FRAIDY CAT

FRAIDY CAT

An Andrew Ramble

“The porcelain manikin with shattered skin fears attack.”

The Carpet Crawlers – Genesis

It rules me.  It rules every person I have ever known.  It rules the world.

It can crush love.  It can smash hope.  It can stifle rage. 

It is a hybrid that is our creator and serves as our guardian. 

It’s an emotion.  It’s a reaction.  It’s and instinct.  It’s a belief.

It can be physical, psychological, fictional and comical.

Define it as the infinite unknown.  Picture it as a dark basement.  Personify it as the Grim Reaper.

It lies outside of time, but it drives us through all the years of our lives. 

It is the demon I battle from my first waking moment to my last unsettled dream.

Regardless of my best and truest efforts, I have as little power over it as you do. 

Both good and evil, benevolent and oppressive it is simply FEAR.

THE FRAIDY CAT HANDBOOK 

 I am and always have been what DSM IV clinically categorizes as a Fraidy Cat.  I was a Fraidy Cat when the mere sight of my big sister’s dolls made me shit my pants at the age of three.  (Fortunately for all involved I was still in diapers.)  I was a Fraidy Cat at the Age of 10 when the sound of water running through the baseboard heating in my little-boy bedroom, ran like ice water down my spine.  I was a Fraidy Cat when I was fourteen and I insisted that my mommy sit at the edge of the bed until I fell asleep, because she terrified the BeJesus out of me by bringing me to see Poltergeist at the Century Movie Theatre.  I was a Fraidy Cat the age of 21 when a pretty young lady told me she was all but certain she was going to have my baby.  (False alarm…thanks be The Lord)  And I was a Fraidy Cat the day I met, then married the girl of my dreams.  Everything from there on has been the ultimate terror.  This is the fear of failure, failure to be a good husband, a good father and a good provider.   The specter of Fraidyness has driven me to and through careers.  It has guided every day of my adult life.  This might sound bad, but fear has also equally worked to my benefit.  It has protected me and made me a more thoughtful person than I probably ever would have become had I been born with any measure of natural toughness or God Given stoicism.   I honor Fear every day and thank it for giving me a life that would make any man with a modicum of common sense thankful.  I do this by fearing every hour of all the days of my life.

Maybe as a kid my copious fears weren’t exactly practical.  I look back on them more or less as fear training for the life that was ahead of me.  As my Mother or older siblings will affirm, dolls, more precisely baby dolls, were and in many ways, continue to be the ground zero of everything that induces a sweat beaded chill to run from my temples to my ass crack.  It’s not rational, but there remains something about the artificiality of the human form that will disturb me to the day I die.  The more life like the baby doll looks, the more terrifying it is to me.  If it has eyes that open and close, then I won’t even touch the thing.  If it has one eye open and one eye stuck in the closed position, then I won’t even go in the room with the goddamn demonic thing! 

FEAR INCARNATE

It wasn’t until my adolescence started to fade into memory that I started putting the pieces together.  Maybe being afraid of a fake baby was a warning to my future self to be afraid of a premature fatherhood which could have resulted from a pre mature…..well moving on.  As a little boy, I was afraid of skeletons and skulls.  To this day I harbor this fear and continue to be disturbed and fascinated by every type of organic calcified animal and human remains. Shouldn’t everyone be afraid of skeletons? They are death image incarnate.  The fresher and younger the life force the more it should naturally fear skeletons popping out of coffins in the swimming pool of the poltergeist family.  (Don’t even get me started on that friggin clown doll!)  I could easily rant about all of my bowel loosening phobias that have and continue to plague my past and my daily existence, but I’m afraid that would be too easy.  I’m here for the bigger picture, not the childhood titillating scares but the psychosis inducing midlife mind meltdown issues that drive some of us to write nonsensical rambling blog articles.   

Most folks want to know what love is and most want it at all costs.  I fortunately have been blessed with love in more forms than I deserve, causing me to take it for granted much more than any living soul should.  I want to know fear, or at least I want to be able to deal with it.

Fear, the thing that I don’t want, but that I never take for granted.  I just really want to know what it is.  Is it an emotion?  Is it a reflex?  Is it a condition?  Is it a force?  Is it inspiration?  Is it protection?  Is it creative?  Is it destructive?  Of course it is.  But more than anything fear, while not uniquely Homo Sapien, is essential to what has made us all human. 

Fear is the propulsive force of human evolution.  Sure every organism on the planet knows fear to a greater or lessor degree, but the human form of fear, this special niche in the way that we experience this sensation, is arguably what drove us from the African Savannas, ever eastward to the shores of the Atlantic.  To us it’s more than an instinctive defense mechanism.  It is a virus of the mind that infects us all in the form of emotional motivation and perceived markers of abstract achievement.  In other words… we are the only animals that God has ever placed on the face of this planet who are consciously afraid to fail.  And it is failure in all its forms, be it heartbreak, conquest, starvation or stagnation that drives us onward day by day to break new ground; to better ourselves; to murder our fellows; to secure our homes and to plan for our futures.  Neither good, nor bad fear is simply human. 

FEAR OF INEVITABLE FAILURE

 So what’s the problem with this simple yet often unspoken constant of human nature?  It is that we are inclined to accept it but eager to exploit it in each other.  Media and advertising sell us life’s “necessities” with little true care other than profit.  The new cars, the smart phones, the diet bars, the anti anxiety meds, the roof top mounted solar panels and on and on.  We are sold fear from dawn to dusk and we willingly consume it as a suitable replacement from mother’s milk to prune juice. 

So it’s a balanced system in essence and it seems to work for most.  After all the days go by; the malls open and close; Facebook assures us that we are failures compared to everyone else in our peer group; the TV continues to tell us what we need to survive; FOX News told us a Black intellectual living at 1600 Washington Avenue wanted to devour our first born and we cringe every time a neighbor buys better patio furniture than the crap we sit our ever spreading asses on.  Maybe it really is just a little too much for me to personally absorb.  Maybe all these minor concerns plus another thousand major concerns are the building blocks of my life.  A life we have all built on being afraid.

Sure I love all the advancement fear has brought to me and my forefathers, but most days I just want to hide from it all and hope that when I pull the sheets away from my ears that I’m not facing a weird world of demands and deadlines, invented achievements and dystopian politics.  I really only wish for the simplicity of The Garden of Eden and a tree of knowledge free of any scary serpents.