MikeyOpp.com

So the good ‘ol U.S. of A turned 230 this week! And as a nation, I think it’s safe to say that we still posses the strength to blow out all the candles on our cake. However, in our senility, some of us may not have noticed the collateral damage: “There are over 31,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, in more than 119 countries, on six continents (McDonalds.com)”— and that’s just McDonald’s! I did not celebrate with McDonald’s this fourth, but I celebrated with America, because I love my country, and so I took two road trips with some vacation time, and basked in the glory that is America! Something that perturbed me, however, was the fact that every time I left in my car to drive, my friends each said to me, “drive carefully, Mike”, but not a one of them said, “Have fun, Mike!” I don’t think this is because no one trusts me to drive safely, but rather, this is a sign that we are becoming a society driven by fear and worry, and so this week, I’m all about discussing fears. For the record, Teddy Roosevelt coined the famous quote: “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself,” while J.F.K. pulled a “Joan Baez;” taking someone else’s genius and making it more famous, a la Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Based on emails I’ve received in the past few weeks, many of you seem to enjoy reading about my irrational fears, but to me, they’re not irrational. My fears are rational, and the things I take for granted, which are the things that most Americans fear; to me, those are irrational fears (like the fear of not having health insurance). For example, I am quite proud of my immense, and omnipresent fear of dying, because I keep this fear in check by assuring myself that if I wasn’t afraid of dying, I’d do something really unsafe and stupid that would lead to my own death, and therefore, I need to have a fear of death to stay alive. This leaves me with what would appear to be an irrational fear: the fear of not fearing death, but it’s rational to me, because I’m sure that on the first day of my life that I no longer fear death, this will be the precise moment that the black angel of death will greet me, scythe in hand, and take away everything I’ve worked so hard to gain; like my 1969 Les Paul guitar.

I think us American’s, we’re bent on being afraid of things, but let’s allow ourselves about ten minutes of sanity, ignoring the imminent threat of terrorism, and instead concentrate on some cultural and social developments that have me shaking in my boots. Like men wearing the color pink. I’m really scared by how many men I’ve recently seen at parties and bars that are wearing pink shirts these days. Guys, pink is a girly color; blue is for boys. What are you thinking? I don’t suffer from insecurity; I just refuse to wear the color pink, because it’s emasculating. I’m not homophobic, but I think that people dress the way they do to attract the types of people, visually, that they want to attract, and since the color pink, much like a rainbow on a flag, is heavily associated with the gay and lesbian community, I don’t think that I will attract the kind of people I want to by wearing pink. Two gay friends of mine agree that young, straight men that wear pink more often than not come across as gay—and using two gay friends as empirical evidence for my theory is more evidence than Bush used to invade Iraq; so I think I win.

One of the most common fears I hear about is the fear of hitchhiking, both riding and picking up. Personally, I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker in my lifetime. I think this will be the one piece of advice that I pass onto my children someday, because it just seems stupid, and dangerous. Granted, not every hitchhiker once owned several copies of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”, wet his bed, and tortured animals (the three penultimate childhood signs of a psychopath, according to modern psychology), but do you really want to take the risk? I decided on my last solo road trip that if I’m ever so bored of being alone in my car, and I have a good book to read, I’ll offer a hitchhiker a ride if they promise four things: One, that they are literate, two, that they have a good reading voice, three, that they will read my book aloud to me, just like an audio tape, for the duration of their free ride, and four, that they will not rob me, rape me, or kill me.

I usually get frustrated when I am unlocking my car doors, and a passenger repeatedly tries to open the door too quickly, thereby re-locking their door. It’s quite ironic that this sign of impatience should bother me, since I’m one of the most impatient people I know of, but that’s just my warm, natural glow of hypocrisy shining through for the world to see. This week, however, I was thoroughly embarrassed, when in my haste to unlock my own car door with a remote key in my left hand; I tried the door handle too quickly with my right hand, and the door re-locked. So I now fear unlocking my own door in time if someone is ever chasing me to my car and I need to get in real quickly, and get away.

I believe that most men are afraid to dance, and this is because we never learned how. It’s not that we don’t have rhythm and hate dancing, it’s the opposite, we love watching girls dance, because they are sexy when they dance, and so we only know how to dance like a girl, if we were ever to try, and our fear of public emasculation outweighs our fear of offending girls by not dancing with them. I’d rather wear pink to a Village People concert than risk looking like a girl while I dance, and I’m not about to start watching men dance, just to learn how. I guess I’m truly screwed at this stage in my life, since I can’t budget dance lessons without giving up on my happy hour dinners, and I’m lazy.

