Fear: Two Stories, One Lesson

Two things scared me about moving to California. Well, more than two but these two things in particular ran through my mind over and over again: driving (traffic) and spiders. In the former case it was the sheer increase in quantity and insanity. Driving in SoCal is crowded, fast while incredibly slow, and pure madness if you really think about it - conversation for another place in time. In the later case, I knew moving from Minnesota to California was going to bring new species, some of the much larger variety, of arachnids. These 8 legged, multi-eyed, creep creeper~tons have been my sworn mortal enemy since the breaking of the world (#WheelOfTime, cray-cray adorbs!), since as long as I can remember. I hate spiders. They freak me out. I was able to watch the film Arachnophobia back in the day, but I’m pretty sure that made things worse.

The Great Californian Parking Lot

This lesson is about fear. It was suppose to be about fear and traveling but once again, it was a chance encounter that provided the spark for me to sit down and write. This time it was with some furry hell-spawn the size of a 50 cent piece that decided to perch itself under my desk - sitting here now makes me uneasy.

The story is short and simple: I came out of my bedroom and into the entry of our apartment yesterday morn’ and reached down to grab something but I don’t remember what and there, under my desk, was the enemy, legs sprawled out to make itself look the size of a small dog, silent and still but ready. I moved a bit. It moved - the quickness of a spider is disturbing. I backed away, grabbed a copy of an OC weekly periodical that I got for free at some strip-mall quick eatery, rolled it up, came in close, crouched down to make for a quick strike and boom. I think I whacked at that sonofabitch 3-4 times, and once more when my wife thought it wasn’t dead.

I’d like to think I conquered fear in that moment. Usually I would scream like a girl and make our roommate, Lucas, kill it. But I know that is not the case. I still fear spiders greatly and consequently hate spiders. And among my human brethren I am not uncommon in this belief. Also, I can help but think that possibly what I did was unjust. The spider wasn’t really a threat to me, just happened to roll into a bad situation: a giant with a fear of tiny things. I’m sure in the great circle/cycle of life the spider has a significant role to play (birds eat them?) and while life and death are natural occurrences of this cycle, getting whacked to death by subpar journalism isn’t exactly life doing as life does.

Allow me one further digression before making my point: my wife and I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Europe for our honeymoon. This involved getting over many fears: flying over a vast ocean, being in strange places with people who do not speak your language, whose customs and modes of behavior are different than our own, etc. Our first major stop was in the country of Malta, where most people spoke English, as well as Maltese. After we got settled in late on our first night there we decided to go out for a drink. We could hear music and see lights from down the street so we wandered out the front of our hotel and made our way down the windy island road. When we reached the source of light and sound we discovered a few open tables outside and the bar itself was no larger than a kitchen with a small bar, three two-seater high top tables, a jukebox on the wall and a door to small bathroom. There were maybe 3-4 people inside the bar and another group on the patio area. We felt all their eyes on us as we walked in and felt strange. The shaved bald head of the bartender came over as we took a seat at one of the tables. We ordered a couple pints of beer while the bartender also brought us small plates of sausage, crackers, olives, and other wonderful bar snacks. We walked in as strangers but as the night progressed, we got intoxicated, they got intoxicated, the bartender came over many times just to ask us where we were from, what we were doing etc. At one point one of the obvious locals who was honestly the doppleganger of Freddie Mercury and also obviously intoxicated, was prodded on by the other locals to lip sync to Queen songs. Which he proceeded to do with a mop in hand as his mic stand busting out the back arching moves of Sir Mercury with a surprising 60% likeness. By the end of the night we were sitting at the bar - at the insistence of the bartender - and had learned most of the stories of the local Maltese people in attendance. The bartender poured shots out of the bottle into our beers, into our mouths, and at one point my wife was behind the bar making drinks while shouting “I don’t give shit” in Maltese. We left the bar at 5 am.

We came as strangers, afraid of things and people around us, and left Malta having made 4-5 more trips back to that bar to see people we had come to know, if not as friends, as acquaintances that we knew by name. Just good, average, if not entirely normal people. It was subtle, overcoming the fear of other people, but it got me thinking.

Fear of each other is one of the worst fears because of the consequences. Ignoring someone because they are a stranger is a mild consequence and mild fear. But fear of each other has also been, if not the cause, the fuel by which great atrocities in human history are fed and continued. Wars, genocide, hate crime, etc. My life lesson at the bar in Malta was to travel, meet people, get to know them, understand they are just dumb people just like you and in doing so you will no longer fear them.

 Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

I’ve mostly overcome my fear of LA traffic and I live in an area surrounded by strangers and while I don’t get the chance or have the ambition to get to know all of them, I know the potential to do so is there along with a good chance they are average, normal, and are not douchebags - though in SoCal there is a high chance of that as well.

I’d like to say, to bring this piece full circle, that my fear and hatred of spiders is a work in progress, that I’ve been actively working to overcome my fear and that I’ve initiated peace talks with the Great Spider Council to convene a cease-whacking, but… fuck that shit.

To close I will leave you with this preview of things to come. I’ve been working on and off one of the fiction projects that I mentioned in an earlier post. The following is either a speech or part of a document that exists in the fictional world proclaiming the philosophical position of one of the factions in the story. It was inspired by my thoughts on fear:

“Fear is the almighty destroyer, for it leads to acts in antithesis of love: callousness; It leads to acts in antithesis of life: injustice. Fear will hold us and bind us and is therefore the antithesis of freedom.”