Getting the Fear Message

I don’t know what’s on your Facebook feed these days—or if many people actually have Facebook anymore, and not some other social media platform. But still, I’m getting a lot of what we used to call “blooper reels.” Maybe because I pause to watch them—there doesn’t seem to be any clicking involved—that the media gods decide to send me more of these. And there doesn’t seem to be any advertising, just a series of twenty or thirty of these three- to five-second clips, obviously gathered from home videos and smartphone cameras, rather than staged. A counter always clicks down to tell you how many more of them you get to—or have to—watch.

These clips are supposed to be hilarious, but most of them are just brutal. Someone is walking alongside a swimming pool at a party, missteps, and falls in—but it’s not a clean fall, and they usually smack their knee or their head on the pool’s coping. Ouch! Or some kid is skateboarding and decides to jump on a stairway’s center railing and ride down on the flat of his board—but instead he tumbles and lands on his neck. Ouch—and maybe a couple of fractured vertebrae! Or someone is swinging from a rope in a tree over the bank of a river or a lake—but he or she lets go too soon and slides face-first in the dirt before plowing into the water. Double-ouch—with a mouthful of gravel.

Being an empathetic sort, I feel an electric jolt go through my body with each of these impacts. I know the person is getting a serious injury—or at least I would if this were happening to me. The sensible thing would be to scroll on before the mayhem starts, but I just can’t look away. Maybe that’s the masochist in me. (I don’t think I’m a sadist, taking delight in these peoples’ pains. And I don’t find these bloopers at all funny. But they are … hypnotic.)

Some of these blooper reels involve motorcycles, too, where a person who is unmindful—or perhaps never learned to ride in the first place—does something stupid. He or she gives the throttle too much twist starting out, or tries to do a wheelie, or has a friend jump on the back while the machine is moving. And predictably, the bike upends or wobbles around and then falls over.

And finally, there is a variant of the blooper reel showing traffic accidents, apparently derived from dash cams. Cars swerving in front of the driver, trailers come unhitched, motorcycles get side-swiped or rear-ended. And in some cases, a car or truck up ahead has stalled on railroad tracks after the gates go down, a train barrels through, and the car is destroyed. These things are almost a repeat of the “death on the highway” films they used to show—maybe still do—in driver’s ed class.

Why do I mention all this? Because I recently sold off my motorcycles and have occasionally thought about buying another one. And seeing a sudden influx of these blooper videos with real pain in them as well as unpredictable highway crashes is having a subliminal effect. Maybe the social media gods are pointing the middle finger at me. Maybe nobody else is seeing these things and reacting. Or maybe it’s a campaign to teach us fear—or, if you find yourself laughing at these bone-crunching exercises, to make us callous and cruel.

The thing that resonates with me, especially in the automotive clips, is that the visual experience is eroding my personal confidence.

To be able to move through your day, you must be able to forget—or at least not dwell on—the possibility of falling and breaking your neck, or stepping into the street and getting sideswiped by a car, or reaching for something on a shelf and having it collapse in your face. You need to believe that you are competent, balanced, centered, and in control. If you think about all the possibilities for death and disaster all the time, you will be frozen with fear.¹

To ride a motorcycle, you must have a certain belief in your own mastery and, yes, your invulnerability. We used to call it extending your chi, your spiritual force, around yourself and the bike. You must think ahead, maintain your margins, keep your eyes on a swivel, and believe that you have the roll-on speed and swerve-avoidance, if not the braking distance, to stay out of trouble. You must adopt the mindset of the “immortal motorcyclist,” or you would never get out there and play among the cars and trucks.

But then there come these blooper reels and highway crash videos. Falling off the bike hurts, just like landing on your neck in a skateboard accident. Falling off at speed scrapes you up and then gives you blunt-force trauma as you come to a stop against a guard rail, bridge abutment, or the bumper of the car ahead. These images are a reminder to me that riding a motorcycle is being a ballistic object held in the saddle only by the force of gravity. And a fiberglass and styrofoam-padded helmet, a leather jacket with neoprene-armor inserts, sturdy jeans, and steel-reinforced boots are not going to be much protection except in the slowest, most dainty of falls.

If the Facebook gods are pointing the finger at me, I am certainly getting their messages of fear. Or maybe I’m just starting to notice them.