I’m afraid of how stupid and overly litigated we’re becoming as a culture. From the standpoint of evolution, I think it makes sense to look down occasionally as you walk, and so if you should see that a floor is slippery and wet, you should be very careful when walking on it; treat it like ice. But modern class-action-law-suit precedence pressures public places to put up a yellow cone to warn people of obvious floor conditions, and this worries me; are we so stupid that we need to be warned of our immediate surroundings?

And what about the fact that in every public bathroom that I’ve used in the last ten years, the toilet seat covers have instructions on how to remove them? (First pull up then pull down). If you can’t figure out how to pull a slim piece of paper out of a box without reading instructions first, then you should probably just stay at home, and hire a service to deliver food to you, feed you with a baby spoon, and change your bed pan, because you surely can’t be trusted to venture out into public alone. There aren’t enough instructions for you. What will we need next, instructions on how to use a car’s cup holder? “Slide cup into obvious cup shaped hole, let go, and watch the magic unfold!”

And speaking of bathrooms (obviously a favorite topic of mine), I feel that it’s safe to state that in most public bathrooms, the graffiti is pretty offensive, at least in men’s rooms it is. Men’s room graffiti usually consists of sentences where fifty percent of the words are expletives, and the fourth grade grammarian is detailing what he did to your mom, and why you should be offended by his actions. This week, on my road trip to Arcata, Ca, which is the hippie capital of the west coast, I used a public restroom. I was pleasantly surprised to find that while Arcata still has graffiti, the messages are kind; one read: “Manifest Happiness.” I don’t think I’ve seen the word ‘manifest’ used correctly in any bathroom wall, ever, and I’ve used a lot of public restrooms on my countless road trips. But to use the word correctly, and in an affable manner, well, it kind of blew my mind. In the interest of exchanging cultures, I responded: “I manifested your Mom.”A new trend in graffiti seems to be tagging a web page on a bar bathroom wall. I think this is ridiculous, because drunk people are not going to take out a pen at the urinal, and jot down the address of a random web page, and then remember to wake up the next day, and while ridding oneself of a hangover, remember to log on and check out what some graffiti was advertising in a bar bathroom. I fear these same morons place anti drug advertisements in urinals, and warn people about slippery floors with yellow cones.

I fear that the way I dress might reflect a personality that I don’t have. But I don’t wear anything trendy or different; I’m a blender-inner. So I don’t like it when people claim that their outrageous dress code, or image, gets them unfairly stereotyped. This bothers me because we’re all aesthetically oriented creatures, constantly observing and deducing the aspects of any given situation with our innate ability to take two objects and compare them with what we already know (also known as discriminating). Therefore, if you dress the same way as a lot of other people do, and their dress code reflects a particular groups’ hobbies or attitudes, then I think that by dressing like them, you appropriately give off the initial impression that you probably are associated with the types of people you dress like and look like. To dress in a very particular manner, and then complain that you are often ‘stereotyped’ is akin to smoking cigarettes, and then complaining about a mysterious cough that just won’t go away; you’re in denial about connections. How you dress represents a part of you, and you should be proud to have the luxury to express yourself; think of all the kids in the world who have to wear school uniforms—it sucks to be them.

I think I’ve justified the rationality behind a lot of my so-called irrational fears, but that’s only a short list of fears that I compiled in my spare time this week. But I’ll be sure, in the weeks to come, to bear some of the secret and guarded depths of my mind’s amazing ability to form connections between two seemingly unrelated things, because writing my column is akin to a drug addict telling a fat person to eat less, so that they may live a healthier, longer life; I’m a hypocrite**. But I do want to explore one last fear, my “Irrational Fear of asking out a girl that I only see while she’s at work.” Sometimes I feel like I have a connection with a random girl, but I only know the girl from seeing her at her job. But if every time that I see this girl, she’s wearing a work uniform, then how am I to know if I would be attracted to her when she dresses ‘normally?’ I hate the New York Yankees of Baseball with a fervent passion rivaled only by my hatred of murderers, thieves, and politicians, so I think it’s safe to say that I fear going out on a semi-blind date with some girl because she might show up wearing a Yankees hat and then, what’s the point? Imagine asking out ‘that girl’ at that coffee shop, only to have her show up in a confederate flag skirt with swastikas—how do you manifest happiness in that scenario?