Crash!

   I love to play it safe.  In fact, if there was a sippy cup for grown ups, I would use that.  I find myself imaging the WORST possible outcome for most situations lest I am caught off guard and I have to deal with the unfathomable...(a desperate man needs a kidney and waits around the corner of a building to relieve me of my one good one.)  I thought for a while that maybe I was just being cautious, (safety first!) and (better safe than sorry!)....but I began to realize that I was not just being safe, that I actually am terrified of everything....big concert venues, tubing behind a speed boat,  even crowded movie theaters, people i have never met, can make me a little more than nervous.  I find myself scoping out the nearest exit, lest zombie outbreak should occur and its every woman for herself.

I hate going places that I have never been before and that seem complicated to find my way out of,  I'm not a huge fan of crowds or trying to get through them, and even everyday things that  most people do for fun...they scare the shit out of me.  I began to put the pieces to together and there is an element of control to all of these.  These things, for me, can almost always be traced back to my childhood.  You have no control as a child, in fact you have less than that...you trust others to take care of you and protect you.  When you have a childhood like mine, i think as soon as you obtain some control of your life, you tend not to trust other people.  You believe that you can only trust yourself.

     I have started saying yes so much more when I would have said no.  I started to go places and experience things that normally I would have said no to, because well, you can fit 50,000 people into the LA Colosseum for Monster Massive, and when they are all on Ecstasy, asking directions to the nearest exit is mostly frustrating when the place is burning down.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Fox Theater was I think the first time I had ever allowed myself to be in a situation that I was not familiar with and had no control over, lest some sort of biological warfare was unleashed in Oakland.  I was stuck 3 rows back in a crowded pit surrounded by hundreds of sweating, screaming, intoxicated people that were all shoving and pushing and mostly much bigger than I am.  This I considered high on my list of unsafe things to do, given my size and poor eyesight.  I could have at any moment been swept underfoot and trampled to death by a drunken roaring crowd, my screams lost in the wail of the crowds and Karen O's garage punk screams.  But it was SO fun!  I think I learned that you gotta push back against that wave of humans all vying for that spot at the front, elbow, if you have to... keep in the moment, don't panic, and LET GO and have some fun for once!  I did it too, well with the help of my giant tall husband and Jack Daniels I was shoving and screaming along with the crowd, never once looked for the emergency exit and instead marveled at the beautiful theater, listen to the song from our first dance LIVE, and even made some friends.

           But it is the things that happen when I am not paying attention that remind me that no matter how hard you plan for the Apocalypse, its the little things that actually suck.  

Watching Shark Week! on the Discovery Channel rendered me motionless near the shore of the ocean, not because I could see anything at all, but it was of what i could not see that scared me the most...am I near a sandbar?  Was I wearing anything that glinted in the sun light?  Is it dusk?  Is anyone near me ovulating?  Might I point out that I grew up in the ocean;  that I have been caught in rip tides 6 different times and swam hard (parallel to the shore of course) to get back in and never had it occurred to me NOT to go back in?  But one week of watching people and other fish getting torn to shreds and losing limbs and I was motionless.  As I backed slowly towards my towel, lest a killer whale surf up to grab a little fast food on his way home, I stepped on a bee.  Now that fucking hurt.  It was a painfully clear metaphor that zapped me right out of my shark week coma and back to earth.  While I was so worried about a relatively benign threat (really what are the chances of getting attacked by a shark that close to shore in southern California?) that I was not paying attention to the real things right at my feet, that I am allergic to.  A very small and sharp truth that I will remember for the rest of my life.  Dont worry about things you cant control, pay attention to your life, it is happening RIGHT NOW.

  In my seemingly safe, boring and well prepared life (ah but that is another blog)  I find myself making lists and waying the pros and cons of every decision I make.  It sounds like not a terrible thing to do, but when I do it about EVERYTHING, when I keep all control in my life and never let go because I am so afraid of stupid shit that is most likely never going to happen...I am limiting myself from countless possibilites, memories and a life well lived...so I did something about it.  I did, what seemed to me, to date, my most reckless and unsafe decision.  Take a motorcycle ride through Wahewa with a 60 year old man named Crash I had just met at a bar, on a drizzly night.  I made a list, you bet your sweet bippy I did.  NOT safe...at all.  I did have a helmet though, and a jacket....But in the grand scheme of things, I think i had to prove to myself that I had the ability to let go, to hand over all control to someone I had never met, and that I would be ok.  And I was. Totally fine.  This doesnt mean that I will continue on a path of recklessness and thrill seeking, that is a little too much for me!  I will, however, hopefully live my life bigger, and bolder and take more chances and write less mental lists, stop looking for emergency exits and stop imaging worst case senarios for my everyday life.