Final Score:

Me 41, Fear 26

Some observations:

From what I observed by re-reading the year’s entries, I had 37 unique fears that affected me enough to think about them, and, in turn, write about them. I’m not going to individually address each one here again, as that’d be very boring. Just the highlights, folks. There’s an archive of what I’ve written in the past on this site, so you can read about anything I don’t address today over there. Back to the score, though. The number 37 doesn’t match up with the 67 items I scored myself for in total. This means that I catalogued identical fears multiple times (either because I didn’t recognize them as being identical to others as I was writing or because I was affected so much by them that I felt I needed to break my “no duplicate entries on the same fear” rule), so my scoring’s a little off in all likelihood. I’ll keep it as is, just because it’s a matter of historical record now. Of the 37 I identified as unique, there are 16 that I feel confident that I’m in control of, 17 that are works in progress, and 4 that I’m still having a lot of trouble with or haven’t tended to at all yet.

I’ve established and ascertained that I’m usually pretty good in a crisis or short-duration emergency. Once upon a time, someone berated me for not “reacting” when I was in a dangerous situation, but I didn’t “react” because I was busy handling what was happening in front of me. It’s a lot easier to handle crisis, danger and emergency with a cool head than it is when you’re freaking out about it. Assuming that you make it through the situation OK, there’s time to think about what it all meant afterward. There’s an admitted danger in being too cool, because it puts you at risk of not properly respecting the weight of a given situation, but for the most part, you’re just better off staying calm if you can swing it.

Outside of famous or otherwise admirable people, who, because I’m an idiot, I still clam up around sometimes (I think I’m finally mad enough at myself to kick this habit, though; so many missed opportunities that I may never have again), I feel that I’ve made huge strides on the “handling social situations” front.

I’ve done better with getting out of the house, but it does take more preparation than it used to in order to keep it stress-free. When I was a kid, I didn’t give a fuck. Now, I have more of an understanding of the cost of things and more understanding of my responsibility to myself, so I do have to contend with that, but I also have to make sure it doesn’t keep me from having any fun. I also have to be careful that I don’t spend too much time away from home, because I do get homesick and I don’t feel grounded without being there a fair amount of time. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

A lot of my fear of making music is actually the fear of the business of making music. It’s healthy to have some fear of the pitfalls therein, but not healthy to let it consume you. That’ll be the trick moving forward, and my “I’m not doing it if it isn’t fun” rule should help there, even if it makes me even more of a pain in the ass to the people who deal with me in the music world.

The mental and emotional cost of dealing with bureaucracy is still daunting (to go into more detail, it’s exhausting and demoralizing) to me, but I’m doing my best to confront it one tiny moment at a time.

I still dread telephone conversations. Some of that’s because I’ve had a lot of really rough phone conversations and some of it’s because I just don’t like the medium anymore. I’m doing my best to make the calls I need to, though.

I’ve spent a bunch of time this year organizing my affairs so that, if anything catastrophic happens to me, people will know what to do, but I’d say I’m probably about another year’s worth of work away from having it all make sense to folks, maybe two. That includes developing secure-ish ways for people who may need to access my accounts and such to do so, reducing clutter, having the things I decide to keep around make sense to someone who didn’t live my life, figuring out who gets what when it’s time to divide up my things and seeing to it that anything I’ve created and/or shared with people outlives me. I’m also looking into ways to help others outlive themselves digitally, but that’s still in the very early stages. If you’re a software or web site developer interested in this subject, get ahold of me and we’ll talk about it.

I’m learning to deal better with anticipation, to the point where I do actually manage to get some sleep on nights when I’m expecting something, even something good, to happen.

My hardest-to-resolve, fear-related issues are the following:

Money: I fear being broke for the obvious reasons, and I fear the illusion of not being broke, as leads me to spend impulsively and compulsively sometimes, in what I’d consider to be self-destructive ways. We’ll get to my plans for this in a minute.

