Crazy Childhood Fears - Nuclear Annihilation?

It seems like most kids have a fear of the dark, or maybe ghosts, possibly their parents or a creepy uncle or old relative. Maybe they’re afraid of dogs, or swimming, or spiders. Not me! My childhood fear was dying in a nuclear holocaust.

Now this wasn’t just some “I’m so scared of nuclear weapons, I don’t want to die, but I do want to eat only the middle out of the Oreos and wear my Luke Skywalker mask to the grocery store” weirdness. This was deep, ingrained fear that I actually thought about and contemplated in my five year old mind. I would lay in bed imagining a blinding light coming from over the horizon and wiping everything out. I would think about Mutually Assured Destruction, the term for what would happen if the Americans and the Soviets ever let loose their nuclear arsenals pretty much destroying everything (and probably the one thing that actually kept the Cold War at a stalemate).

I grew up a military brat, my father an officer, and I would pay attention. I would hear talk about the Soviets, about the Cold War, about nukes. And I took it heart. I imagined it happening. I had a deep and abiding fear that my life would end early and the world would no longer go on.

I guess that’s the thing, kids pay attention. They pay attention to what we say, what we talk about, what we discuss, for better or worse. They listen to our biases, they pick up on our conditioning, they assimilate our fears. Obviously, nuclear annihilation was a serious concern during the Cold War (my youth was spent toward the end of that ongoing conflict), at least serious enough around my house that it was the greatest fear I had growing up.

I just hope that, as my fear of youthful annihilation at the hands of an Atom Bomb did not come true, I did not tap into some prophetic future. Because man, when I would see it happening, it was fucking real. And it fucking sucked.

Crazy childhood fears…did any of you have any crazy ones?

Slavery and Freedom

The slave is the one who thinks he is free; the free man is the one who knows he has been a slave.

Love and Marriage - Still Talking After This Many Years

"Woop, woop, woop..." was the call.

"Weep, wip, woop, woop..." was the reply.

My wife and I were sitting on the back porch of our townhouse just outside of Seattle, Washington, USA smoking cigarettes when I started making strange wooping noises.  She responded with her own woops and wips.  "I gotta tell you, I'm grateful that after this many years of marriage (close to six) that we can still talk shit," I said.  "Me, too," she said in return.  And then we burst out laughing.

I was reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman and he was talking about the ideals of relationships and love that we get from the media (every girl's in love with John Cusack, but in reality are only in love with Lloyd Dobler, Cusack's character in Say Anything). He went on to discuss that so many people fall in love with the ideals of a relationship or an individual as they see them in Romantic Comedies and on TV, only to realize down the road that they no longer love the person they're in the relationship with when they run out of things to talk about (John Cusack is not really Lloyd Dobler, and worse he's boring and you have nothing in common).

My wife and I don't have that problem.  We discuss books, popular culture, spirituality, friends, events that happened in our daily lives, etc., etc..  This is easy for us because we actually enjoy each others company.  Even if that means that our conversations might sometimes be nothing more than woop-woops and wip-wips.

I think the reason for this is our relationship wasn't built on ideals of who we hoped the other would be, and we held no fantasies. We become close friends in insane travel conditions in a Middle Eastern country where we were truly authentic and saw the best of each other (passion for life, love of our fellow man) and the worst (taking dumps in the private bathroom inside our shared hostel room where the "door" was actually a vinyl shower curtain that did little to cover the opening, getting wasted on New Year's and being a dick).  We were who we were, and are who we are and that's what we fell in love with.

We love each other for that ideal, the ideal of who are, not who we want the other to be.

And we talk about it.  Even if that sometimes comes out as woop, woop, wip, wip.

How Much Cheese - Life and Times in the Age of Consumerism

When my wife and I returned from Egypt, we had a bit of culture shock.  We had just come from a country where there were three types of cheese – one was the type of cheese that tourists paid exorbitant sums for, another was the type of cheese that foreigners who lived in Egypt paid realistic prices for, and the last was the type of cheese that Egyptians paid Egyptian prices for.  All were soft and white and tasted exactly the same.  We had walked into a supermarket upon returning to the States and almost had a heart attack at the amount of food choices available to us.  I went down the cheese aisle and suffered a mild anxiety attack.  This was a whole aisle of cheese! Block cheese, shredded cheese, sliced cheese, with pimientos, or jalapenos, yellow, white, sharp, medium, mild, aged, crumbled…I was there to buy cheese but I couldn’t wrap my head around how much fucking cheese there was and had a mini breakdown.

So I did the only thing I could – I hightailed it out of the store, stopping only when I reached my car to light a cigarette and calm my nerves.

“Good lord,” I said to my wife, who was looking as ashen and panic stricken as me, “how much cheese does one man truly need?”

Welcome to my Blog!

Hello world!  What’s happenin’? My name’s Jason and I’m here to share some stories with you – stories about my life, my experiences, my travels.  I hope they make you laugh, cry, and think about this world we live in.

And please tell your friends about just how frickin’ hilariously awesome this blog is. If you do, I’d love to send you a free t-shirt, except  the only t-shirts I have to give away aren’t even fit for Goodwill.  And sending free socks or some bite-sized Snickers that I have leftover from Halloween just ain’t the same.

Peace,

Jason Richard