I STAYED UP TOO LATE READING COMICS, got up too early because cats are the worst, and have sought solace in the embrace of Hawai’ian sweet-rolls, so I don’t have another giant post in me today wherein I hint obliquely at a Fortean worldview that, if I’m being honest, probably didn’t surprise anyone, least of all my mole-manic readership1. What I have in me today is most of a package of Hawai’ian sweet-rolls, and you can’t have those, for several good reasons.
What you can have is this reiteration of ways you can help humans and animals who are desperate and suffering and struggling to survive the Maui wildfire. Donate if you can, share if you can’t, pray or vibe if that’s your thing but remember that, as ʻAbdu’l-Bahá roughly said, prayer that works is prayer followed by work.
- RED CROSS: Giving people hot food and phone-charging access, and helping them replace prescription medications, reading glasses, and other non-drugstore necessities; text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to donate $10 (through your phone bill I think?), or check here for more.
- MAUI STRONG FUND: Providing shelter, food, and financial aid for the displaced, donate here.
- MAUI FOOD BANK: Able to provide four meals for every dollar donated, more info here.
- MAUI HUMANE SOCIETY: Soliciting food donations and foster openings for displaced furfurs; donate to help offset animal medical costs due to burns and smoke inhalation here.
Alright, that’s done, and I’ve also had some fruit snacks2; let’s get down to business.
#8: What is your greatest fear, and how does it impact the type of content you create or consume?
If we’re talking like spiders-and-clowns fears, I have two (Google at your own risk):
- The closest term I can find for this one is Merinthophobia, which is a fear of being bound or restrained. That’s not exactly right, because I’m not like scared of being tied up or handcuffed or anything, and it isn’t exactly Claustrophobia either because it’s not about being trapped in a small space (although that’s not great obviously, none of that on my burger if it’s an option please), it’s specifically about having my movement restricted, usually because I or my limbs are stuck inside something. Examples include when Ed, Edd, and Eddy get partially encased in concrete in that one episode, that bit in What Dreams May Come where Robin Williams finds a field full of people who are buried up to their faces, which point straight up from the ground, or The Enigma Of Amigara Fault.
- Trypophobia: Fear and/or disgust of things full of awful little holes and what could be in them, like wasp’s nests, lotus pods, or The Enigma Of Amigara Fault.
Other than that it’s pretty meat-and-potatoes, saw-a-thing-when-I-was-a-kid-and-it-fucked-me-up stuff; glowing red eyes in the dark (Critters, Gremlins, The Nightmare Before Christmas), something watching me through a window (Signs, an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark about scarecrows I can’t find a screengrab of, Critters again), going to Hell because I was born less perfect than Jesus (Christian School).
Obviously there’s deeper, more personal stuff (basic The Anxiety Was Right All Along bullshit, probably not much different than yours), but to the extent that I use them at all in my creative work (mostly tabletop games), I stick to the monstros and Big Book of Phobias, like a medical-horror take on the Cenobites called the Chirurgeons whose leader’s surgical mask is sewn onto his face, or a monster just outside the frequency of our world but protruding into it via something my notes refer to as an “anti-birth canal”, or horse-sized jellyfish with long, many-jointed fingers instead of tentacles. All basic-bitch eldritch horrors that I’m happy to engage with in the media that I consume; what I don’t engage with is the stuff that really scares me, like real-life too-dark-for-Dateline nightmares, Thomas Ligotti’s convincing arguments that the rotting core of reality is why existence itself is malignant, and of course, that bit in Twin Peaks where Windom Earle asks a truth-serumed-up Garland Briggs what his greatest fear is and he replies “The possibility that love is not enough.”
Sleep tight!
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK3.