Brian Explains: Fear

Fears, fears, I just can’t get enough fears. I also can’t decide which fear I like best. It is as if I am choosing an accessory for my personality. Which color goes best with self doubt? This Halloween time, I thought I would examine fears. When you talk about fears, most people think of being trapped in a bank with goats wearing clothes who are trying to kill you (okay, that might just be me), but this time I will be looking at everyday fears.

I know I worry too much, but if I start to worry about worrying too much, the universe will implode. I am 40 years old (as of the writing of this article). I have no fear about revealing my age nor do I fear getting old. I do not fear death. Of course, a painful death is another bloody matter. (No, I am not from England. Why do you ask?). A fear of pain is healthy unless you plan on joining the cast of Jackass. If we all drove around with no fear of crashing, the roads would become a free for all crash-fest. I do have a fear of running into invisible cars on the road, but I will go over that subject when I talk about my irrational fears.

Speaking of fear, let's talk about school. Everyone has had that dream where you show up to class naked to a test for which they didn't study. In my dream, there was also a killer whale/teacher that surrounded my desk/boat that was trying to make me fall in the ocean/classroom so it could eat/fail me. My most horrified moments in class were during tests. The anxiety was not from the test itself, it was from the silence during the test. My stomach would make noises that I just could not stop to save my life. Sometimes I would have preferred death to the embarrassment of my talking stomach.  The rest of this paragraph is going to be filled with toilet humor. When I was a kid, I pretty much never saw the inside of the restroom at school. Grade school and junior high were a series of restroom horrors. One horror was the bully that usually hung out in the restrooms while he was ditching class. The other horror had to do with noise. If it was silent in the restroom, I worried about every trickle of water and noise that came out of my body. It is a restroom after all so there was definitely a chance that the noise would echo.

Hopefully, this article didn't sicken you too much. I removed the really gross parts about my restroom habits so be glad. I should have left them in to honor Halloween, but I am too lazy to go back and change it now. This is the final paragraph so this article is staying as it is. You can always read through it again and imagine the gross things I said so you can get into the horrific Halloween spirit. It will be like a written rerun. If you opt not to do that, I say goodbye to you. If you are reading the rerun of this article, I say thanks for the double read and goodbye.