The Million Dollar Question

What scares you more than anything else?

It's a simple question. I'm not talking about what fills you with anxiety; a lot of stuff can do that. Anxiety is what you feel when you're walking through a dark forest and hear something move in the darkness. Freaky yes, maybe even a first step to real fear, but not fear unto itself. I'm talking about real, unrestrained fear. Something that happens when your amygdala takes the wheel away from your frontal lobe and steers the car right into the median. Pure, cornered animal terror.

Actually, I don't think that this question can be truthfully answered by most people. I know I can't. I've had moments where I would have bet money that I would be dead in the next few seconds, I'm arachnaphobic, and I'm amazingly insecure, and yet I still don't think I can do it. If you can answer this question truthfully, you probably don't even want to think about it, let alone say it. Real fear is the kind of thing that scars us for life; the stuff of PTSD. The cause of it almost has to be death, or at least severe harm. You lose total control of yourself. All you want to do is escape. You'll do it by any means necessary, even if that means to kill. Can you justify killing if you're too high on adrenaline to restrain yourself because you were reduced to a frightened cornered animal that would do anything to survive?

People claim that they are afraid of a lot of things. Change, loneliness, being misunderstood, commitment; these are just some of the bullshit things that people claim scare them. That's not fear. Sure, they may be some legitimate issues that cause a great deal of stress and axiety, but it's not fear. I wonder how someone who has experienced true fear views these kind of things. Do they see it as a farce; worthless fretting over ultimately meaningless issues? Do they become amplified, creating more fear? Do they fill you with joy by the simple fact of being around to feel them?

And yet, despite our innate aversion to fear, we can't help but want to flirt with it. I suppose that's why this time of year is so popular. I'm especially thinking of haunted houses. We actually pay money to people who let us walk through a series of rooms where we experience a brief glimpse of what it feels like to lose control to fear. And lose control some people do. I walk through haunted houses and admire the production values, but I've had grown adults grab onto me and try to climb me like some kind of cat tree; sometimes even complete strangers. Why do we do it? So we know what it feels like to be really afraid? I don't think so. No matter how believable a haunted house is, we know in the back of our minds that it's fake and that we're in no real danger. If one of those zombie clowns actually walked up to you and grabbed you around the throat and started squeezing, then you'd really freak out. Adrenaline junkies are similar but a little different. Jumping out of airplanes, base jumping, rock climbing, it's all just different approaches to the same idea: fake fear. I don't want to just write this off as some form of emotional masturbation. This is toying with our survival instincts. We do it for an easy reason: to prove our intellectual superiority over more primative drives. We like to think that we can look the devil in the eye and not flinch, but let's face it: we're still animals. Our simple brains are there for a reason, and that is that they keep us alive. Therefore, since I believe that my body knows what's best for me, I try to avoid such negative vibes. Why try to feel afraid when I can do something to feel happy, often with less effort, like actual masturbation.

So what scares you more than anything else? I have no idea, and probably neither do you, and I think it's best that we keep it that way.

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!

Neither Prime, Nor Composite

Consider this the compliment to the Cuddle Monster. This is no monster though; no ghouls, freaks, or spooks are involved in this one. In fact: it is the lack of these things, as well as everything else that motivates this fear. I can only describe it as the fear of being alone. Abandonment is the most primal of fears. It is instictual in fact; engrained on our very DNA. So why do we fear being alone? The answer appears to be simple enough: because life is one big game of dodgeball and it really sucks when you're the only one on a team and everyone is trying to peg you square in the nuts from across the gym.

We're social animals. We need the company of our own kind. The only critters out there that are good at being alone are the ones that are singularly created killing machines whose sole purpose is to be a mean little bastard to everyone else (i.e. honey badgers). We homo sapiens are more complicated than that, and we've certainly done a good job at trying to avoid ending up alone. I mean, everything from marriage, to sports, to racism is fundamentally based on the idea of unity; that it takes more than one person to make something happen, to find happiness.

In a more psychological sense, we need others because it gives us value. The very fact of knowing that somewhere out there in this big clusterfuck is at least one person who cares about what I do make us feel good; like we matter. And we do, because as soon as you really let yourself become entwined into another person's life, your actions become a deciding factor in those of that person, maybe even the thing on which his or her happiness is contingent. This is only one extreme though. Meaningful relationships are key, but there is an entire spectrum of interaction that fulfills so many other needs, from the utilitarian to the truly miraculous.

This is not to say that isolation is not without its virtues. Can you truly understand yourself as an individual without the occasional quiet moment of reflection. Whether it's meditation, prayer, laying down for bed, or taking a shit, we allow ourselves times of reflection because sometimes it sucks to be around other people. In the end though, we all want to go back to others.

Are we afraid to be alone because it leaves you with no one around, or because it only leaves you around? Only you can answer that question.

Harem Scare 'em

As a buildup to Halloween, I have resolved to do a series of posts regarding things that are scary (and some things that aren't, like vampires). You could say that this series is a continuation of the two previous posts regarding Bigfoot and those lame-ass bloodsuckers. Consider this the Frasier to their Cheers.

We of course can't delve deeply into this subject matter without addressing the common denominator here: fear.

Fear has a certain allure to it. I loved how it was a central theme to Batman Begins. I never felt that the Scarecrow got enough credit. Fear is such a primal feeling; it could be interpreted as motivating almost every single human action. We date because we are afraid to die alone. We eat because we are hungry and afraid that there may not be food around later. We believe in God because we're afraid that life ends when we die. We're afraid to be afraid because it makes us look weak. A bit pessimistic with a touch of nihilism? Maybe, but there is still a grain of truth to it.

Fear drives our need to survive. Things scare us because our fusebox of a brain tells us that we are about to end up in a serious world of hurt unless we do something...and fast. This usually manifests itself in "GYAAAAAAAAH!" Although not a psychological anthropologist, I presume that it is a desperate effort to scare away the potential threat. What usually happens though is that you just end up looking like an ass in front of everyone else, which leads me to my next point:

Just like everything else in nature, we humans have gone made a very simple thing wa-hay too complicated. Take the simple fact that the only too innate fears we have are of abandonment and sudden, loud noises. Everything else is learned, and of course our huge friggen' noggins have gone and messed things up to the point where some people are afraid of the most rediculous things (i.e. the color blue and the letter "Q").

It will be interesting to see where I end up going with all of this. We'll look at some more of the classic monsters, whether they are scary or not, the funny side of fear, and, if there is time, what scares me. After all, if I can't take it too, why bother with this at all?