Expectations: I’m always afraid that I’m not holding up my end of the bargain in life, or that I’m not living up to the expectations that the important people in my life have of me (or should have). The world at large, I don’t worry about much, as you can’t please everyone, but people who make a real, positive difference in my life, well, I want to do right by them, and I don’t always feel like I do, or, more specifically, like I do to the degree that I should. I’m learning to actually ask them what those expectations are, so I can at least worry about a known commodity rather than worrying about things that may all be in my head. This way, even if I do continue to panic about these things, I’ll at least be panicking about something real. I have serious issues with this, though

Regret: Regret keeps me awake at night. I don’t know how many of you live with regret, but I do. People have done much worse than I have in life, but that thought hasn’t helped me make peace with what I have done, or haven’t done. It’s stuff I can’t do anything about beyond making amends with people I feel that I’ve wronged and being the best person I can be moving forward, but it still gets its hooks into me all the time, and it’s painful. This is a lifelong struggle, and I think it’ll take work that I’m not sure how to do yet to get a handle on it. How do you deal with regret?

This Year’s Resolutions:

Beyond continuing to work on what I’ve made public for the past year privately, I’ve got two resolutions, ones that I won’t be burdening this site with for privacy as well as readability reasons, but important ones.

1. Save money and manage money better: I’ve experimented with a budget over the past year or two, but it’s not something I’ve done great with. I’ve also been saving, but not enough to put together a comfortable emergency fund or long-term savings. I intend to step up my game on both fronts. Wish me luck.

2. Do a better job of enjoying what I have: I’m really, really fortunate, despite all the obstacles in my life. Yet, I do a lousy job of enjoying, using, and appreciating the fortune at my disposal. I’m looking into a number of ways to remedy this, including a “Wheel Of Solitary Entertainment” to encourage me to read, listen to, watch and play with the things I’ve been hoarding for years rather than just sitting in front of a computer hitting “reload” all day, and I’m also looking at sites like Goodreads, I Heart Movies and Rate Your Music (perhaps not those exact sites, but at the very least, ones like them; stay tuned for more details) to help me catalog, share my insight on and enjoy what’s in front of me everyday. In addition, I’ll be stepping up my efforts to place things I’ll probably never get around to enjoying in the hands of folks who will. Again, wish me luck.

Thanks for enduring this yearlong experiment with me, and I hope that you’re able to stick to your guns on your various resolutions as well, regardless of whether they’re made on New Year’s Eve or not.

This Week: Me 1, Fear 0
Total Score: Me 41, Fear 26

OK, 3 days and change left in the year, and one of the more high-stress weeks of the year (the week of Christmas) caps it off. The stress that comes with Christmas is kind of pissant in the grand scheme of things (especially if you’re a person without kids; kids and Christmas, that’s a whole different ballgame, and props go to every set of parents who do it right and care about giving their kids a good holiday), but it still creates fear, so we’ll talk about it. I had some typical week-of stress (“Do I have something for everyone I should have something for? Am I doing enough? Will I get everything done in time?”), and I was in the stores until 7:30 on Christmas Eve, but all in all, I kicked ass. I refer to the immortal words of Mr. Miyagi, who once said “Buddha provide.”

There’s some snow here on the East Coast, too, but that’s really no big deal. Not even worth awarding a point to in either direction.

Later in this week, or at the beginning of the next (I may wait until I’ve got the whole year under my belt), I’ll sit down with all 52 weeks of these posts and do a wrap-up. I’ve got next year’s resolutions picked out as well (which, thankfully, won’t be as emotionally intense as this year’s, from the looks of things), but we’ll talk about those in the wrap-up.

This Week: Me 0, Fear 0
Total Score: Me 40, Fear 26

Yet another very quiet week. One more week (well, technically 9 days right now) to go!

