It's only going to be 80 degrees in DC today, which is wonderful, as I am working for a gardener this summer and, obviously, we work outside. Today we will probably only work half a day, so I can go buy my mom a birthday present. My family is in Old Lyme, CT, and I am taking the train to join them there on Thursday.
I like traveling on the train because it is one of the few ways of traveling that does not make me think I am going to die. I am pretty sure I am going to die in a car crash every time I travel in a car, and in a plane crash every time I travel in a plane. But I feel good about the train. It will be very ironic if I die in a train wreck.
My husband and I just planned a summer trip to San Fransisco. I have always wanted to go there because I have a vision that it is a hippie paradise and Jack Kerouac lives there in a bookstore. We are also going to see the Sierra Nevada mountains. I am excited about the trip, and I am excited about two other, smaller, trips I am going to take, but I know that the whole time before I leave, I'll be anxious about the part where I have to get on the plane, and the part where I have to drive the car. I will imagine various fiery crashes.
I don't know if this is travel phobia or fear of death.
I am also worried about terrorism tomorrow. I don't want to get on the Metro.
Do other people worry about dying this much?
5 comments:
No...you worry about dying in a special way. And I still promise that if you do one day die in a fiery plane/car/godforbidblimp crash, I'll call your mother and tell her that an angel appeared to you in a vision and told you that it's your time to go because you were needed in heaven to guard Jesus and 1,000 kittens against an imminent attack from Beelzebub. I'll make it sound good. Maybe I'll get my husband to tell her with all his blue-eyed addicty convincingness.
Do you like the way I just turned a fantasy of your death into a fetish fantasy about my husband?
I do fear, death, though...but mostly, terrorism death or the death of my husband from an overdose. I still have September 11th-themed dreams, usually in a terrible slow motion. And I like to Google "heroin" and read and read about all the ways you can die from it, and to look at the terrible pictures of dead people with their faces squished against a toilet seat and their blue arms and the spoons and needles all around. It makes me want to chain a motherfucker to a tree in the backyard and stand there, guarding him, with a shotgun, like he's my treasure.
Did I ever tell you about the time I panicked in the subway in Brooklyn? It was when I was still working 7 days a week right after 9/11 and going to school and I was tired, tired, tired, and I was waiting for the train underground, and I became convinced for a moment that I could see an invisible gas that no one else could see, and that I felt dizzy and fuzzy, and that we were all going to die. I forced myself to stay and wait for my train. I probably thought of you while I was waiting there.
Yes, I think TJW is right, you have a special fear of accidents/death. Though that is a much more normal thing to fear than, say, blimps or sloths. So you have that going for you.
You will be fine and will not die in a car or plane crash. Planes are very safe. And I crash my car into stuff all the time and have not even gotten hurt!
I just blogged about my own fear of flying! I don't know why flying makes me feel like I am being so reckless -- makes me feel my own mortality so keenly. I think it's hanging inexplicably in the air.
I'm enjoying your blog -- glad Junky's Wife pointed me over here.
Have your read "The Far and the Near." I forget the author, but it's a great short story about a train conductor and his perceptions of the towns her passes.
I don't really feel I was much affected by 9/11 in the sense of being afraid. I fly all the time (but maybe it's the Air Force pilot's daughter in my that makes me unafraid). I was in CA that day, on an Air Force base, and felt much removed from all that was happening. I've been overseas since then without much ado. I don't worry about dying nearly as much as I worry about dissappointment.
Well said.
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