shapes that could be the Grim Reaper, or a mummy, or some black-shrouded demon that was going to get me and drag me down to hell. I don't see those things anymore (the shock therapy helps, zappy zappy!), but a dark area still plays out as some some twisted game of staring at clouds. I'll turn my head and think I see some vaguely human shape and jump pretty good. Another family trait is that I startle extremely easily. It really friggen' sucks. All I have to do is zone out for a minute and the slightest thing will make me jump like a chihuahua in front of a twenty-one gun salute. I was carrying a trash bag and almost shit myself because its ruffling sounded like someone was running up behind me. The worst part about the whole thing is that there is never any release to the fear, just a constant dread. At least when you watch a scary movie or go to a haunted house, something jumps out and scares the piss out of you and the tension dissipates. If it builds up long enough, it's almost orgasmic. So as I walked around in this state of horror blueballs, I remembered something that had happened to me the previous night.

I was at a reptile show as part of a wedding reception, and by this point the open bar had started to take its toll on me. A brief aside: I did not put "Go to a reptile show drunk" on my Things To Do Before I Die List, but I should have and recommend that all of you do, cuz it's awesome! At one point in the show, I was holding a tarantula in my hand. A tarantula in my hand! A MOTHERFUCKING TARANTULA IN MY GODDAMN HAND!!! To educate some of you out there, I am a pretty big arachnaphobe, which is fancy talk for spiders scare the bejeezus out of me. So for me to hold this huge fucking spider in my hand was kind of a big deal. I knew what I was doing, but I didn't care. I knew that I would normally have wigged out and maybe even killed the thing accidentally, but I didn't. Sure I tensed up and all of the blood flushed from my head, but I've done that in the bathroom before. So in my drunken state, I was less fearful of having a tarantula in my hand than I was stone sober on the forest at night.

My final conclusions: fears are ultimately the result of our higher reasoning skills jerking around our older reptilian brain. If alcohol is present in sufficient levels to shut down that pesky frontal lobe, then it is very likely that not as much stuff will freak you out. Had I had my load on in the trees, I probably would have felt much more at ease, as well as probably singing "More Than A Feeling" at the top of my lungs. I think I have stumbled onto a whole new area of research that should seriously be investigated further. I mean, how hard can it be to find people to pay and get drunk? Who says students can't get interested in the sciences?

I'll be famous!