Fear of the Dark?

I’m 23 tomorrow, an age that punctuates life only by how little meaning it has. A more depressing age when one knows that the older one gets, the more of these ages they’ll begin to see.

I suppose anyone can be cynical about age, time and mortality, so in keeping with my outkeeping, we’ll skip the unpleasantries and get on with something else.

In growing, we all reap the rewards of the many experiments we instigate on a daily basis. Life is empirically scientific, as such there is much that I have gratefully accepted over the years, I could go on here about hope and all that other kind of bollocks one often gets when faced with the prospect of responsibility, but that wouldn’t be fun would it?

Of course not, so here are some of the most ridiculous things that I am afraid of, but first, an enquiry into the “fear of the dark”.

Fear of the dark and all that is hidden in its depths often leads adults to change course on travels, let alone children and their lamplight energy consumptions. Not ever having such fear myself, I have always found it rather odd.

The unknown is something that I assume taps into the base survival instinct that we all should share. If the unknown innately is presumed dangerous, why is our desire to avoid it somewhat varying between persons?

With only a little hubristic intention, I surmise it’s that the human ability to be curious beyond other mammals is a defect, whose luck has driven us forward. It is that very curiosity that jumped our evolution, our overcoming of the fear of the dark that brought us tools and power. Our triumph over this fear, is what makes us the gods of the earth.

Or perhaps I just revel in being a hard-arse that’s not scared of the dark.

No Englishman worth their salt could honestly title a post “Fear of the Dark” without the best ever metal band making an appearance.

Phobia – An extreme or irrational fear of simple things.

I once heard, that if animals were able to vocalise themselves in human speech, they would still be incomprehensible, due to the referential context points that animals use as a basis for life, being so vastly different to that which humans communally use.

That being said, my notebook has a somewhat bestial quality to it, a thought that is penned to papered is hardly decodable merely minutes after being expressed.

One of the few understandable things I have gleaned from my own notebook, is that I have a uniquely unprecedented fears of certain phenomenon that I painstakingly note “for posterity”.

Lack of Individualism.

Treading on untrodden snow is a singular joyful feeling which I seldom have the chance to partake.

However, the knowledge that the meteorological gods don’t smile at me, doesn’t get me down, nearly as much as knowing that every second I live and breathe on this planet, the one thing I truly know with any sense of certainty, my own self and by extension my brain, can hardly act independently the to history of time of other existences.

I have no unique thoughts.

As a culmination of thoughts, traits, experiences and physiognomy, I am unique and there is no other. But singular thoughts, I can only presume to have none, with such odds stacked against me.

Which leads me onto the depressing thought of there being a day when there is no new music or literature, as all combinations of notes and words have been exhausted.

How dreadful.

Plug sockets changing.

When I was younger and the concept of circuitry was lost on me, I was ‘fraid that one day, all of the plug sockets in the house would change, making my Megadrive completely useless to me.

Every game and film, every song and radio show, everything would be gone last to the obsolescence of cassettes and cartridges, not to be transferred and remember, fondly or otherwise.

This fear has since been rekindled in the form of modern consoles, as each generation moves closer to closed systems that lack transfer capability and are locked down by those we see as the purveyors of interactive entertainment.

I suppose this is a part of the fear of growing up and maturing a way, as with every change, I feel like we are being pressured into forgetting and shrugging off everything from before, or else be branded a child with automaton-like thinking based on nostalgia and base pleasure alone.

Angry plug, sad plug, somewhat blushing plug…
Hey plug, do you come here often?

All things that anti-matter.

The final fear that I had and still have from time to time, is the fear of anti-matter entering our galaxy in fairly large quantities.

As many of you might already be aware, when matter meets anti-matter a large amount of energy is released, akin to that of a nuclear bomb but on a greater scale. Our galaxy, the Milky Way has mostly matter, like most of the universe, however it is thought that anti-matter used to fill the universe around the time of the Big Bang, it’s frequent meetings with matter presumably being the reason there is less of it now.

Anti-matter is basically the reverse forms of sub-atomic particles, some of which we have in regular use in our modern lives. The cathode ray tube (CRT) that powers your non-flatscreen television has positron (the positive charged version of an electron) flowing through it, unfortunately, I have never been able to find out why this is able to function without causing problems, hence why I have an interminable fear of these strange particles.

They could be anywhere, at any time ready to collide with me, destroying me completely, beyond even atomic recognition and I would never even know.

It’s so hard to acquire practical information on anti-matter, if a large amount entered the solar system, our entire planet could be wiped out and we would have nothing to counter it at all.

Well, I think that I’m beyond apologies on my thoughts and care even less about reproach.

My own fear of not thinking uniquely leads me to believe that most people experience such ridiculous internal frivolities such as these.

But if you ever feel your fears beginning to overcome you, just think of your 3 favourite words in succession and your phone number and I can guarantee you, your perfectly unique thought.

Fear of the Dark?