I’m going to declare war on a faceless, abstract opponent.

Fear.

I have a whiteboard in my room, which originally was for to-do lists, but my to-do lists move too quickly for anything like that to be practical (they’re embedded in 2 columns on my desktop now), so it became something of a visual manifestation of my super-ego. There is a list of questions written on it, and one of those questions, for most of this year, has been “What am I afraid of?”

The answer, which should come as no surprise to many of you, is “quite a lot, and plenty of it unreasonable from a purely intellectual standpoint”.

So, I’m going to work on that some.

I don’t plan on doing the whole cliff-jumping, speedballing, unprotected sex with your mom trip. It’s not really about the broader strokes (or stroking broads). It’s more about that subtle kind of fear, the really ugly one, that keeps us from taking chances that might have a real impact on life. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of not being rejected, even fear of not enjoying myself because the DJ is a douchebag and will undoubtedly play songs that I have no desire to hear ever again. I have my share of fear of danger/injury/death as well, don’t get me wrong, but at the risk of rationalizing, that’s kept me alive long enough to realize that life’s a lot more rewarding if you’re not in such a damned hurry to dull it, sharpen it, speed it up or slow it down, and you’re generally less of an asshole when you’re not in said hurry. Some of that fear probably still has its place, but it’s not at the core of why I’m not in as much of a hurry to endanger myself in my old age.

But yeah, those more subtle kinds of fear, the kind that tend to populate the songs and stories of jaded British men and the people who love them, I think I need to spend some serious time examining those, figuring out what’s at the root of them, and figuring out how to get a good, solid handle on them, if not eliminating them entirely. For a time in my life, all it took was a weekend and a few hits of acid to tackle them on a case-by-case basis, but I’m thinking that there are other methods more conducive to my lifestyle these days.

We’ll see how this goes.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 2:52 am and is filed under My Big, Black Cock., New Year's Resolution.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.