List Your Fears

fear and sweatshirt hood tight

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.”

Eclipse checklist: I’m ready.

Seems we’re expecting tens [maybe hundreds] of thousands of folks heading to our area for this weird thing happening up in the sky on Monday.

Bring it on. There are rumors of our utilities being overtaxed, what with visitors needing things like water, electricity, and basic sanitation–seems there’s no pleasing some people.

I say, bring on the apoc-eclipse. I am all over this.

First and foremost…coffee [pre-pulverized, in case we lose power], my Clever Coffee Dripper, and coffee beans [we snobs like it fresh ground, if possible]. Filters don’t rate a photo, but they’re in my emergency pack, as well.

coffee and clever

 

Second, [again, if we lose power] a heat source…boil water for coffee and grill whatever will be thawing out from the freezer. And there’ll be lots of unfrozen fruit on our paper plates as well. Not so surprisingly, even in these potentially dire situations, I’ll still be unimpressed by the bumper crop of summer squash holding up our side fence.

charcoal heat and cooking source

 

Next, my most vital food stuff.

kettle-corn

 

Still in the sustenance department, nothing like a little touch of whimsy…

boffo

Seems someone in the household is having boundary issues.

 

On the day of the eclipse, I guess I’ll humor those millions of alarmists who seem to think a) they know more than I do  b) I need these when looking at sun and moon in partial eclipse phase.

eclipse glasses

 

 

NASA is also inviting us to be citizen-scientists. My specialized headgear is a clear sign I take this responsibility seriously. [My wife agrees it’s a clear sign of something else.]

light bulb hat citizen scientist

 

And if outages persist and I get desperate…

nose and glasses

These should perfectly disguise me when I saunter into someone’s living room and snag their generator complete with, I hope, an idiot-proof instruction manual.

 

I just noticed the missing eyebrow. That’s a problem. I’ll be a whole lot easier to pick out in a lineup. Luckily, the headgear will help me blend in. Then again, will I make it to the lineup or will there be an executive decision to transport me elsewhere?