This Week: Me 1, Fear 0
Total Score: Me 40, Fear 26

This week’s instance is really, really marginal by “fear” standards, honestly, but it’s the best I’ve got. As some of you know, I travel short-distance a lot these days. I’m only home for 4 days out of 7, sometimes less. As I was about to do it last weekend, I got hit by a wave of homesickness, and despite me liking where I was going and who I was going to see there quite a bit, it was a struggle for me to get out the door and drive there. I didn’t anticipate anything bad happening, but sometimes, I do just feel like staying home, even if I really do a shit job of enjoying the comforts of home when I’m here most of the time. I made it there OK, though, and I had a very good weekend, so in the end, I overcame…something. Was it fear? Laziness? Just homesickness, as I described above? I’ll put one in the plus column for me for now, but I’m not totally sure if this was fear. This wasn’t me thinking that I’m going to be shot when I open the front door to my house or get out of my car. (I have those thoughts a lot, thanks to December 8th, 1980 and too many movies after that date. Weird that I think we made it to Week 50 without it coming up. For my part on this, I just look around and make sure the coast is clear.) This wasn’t me being afraid of any kind of dying at all. It wasn’t me afraid of natural catastrophe, poverty, homelessness, war, pain, disease, being alone, losing people I care about, accomplishing less than I want to in life, or any of those other consuming types of fear you hear about from folks, some of them me, some of them not. I just struggled with the idea of leaving home a bit. Does that count? Am I reaching to fill up space here?

I’ll try to get Week 51 in sooner than I did Week 50. Then, we do Week 52 sometime around or after the 27th and a wrap-up after New Year’s Eve. Crap, I’m going to have to read all 52 weeks of this to do that.

This Week: Me 0, Fear 0
Current Score: Me 39, Fear 26

This week was really that quiet. See you next week!

This Week: Me 1, Fear 0
Current Score: Me 39, Fear 26

Had a run-in with my old pal bureaucracy this week. It sucks when that happens, but I’m not panicking despite a serious fucking-up of my month because of it, which is pretty cool. The lack of panic, that is. The fucking-up of my month, and the fascist douchebag governor who gave the order to initiate the bureaucratic nonsense, not so much.

Really all I have to report, though. Onto next week, and the beginning of the last month of this experiment!

This Week: Fear 1, Me 0
Current Score: Me 38, Fear 26

I took steps to jumpstart my working on music this week, Harry Nilsson documentary be damned! (It is pretty great, but damn it anyway!)

One of the steps I took was to figure out what made me unhappy the last time I was making music on a regular basis, and resolve not to do those things, even if it makes me seem like a primadonna. I don’t want to make music to climb the food chain. If I’m going to make it, I’m going to make it for the joy of doing so. No joy, no music. If supposed “opportunities” are missed because they don’t seem like any fun to pursue, so be it.

That’s about it here, really. Tune in next time, when I talk about Thanksgiving (which should, knock wood, be fairly quiet and stress-free).

And again I slack off, but in this case, it wasn’t “the new laziness” as described by Seth Godin, though we will touch on that in a moment. I’ve just been really busy and dodging sleep disasters.

Weeks 44-46: Fear 3, Me 0
Current Score: Me 37, Fear 26

Some things that scared me over the past few weeks, and I have been keeping track:

After watching The Walking Dead a week or two ago, I went out to the store to get a snack. Walking outside onto an empty street late at night after that show…yep, definitely scary. Of course, to me, this is a sign of really effective entertainment. I haven’t seen all of them, but I’ve seen more zombie movies than most, I’ve read the entire Walking Dead comic series (consistently among the best reading comics have to offer), I’ve had dreams where I’m trapped in the zombie apocalypse at least a few times a month since childhood, and I’ve met George Romero. I haven’t read the Max Brooks stuff yet, but it’s safe to say I’m familiar with zombies otherwise. This also puts me in a position of being jaded and having a pretty high bar set for anything I see in the genre. To genuinely get the heebie-jeebies from a TV show…well, I’ve got no choice but to offer kudos to the creators. Now, at least for now, as far as we know, zombies don’t exist. Should a grown man be afraid of something from a horror TV show that doesn’t exist? Probably not. Point off here, but it’s a point I’ll happily cede.

I was too intimidated to say hi to David Byrne when he sat behind me at Pee-wee Herman last week, or to say hi to Susan Sarandon when I saw her after the show. Interestingly, I had no problem saying hi to John Waters on the same night, so it’s not all folks whose work I respect that I have this problem with. Every once in a while, this stuff gets me, though. Still need to work on it. Great bodies of work or not, they’re just people. Point off, even if I’ve addressed the subject before. This one’s annoying me enough to make me break my own rules.