1. And this, of course, is a metaphor for life. Every action you take does invite risk. On top of that, we still live under a variable star in a dangerous cosmic neighborhood. And then, whatever you do, sooner or later you will die. Live a perfect life, utterly safe, avoiding all risks, and your organs and connective tissues will eventually clog up and break down anyway. This marvelous meat-covered skeleton made of stardust that you’ve been driving all along is not immortal. And the possibility exists—coming to you sometimes in the middle of the night—that the you who’s driving it might not survive the meat machine’s ultimate collapse. Maybe after life … there is no life.

Obsessions and Whims

The human brain and the mind that it embodies are always active, always thinking, feeling, reacting … forever humming along. The quality of a person’s life then, depends on what that mind does, what it feeds on, and what it produces.

And here, I’m thinking about idleness, ease, lack of activity, concern, and motivation. Lack of engagement with actual life. The reason for this meditation is that, now that I am retired and between books—for which I haven’t had an otherwise imposed deadline in years, but work at my own pace to my own thoughts—and not actively engaged with more than volunteer work and my own pleasures, I find my mind is … wandering. Spinning its wheels. Humming along to no purpose.

This is not a good thing. To someone who has been under the gun with deadlines, responsibilities, things to do in a certain way and a certain time frame for all of his working life, this might seem like a reprieve. And indeed, a few days with “nothing to do,” nowhere to go, no one to meet or satisfy, is a luxury. At least for a few days. But then, the mind keeps humming along.

Without a definite purpose, a life-involving goal or ambition—or conversely, a daily struggle for mortal survival—the mind ends up spinning upon itself. It takes up obsessions that have no purpose or direction. Or it flutters about on the wings of whim and whimsy, alighting nowhere.

I find myself in this state right now. For example, all my life I have been mindful of my keys. I started wearing them on a chain in high school. That way, I never had to worry about leaving them stuck in a door or lying on a table somewhere, put down for just a moment and then slipping my mind completely. If I let go of them, they banged against my leg until I remembered to feed them and the chain back into my pocket.

And then, when I started riding motorcycles, a few years after college, I valued having my keys on a chain. When you sit with your knees high against the gas tank, it puts a slant on the pockets in a man’s slacks. Keys and loose coins can work their way down to the opening and fall out. Now, this never happened to me. I never lost so much as a dime. But you think about this, if your key ring is loose in your pocket. And you don’t happen to think that, if your keychain is longer than about twelve inches, the keyring and chain will fall into the rear wheel, tangle in the spokes, rip up your pants or disrupt the bike itself. You’re more worried about losing your keys in the first place.

So, over the years, it has been my semi-serious hobby—or obsession, take your pick—to find just the right key ring and chain combination. Light chains that are not the pre-made silver things you can buy at a jewelry store are difficult to come by. I’ve used dog choke chains with the end rings cut off, various grades of stainless-steel necklace chains and bracelets, and the light chains used in furniture for drop-leaf desk fronts. Different weights, metals (even a couple in titanium), and finishes (chrome plated or not). To complete the ends, I have generally settled on French marine hardware for the hooks that attach to my belt loops and the shackles that connect to the final link, top and bottom. For the keyring itself, I use a small carabiner or tie down, usually in marine-grade stainless steel rather than the traditional split ring—which always seems to lose its tightness and show a gap with use.

I now have a collection of different chains, different lengths, metals, and finishes, and different keyrings to match with them.

The point of this lengthy disquisition is that, when my mind is not properly occupied with more weighty matters, I tend to obsess about how I wear my keys. The last time I went out, did I fumble a bit with a chain that was too long? Maybe the shorter chain would be more convenient. Or, I’m not really riding a motorcycle—or not right now—so maybe I could drop the chain and just put the keyring naked in my pocket. But then, the last time I handled just the ring, it took my fingers too long to work it around to the key I wanted; maybe I should put on a fob for easy handling. (Oh, yes, I have a collection of fobs, some decorative and some—like those little cannisters that hold my caffeine pills or maybe a couple of aspirin, or a small Crescent wrench—more useful.)

Some days, when I am not fighting for my life on the motorcycle or deep in the settling of plot mechanics, I change my keyring, the chain, or the fob two of three times, depending on whim and the vagaries of what feels right at any particular moment. And each time, it’s like, this is perfect for now and forever. Until the next change of mind.

The idle mind is not the devil’s playground, it’s a loose nut rattling around in its shell. I should take up a dangerous hobby, like skydiving or motorcycle riding, to put me in fear of my life and make me concentrate on the essentials.