What’s Out To Get You?
If we’re all honest, we know that time and tide wait for no man, and as The Onion once put it, “World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent.” But let’s set aside the massively existential nightmares out there and focus on the little things that are out to get you, or the highly improbable things you still fear.
For instance, I’m one of those people who are mosquito magnets, and I get wary about walking through marshy areas. I have a brother in law who is stressed about bears, even though he lives far from bear territory and once helped capture a crocodile.
So what do you think is lurking out there that has your number? Do you dose up with sunscreen and wear a big hat in fear that the all-seeing eye of the sun will give you another sunburn? Do you avoid a certain restaurant out of fear of food poisoning? Or maybe you skip a certain road because you’ve seen too many accidents on it?
Or, like the Kinks, you think there’s a red under your bed and a little green man inside your head?
Tell us, Deadsplinterfearers, about something not too scary that you think might be out to get you.
I’m irrationally convinced that if I toss the dried mint leaves from my tea into my compost it will somehow come back to life and spread everywhere like mint does.
I sort of worry about the volunteers from seeds that go into my compost. But that will only happen if I ever get around to spreading my compost, which hasn’t happened in a long time.
I think people have lots of stories about compost volunteers, too, so it feels like a thing that could happen.
It would pretty much be bell peppers or tomatoes for the seeded things I toss in my tumbler composter, and I’d enjoy volunteers of those.
But if we’re talking mortality, I’ve had 2 relatives on one side have brain aneurysms. There’s also 3 of 4 grandparents having strokes.
So realistically it’s going to be one of those. The good news is I have never smoked and aside from being fat my health metrics are good so not really sure what else I do to reduce risk.
People. People are out to get me.
But are they dragging you to buy second hand stuff from a giant six block rummage sale as described earlier by Comrade Keitel? Because that would be a good way to go.
Don’t forget the Egg Roll Lady! I wish she was out to get meeeeee.
No they are not, it is a zoo, professionals show up. I will be the person lounging on the sofa, in the air-conditioning, with the four dogs…checking in on the DOT.
My parents, partly out of economic necessity and partly out of sheer curiosity and the thrill of the hunt, used to love yard sales and flea markets and cheap auctions. This is when everything was very amateur so it was real people disposing of things they or someone had. They would approach a table and someone would have 100 paperback on a…I can’t remember what these are called. They’re collapsible tables. We had one. Card tables, maybe. My father would say, “I’ll give you five bucks for all of them.” And they’d agree to this. We had a cart, they’re called “granny carts” in NYC nowadays, so they would load it up with the books, and then load the trunk, and that is how and why Cousin Mattie was possibly better read at age 12 than most mid-tier college seniors of the era. Not to mention nowadays, but I will stop commenting on current pedagogical trends concerning literature.
What about the children of the corn? You live in a rural area. You must have a few.
Oh no. This was meant for Luigi in response to his black-eyed children comment!
People? Take it away, Barb!
Carrot Top is the only correct answer.
You may have a point.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/comedian-scott-carrot-top-thompson-204259102.html
No good deed goes unpunished.
Waiting for worse blow back.
My health “care” provider is going to send me into an early grave. But you know who has been my best friend and advocate? My insurance company, of all things. My calls go through, the reps are competent, patient, and friendly, and they have records of everything. So they can actually answer questions my health “care” provider can’t find the time or the will to call me back and chat about.
I have got to move into a new system. My insurance rep and I actually talked about this and she wanted to know my zip code so she could look up alternate providers close to me.I told her that was unnecessary, I could just go to the website myself, but she was willing to do the research for me and send me the results. This insurance isn’t cheap but it’s certainly been paying off. Maybe Joementum! was right and we need a Hartford-based private-sector insurance industry to buffer us from the vicissitudes of our insane
not-for-profit health care industry.…I don’t know if this counts exactly…excessive exposure to those short story/thought experiment things where philip k dick scattered esoteric ends for humanity like candy has warped my baseline for unreasonable fears
…but as a kid sometimes (before I was really familiar with the concept of paranoia) I’d get scared of some nebulous terror or other & I’d think to myself “ok, so…if that actually is the deal what would have to be true that I have no actual reason to believe…ok…that’s…some unlikely sounding shit…but I could think of it…so maybe not impossible…still…if I go out like that people who hear about it are going to be surprised…because it’s unlikely…but if I could do the math on it I bet the odds of it not only happening but my having figured out in advance that it was going to would be…I dunno…way less likely than me getting run over by a bus tomorrow…& that doesn’t worry me…so…probably nothing?”
…anyway…if that doesn’t count…I happen to know that hank green (brother of the guy who wrote the fault in our stars) has been known to talk about a few in the “asteroid that did for the dinosaurs” range of likelihood…& should let me pad my answer pretty copiously?
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/10-things-scare-me/articles/hank-green-10-things-that-scare-me
Let’s see…my refrigerator (which died and had to be replaced), my car A/C (which died and needs to be repaired), my cesspool, my landscaping, my windows…
Ain’t home ownership grand? My rules of three: stuff really does break in three’s, and anything home-repair-ish takes three times as long as planned and costs three times as much as estimated.