I also had a run-in or two with bureaucracy recently, and it reminded me, as it does every time I deal with our inefficient, corrupt government, of just how soul-sucking a thing it is to let them have much control over your destiny. I’m still shaking this feeling off, 2 weeks later. Alas, for the time being, I can’t shake the government off, but I need to find a better way to avoid feeling totally dejected when dealing with the gummint. Point off here, too, again, despite any past reference I’ve made to it because of this project. It’s getting close to the end of the year, and given the concerted effort I’ve put into things, I should not still be disarmed as easily as I am by what are common occurrences in my life.

Wow, I’ve sucked recently! I kid, but I really need to make a point to try and face the next scary thing I run into head-on, in a mature, sensible way.

To get back to Seth’s post on “the new laziness”, I’m not entirely sure that I’d use the word “laziness” in every situation where an uncomfortable and off-putting amount of mental or emotional labor scares someone into avoidance, because damn it, some of those situations are really hard for even the well-adjusted to cope with. However, I do commend Seth for calling attention to the fact that those situations exist in the first place. So often, people are dismissive (I’ve been guilty of it myself more than a few times, alas) when they hear about a situation that someone’s having mental or emotional difficulty addressing. Sometimes, when things are easy for us, or when we’re not familiar with the ground someone else is treading on, it’s way too easy to say “oh, just deal with it”, because in our minds, if we see something as not too difficult, it has a tendency to be viewed as not too difficult for anyone. That’s not always the case. I’ve spent most of a year writing about my own difficulties, even on something as simple as quietly saying “Hi. I grew up enjoying your work. Thank you.” to people I admire, and I see examples of other people running into a whole mess of trouble doing “the easy stuff” every day. As I grow older, I also find myself developing a deeper understanding of why people couldn’t deal with certain things in the past that I just couldn’t wrap my head around when I was younger. Again, I have trouble using the word “laziness” to describe any of it, because dealing with uncomfortable situations is scary, and fear is exhausting (more than just about any other thing we encounter aside from pain), but kudos to Seth for at least shining a light on the subject and inspiring further discussion (as he often does).

I will seriously, seriously try to post about Week 47 on Monday. Give me a hard time about it if I don’t.

Weeks 41-43: Me 2, Fear 4
Current Score: Me 37, Fear 23

Shit. Let’s see if I can even remember all of what I should’ve been afraid of but wasn’t, what I have been afraid of, and of that, what I’ve managed to overcome since last I wrote.

