Anonymous asked:
What is one afraid of?
- eating something soft and biting down unwittingly on a piece of metal
- being shot in the head somewhere in the isosceles triangle formed by the bridge of your nose and the two corners of your mouth. bullets that enter the skull through this triangle almost always pass through the brainstem on their way out of it, interrupting the signals that control breathing and heartbeat
- being present during the loading of a cremation oven in which dozens of dead housepets will be reduced to ash together
- hospitals
- derision
- celebrity
- insects with mouthparts that suck or puncture
- swollen and inexpressible respect for another person
- policemen
- bleeding that cannot be stopped
- a rapaciously convincing schema for the world that dries up the flow of your intuition
- freefall into poverty, as opposed to your life in it
- drowning: the need to cough that can’t be answered and which grows more and more urgent until it consumes your whole awareness and you lose consciousness
- that octaves of meaning and organization exist which no intuition is subtle enough to perceive nor words ductile enough to construe: that if god (among any number of other things) is real, any feature of its existence might easily be beyond our capacity for faith
- your mother dying
- awards, prizes and brass rings of all kinds
- colicky frustration in public
- vomiting in public during the daytime
- the first coup of the US government
- being present for a preventable death you can’t prevent
- narrow passages in caves that turn out to be too narrow to go through and too tight to back out of
- anyone in any position of power who hasn’t had a deliberate, private, and extended conversation with a person who is homeless
- " " " " with a person who is in recovery
- " " " " with a person who is on the other end of the greatest run of economic prosperity the Western world has ever experienced
- big black sunflowers late in the season after their petals have withered, when the heads are so heavy with seeds that they droop towards the ground
