List Your Fears

Today’s 500-word topic: List your fears.

So I fear that I’m not going to finish this January 500 word challenge.

I fear that I won’t finish the projects I’ve started and that Jon Acuff will send out his procrastination police to drag me in front of a vicious, closed minded tribunal that will throw me into a dank, dark motel room on the outskirts of Bumwiddle, Wisconsin in the middle of winter and force me to finish all my started projects.

I fear that the entire state of Wisconsin will turn against me because I happened to choose their fine, cheese-laden state as the locale of my fictional town, as if to suggest that it represents the hickest, most outlying place in the universe, which isn’t at all true.

I fear that they won’t believe that I actually used a random number generator to determine the number of the state I would choose.

I fear that I will never get to eat cheese again because of my unfortunate choice of that fine state.

I fear that I’m running off the road, in a writerly sense.

I fear that I will never get around to watch Tim Ferriss’s TED talk on fear setting.

I fear that, because I’m not Scandinavian, I will never get around to Swedish death cleaning.

I fear that I’ll never make it to the rescue shelter and give another dog a chance at a life of no training, regular meals and walks and car trips, comfortable naps on the bed, and lots of love.

I fear that I won’t talk myself into buying that MacBook that I ceaselessly pine for in 84.6% of my posted writing.

I fear that anyone who reads this will lock in on the cheap, tawdry word-count-cheating tactic of repeating the words, “I fear that…”

In my attempt to nail that exact quote from the dad character about Swedish death cleaning and decluttering in general, I fear that last week’s episode of The Middle will never come up on another screen in Chrome. I fear that I’ll be watching these buffering dots 

 

on ABC’s website for the rest of my life.

I feared that I would never climb out of the suffocating Internet rabbit hole/search for the above-mentioned quote.

I used a handful of kettle corn to snap me out of it.

So I fear that I will rely too heavily on kettle corn to solve [or salve] any future bouts with the Internet’s multitude of distractions.

I fear that you will all find out that I am listening to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass while writing this. [Something magical about instrumental music and cranking out meaningless prose.]

I fear that I now have less than ten words to, as slave driver Jeff Goins, the evil mastermind behind this 15,500 word challenge, suggests: “do something with this fear.”

I fear that my math might be off.

I fear that Professor Goins may not accept ‘fear spewing’ as a productive first step in my attempt to “do something with this fear.”