That’s actually one of my worst fears, private home ownership. We’ve never done it. For what we paid for this apartment we could have bought a small brownstone nearby but in a slightly worse neighborhood. At the time I was just thinking about taking on a building that was over 100 years old. God knows what the residents would have done to it over the decades starting with the 1970s, and shoveling the snow in front of the building because the city, despite the billions we throw at the Department of Sanitation, this is not their responsibility, unlike in more civilized locales, and they’re vigilant about levying hefty fines. The boilers. The roof. The plumbing. All too much to contemplate. Far better to live communally and pay through the nose every month and have a staff to deal with things like this.
Leaky slider, cracked tile, & unfinished stone path. Okay, rule of 3 checks out.
I’m a ghostly-pale-skinned redhead… everything in Nature IS out to get me! I am a buffet for mosquitoes and black flies and every other bite-y bug out there. I burn when I even think about going into the sun. I’m allergic to DEET, and every bite turns into massive hives. Oh, and I’m allergic to bees. So… basically, I don’t spend a lot of time outside except maybe in the middle of the night.
I’m not quite as bad off as you are, but I’m similar. I can get sun- and wind-burned in the middle of winter. People assume my face is red because of my drinking (which I do, a lot) but I show them my hands, that also look like they’ve spent a month in Tahiti or Waikiki. Thanks, Anglo-Canadian ancestors!
I’m not allergic to DEET, I’m just not convinced it stops mosquitos from going after me.
The only thing I find that helps is having a fan blowing fast enough to knock them off course and mix up my scent, heat signature, and whatever else they lock onto.
I always did better with lemon eucalyptus bug spray over deet & fear long terms effect of that.
Yeah, I’m definitely not a big fan of using stuff like DEET in general, but that’s what my mom used to use when we went camping. I started to get a rash wherever it’s applied, so she tried a bunch of alternatives, none of which worked very well.
When I worked at Bristol Renaissance Faire, the owner of the shop made an herbal mosquito spray that actually worked, but I haven’t been able to get to Faire for a few years.
I ain’t askeered a nuthin’.
Wait. Black-eyed kids scare me.
See above re: Children of the Corn.
In high school I read a decent amount of high fantasy which drew heavily from Celtic and British Isles myths. And then when I was older and learned about some of the stories from Appalachia, I was like well duh what did you expect, look at all the Scotch-Irish settlers there.
Sorry I was reading about the black eyed children and thinking about things like Black Shuck. Even though Black Shuck has glowing red eyes, which are the opposite of those weird kids.
I have something completely off-the-wall to add.
When I work away I open up a window and hit “Youtube/My mix” and have music in the background. Completely out of the blue it remembered a video I watched many years ago and served it up. It might be one of the hottest music videos I’ve ever seen (and it’s G-rated):
God bless our service members. If I were a Senator and on the Appropriations Committee I would ask, “What is our defense budget? Tell the House to double it. I want mass mobilization! World War II levels. With the proviso that the recruits lip-synch pop songs in their underwear and no one goes into a combat zone, they stay here domestically and perform useful tasks our sclerotic public sector bureaucracy seems incapable of performing.”
A follow up! After I watched the Afghan soldiers “Call Me Maybe” clip a couple of times Youtube has now served me this:
I’m coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that if there were a military coup in NYC I would probably support it, to get rid of ten years’ worth of clown-car governance, and furthermore would invite the coup plotters to come to my apartment and violate my civil rights if they wanted to, as long as Better Half was out of town.
here…have the british contribution too
God bless. I hope they all made it out of that hellhole alive after that catastrophic, abrupt, disastrous, retreat by the US and the almost immediate takeover by the Taliban. Made the shameful defeat and exit in Vietnam seem like the conference where the Treaty of Versailles was hammered out.
everyone in that video probably made it out alive…or at least wasnt caught up in the exit mess
oldest version of the video on youtube is 17 years old
After you painfully reminded me of Guilded Age’s existence and subsequent absence of a second season, I was wondering where I would get my next royal/rich romance fix from. Here’s something to look forward to @matthewcrawley
Missed opportunity to call it Red, White and Royal Blew. Harharhar! I’m actually quite immature.
One of my favorite gay jokes, and I don’t know that it’s particularly homophobic but it’s certainly extremely well known, is, how do you you fit four gay men on a barstool? Turn it upside down.
Based on the best-selling novel! Oh my God. I’m off to Amazon now to acquire this thing. Many, many thanks for bringing this to my attention!
the weather is out to get me…
all too often i’ll be looking outside at work seeing a lovely sunny day…and when i finally get to take my break…. bam…rain and high winds
2 minutes after coming back inside soaked…oh look….its sunny again…
likes to pull that shit for my walk to and from work too
and in todays case….tho i dont think its going to try to drown me……its trying to cook me instead
….
it feels pretty personal is all im saying