• Recently, my stomach problems (I either have acid reflux syndrome or an ulcer, more likely the former) led me to a point where, when I woke up in the morning, my saliva was streaked with blood. Bottom line, kids: caffeine, sugar and chocolate are not on my menu for a while, at least not to the degree that I was allowing them in. I’ve reined it in a bit, and I’m feeling better. No blood. When I find my next doctor (I’m between them at the moment), I’ll mention this to them, and see whether they think it’s worth attending to. Last doctor was basically like “Fuck it, if Zantac works, go with that”, but I’m not really feeling that. Hard to find a doctor you can trust nowadays. But yeah, waking up and spitting up blood? Scary. I’m dealing with it to a degree, but probably not to the degree I should be. Let’s put this in the minus column.
• Aside from myself, I’ve been worried for a bunch of other people in my life and on the periphery of it who are not in the best of health at the moment. I’m trying to be strong for them, and I think I’m doing OK there, but it ain’t easy. Never is. Plus column for now, though.
• I’ve had a great deal of money-related anxiety lately, but not the kind we’ve covered ad nauseum here before. You see, for about a minute, I actually had the illusion of having money. That’s fucking scarier than not having any. You know what you’re working with, when you’re working with nothing. When you have a little, especially when you’re an overthinker like I am, the gut reaction is to try and make every cent, even the ones you’re royally pissing away, count and last and mean something. They all have to blaze with the power of a million exploding blowjobs, to steal from two or three writers whose work I enjoy. Frankly, it’s impossible to do that nowadays, or damned close anyway. I’m coming back to Earth now, but for a few weeks there, I was insufferable and I apologize to anyone I talked to during that time. Total minus column, but a learning experience, hopefully.
• Some crazy cocksucker damn near killed me and several other people on the road the other day. Speeding until he almost hit me, swerving all over the road, just a mess. I got the hell away from him, and called 911 to report him. No idea if anyone stopped or even found him (he turned onto another road right before I was able to pull over and call), but hopefully he didn’t end up hurting someone else or even himself. I had to retype this story a few times, just to keep the amount of personally identifying information to a bare minimum, but if you’re the dude who was behind me, freaking me out and you’ve somehow found this site, be more careful! Sorry if you got into any trouble you didn’t want to be in, but you were doing some fucked up shit, man. Try not to kill me for calling the fuzz on you, thanks. The other day was scary enough. So let’s see, I lived, didn’t panic on the road, did what a responsible driver should do, and even left an open letter on my web site asking my mysterious antagonist not to take any of his self-created trouble out on me. Let’s put this one in the plus column.
• The fourth quarter of the year scares the hell out of me. One minute, it’s September 15th, and the next, you’re making plans for January. Some say that time always moves that quickly, but I’d argue that you get put through the ringer worse in Q4 because of the holidays, the end of year business and so forth. I can’t slow down time, but I really do want to make a concerted effort to choose how I spend said time more carefully in the 4th quarter of next year. Already experimenting with it on this year, but it’s, of course, hit and miss without a plan, and I still have whiplash. Minus column.
• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about starting work on music again in January (See? This year’s fucked!) and even talking to people about it here and there, but I watched Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (official site here, but I figure you guys are more likely to actually watch this if I spoonfeed you an instant Netflix link) the other night and frankly, making music, even if I don’t do it in the music business per se, scares the living hell out of me right now. Don’t get me wrong, the film is utterly fantastic, but it reminded me that even the process of creating music that brings joy to ourselves and others can be fucking heartbreaking and soul-destroying. Right now, I’m scared of it. A few months ago, watching Meat Loaf do it in front of a crowd, it seemed like fun. Now maybe that’s because Meat Loaf’s more of a fun guy than Harry Nilsson was, but the anecdotes don’t exactly line up and tell that story. Meat Loaf’s also had more than his share of heartache over the course of his career, so him having fun now (or at least portraying a guy who is on stage) may just be a testament to the fact that he’s survived, or one to the fact that music itself can be fun, but the business sucks. I’ve run into more than my share of situations where things sucked before we even got to the business end of it all, though, so like I said, I need to tread lightly. Minus column with this, but down the road, in the overall mental health picture, I may end up calling this a plus.

I think that’s all I’ve got for now. If I think of more, I’ll add it at some point in the next 9 weeks.

This Week: Me 0, Fear 0
Current Score: Me 35, Fear 19

Nothing new to report, still. Same old money/time/stuff/legacy thoughts, mostly reined in with an exception for a minor braindump on last Thursday.

Onward to next week. This weekend should be interesting. I’ll talk about it soon.

This Week: Me 0, Fear 0
Current Score: Me 35, Fear 19

Nothing new to report, though I wrote late last week so this was a short week. Usual freakouts about my mortality, money, and having too much stuff apply, but we’ve written about those already. In the short term, not selling any comics, but I did pull about 100 more CDs to sell (which will eventually be on Amazon or somesuch).

Three quarters of the year down now. Who knew I’d stick with this even as well as I have been?

Weeks 36-38: Fear 1, Me 1
Current Score: Me 35, Fear 19

Became aware this week of some serious issues I have dealing with my perception of what the people close to me expect from me, as opposed to the reality of it. I get scared of my perception of things, but the reality probably isn’t so bad. Eventually, I may beat this one, but it got me this week.

I did, however, fight a winning battle against The Closet Of Anxieties. Literally. Had some cleaning, sorting and cataloguing to do, and while it totally overwhelmed me for an entire weekend and probably led to a migraine, I got things in perspective and gutted it out.

Aside from those two points (I know I missed some time), nothing you haven’t heard about in previous weeks. Money worries, “What happens to my stuff?” worries, the usual.

I’ve finally got the numbering correct, weeks-wise. We kept leaking days here and there. This coming Monday will be Week 39. Thanks for your patience with my time accounting inadequacies.

