Stress Vectors

[from 10/28/09]

Since Halloween is hunching over us it seems like a good time to voice our fears. We are very afraid; we have always been very afraid; let's voice.

Probably the biggest fear of my entire life was the one that consumed me for years starting around about age 8. It was the stark terror that I would have to go through my entire adult life wearing a suit and tie, and that if I was never able to do the foxtrot or mix a martini I would be a failure. I would never know a woman Biblically, and I would have to make my bed every night out of leaves in a damp gutter. Also, I would always be shunned because I wore glasses and did not have long flowing tresses to shake out the same time the glasses came off.

You can imagine how relieved I was, therefore, when "They" decided during the course of the Sixties that you could just dance like a fool by yourself five feet from the woman and she'd be happy, and you didn't even have to know how to roll a joint, just know not to bogart it, and sure, you can crash here. I could wear glasses as long as they made me look vaguely like John Lennon, and I could even have the flowing tresses, with or without wearing glasses. Because of all those permanent reforms, I knew I could make it after all.

Of course, I was wrong in that knowledge. It turned out that life would not alternate between studies and the Perpetual Pot Party. There would be classes to take, and later, a job.

To this day I still have that recurring nightmare where I'm getting out of bed, and as I think about how I just finished the last of my finals yesterday, I glance at a book cast aside. I pick the book up and examine it. I remember that I bought the book at the beginning of the term for a course in Advanced Tediological Stress Vector Theory, and smile for a moment as I recall deciding on the very first day that I would drop it. Intense screeching violins in the background then alert me to the fact that I never did in fact officially drop the course, and somehow I am able to know at that moment, instinctively, that the final for the course I never attended or studied is in exactly one hour, and that I will fail it and be at boot camp in a week.

Boot camp never happened. Instead, in the waking world, I knew a woman Biblically, she told me I couldn't crash anymore, and I made my bed out of leaves in a landfill over a toxic waste dump.

My point is, we never needed to fear the fears we had, that were based on what we knew of. We needed to fear the fears we didn't have, based on all the awful things that were going to happen that we were clueless of. Or, to paraphrase FDR, we have nothing to fear but being completely broadsided.

This, to me, is the true meaning of Halloween. It's that day of the year when we all should take stock of the fact that we don't know what's in store for us around the bend, but we're sure it's going to be horrifying. And a time to say, "Thank you; may I have another?"

The horror might be homelessness. It might be the passage of a Tim Eyman initiative. Or, it might be: you get hit by an uninsured motorist and your insurance company says the accident came about as a result your being ambulatory, a pre-existing condition, and as a result you're the person in the YouTube video being dumped out of a wheel chair under the viaduct at S Washington, because the hospital had to cut beds because of budget cutbacks and you were designated "it" and, oh yes, certainly, "dumped" implies homeless.