The Frighteners

Frightened: Implies a sudden, usually temporary seizure of fear.

I was talking with my friend Jack last night about the trials and tribulations of being self-employed. The best thing is that no one gets to tell you what to do. The worst thing is that no one sends you a paycheck. In the straight commission world that we inhabit this is called "eating what you kill," which is a strange turn of the phrase for a vegetarian. You should see me stalking the deadly turnip in my back yard, dressed in full camouflage, face blacked out, crossbow at the ready. Those turnips haven't gotten a chance against a fearsome vegetable hunter like me. Carrots, rutabagas, parsnips, none of the root vegetables stand a chance.

We were laughing about how easy it is to project doom and failure and how difficult it is to believe that things will work out well. This despite the fact that most things work out just fine and, when they don't, we handle it OK. We learn from setbacks. We get stronger. Is this a curse of the average alcoholic, this certainty that we are going to die a horrible death tomorrow? Or are other sinister forces at work?

I don't watch the news too much any more. I think most news organizations peddle fear. Right now the crisis du jour is swine flu. Apparently 25 or 30 people in the United States -- out of a population of 300 million - have contracted this disease. My cheap desk calculator doesn't have enough decimal points to tell you what vanishingly small, statistically insignificant percentage this works out to be. What did I glimpse on the national news on a major network last night? Graphics of the states where people have contracted swine flu, with blood pouring out of them and fire consuming them and animated Satans spearing infected humans and roasting them on ovens stoked with hell's brimstone.

It's not all us.