This Week: Me 1, Fear 2
Current Score: Me 34, Fear 18

Amazingly, the one in the plus column for me was me locking my keys in my trunk. Had a moment of “oh, fuck”, then methodically exhausted my options until one came along that was free and worked. Kept a cool head, didn’t do anything rash or disturb anyone I didn’t absolutely have to.

As for the minus column, there’s a few.

First off, a few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep for about an hour and a half after watching “Amelie” (GREAT movie) after being up for a very long day before watching it, because it sent my mind racing. Got a few lines of a song out of it, but I basically had to ride out my thought processes being on overdrive until I was exhausted, and am still feeling set back two days later.

Second, as I type this, I’m dealing with the realization that technology will always be just one step behind being usable in the ways I’d like it to be, if for no other reason than that it keeps people buying new stuff. This fucking sucks, and it frustrates and inconveniences the crap out of me all the time. Just the thought of waiting for features to be added to things I need to use gives me anxiety that I can’t quite dispel. It’s a petty, first world concern, but it eats at my time and my happiness, and I haven’t quite solved it yet, so we’ll go to the minus column here.

That’s all for this time. Coming soon, I resolve which week I should be on in the calendar year I’m supposed to be keeping track of!

This Week: Fear 1, Me 0
Current Score: Me 33, Fear 16

I may have written about this one before, but it came up again on Friday of this past week. I was thinking of doing something, and held off because, if I did, I’d have to walk downstairs past people, and probably explain what I was doing before I did it. What I was going to do wouldn’t have been a problem for the people at all, so there was no problem there. Explaining myself, though, even though it was just making conversation? That would’ve been a huge, ugly pain in the ass in my rat’s nest of a head, even if it would’ve been maybe a minute’s worth of conversation. Hate that. Sometimes, I need to just do things rather than making announcements about them, and I haven’t mastered that yet. So, fear got me this week (last week was totally uneventful), but I’ll try harder next week to get past it.

This Week: Me 2, Fear 0
Current Score: Me 33, Fear 15

Got a flat tire on Saturday. Rode over a nail, just like in the cartoons. That’s always kinda stressful, but AAA made the best time they’ve ever made on a roadside assistance call (Thanks, Dave!), and since I needed to get the spare out of the trunk, I used the opportunity to sort out and get rid of a bunch of crap that was in my trunk, something I may have been putting off for years.

My sleep was royally, royally fucked up this weekend (it’s been that way a lot recently, after a month and a half of it being legitimately great in the spring), and while I was afraid that I would hear a lot of grief about it from the person I was staying with, it turns out that they were OK with it after all, and had no intentions of throwing tantrums, making me drive when I wasn’t awake enough to do so, or doing anything else to make my rather serious physical, mental and emotional health issue about them. I’m going to take a second to say “thank you” now, and then we’ll get to just how loaded that last sentence was.

Unfortunately, this is kind of how I’ve let myself spend most of the past decade being treated by people. That’s kind of a weird thing and a huge admission to see typed in front of me right now, because in print, it looks like the words of someone who’s been the victim of abuse. Hopefully my writing this does not cause any of the people who may have treated me like this (because, quite honestly, it’s not any one person who treated me this way; it was actually a few, thinking about it, and I don’t think there was any real malice behind most of it, just a lack of understanding of my own problems and theirs…still fucking sucked, though!) to get all crazy on me yet again, but if it does? Fuck it. I’ve handled it before, and I can handle it better now, because I’m well-rested today and I’ve got the benefit of perspective. So, while I’d truly appreciate it if no one behaved ridiculously in my direction over what I’ve just written, I’m not really afraid of it anymore, and I’m not going to tiptoe around how I feel or what I’ve experienced on this front, either. (When have I *ever* done that, aside from this? I can’t even begin to explain how it makes me feel to know that I have.)

Folks, if you haven’t gotten it already from reading a decade and a half of my shit or from knowing me for however long you have, people with sleep problems have very real, very serious health problems that can’t just be Red Bulled or Xanaxed to death in order to keep the party going. Be decent and compassionate to us, please.

Huge admission and public service announcement aside, we’re done for this week. See you next time, boys and girls!