top 5

I just did one of those Facebook quiz things. Well, I did about 12. I did the 'Which Spice Girl are you?' and 'Which Buffy character are you?' and 'Which Australian playwright are you?' (the answers, in order, are Scary, Buffy and Ben Ellis). Then I came across one called '5 things that terrify me'. My friend did it and she chose some really good things, like things that normal people should be terrified of, like entropy and global warming (she also, like a normal person, is scared of murderers and, less interestingly, heights). This is by far the hardest survey I've had to do, mostly because it's not multiple choice (if your options for answers to the question 'What's your favourite colour' are a)hot pink; b)leopard print; or c)union jack, then you kinda know how things are gonna turn out). I tried to list my some of Top 5 Fears as 'third world debt' and something about the Sudan, but I just wasn't being honest. So instead I started with what you would expect, 'Killers watching me sleep through cracks in my windows or curtains'. Good start. Moved onto 'Pigman from Saw' (a little more specific, still working in the same 'killer' sort of vein). I struggled over the next few. Jazz was number 3 for a little while, but then I changed that to 'the darkness in men's hearts', but then I thought that was a little too narrow, so I changed that to 'the dark', because it's been around for a very long time, and I feel that it can probably stand in for a lot of things (ie. the dark in my heart, the dark in the corridor, the dark under the sink etc etc). Then I went with 'Being left behind by the boat when scuba diving', which may not seem like something that would scare someone who doesn't scuba dive, but really, it's a proper fear that I'm consumed by more often than I would like to admit. That one encompasses a lot of fears - fear of open water and fear of sharks being the main ones (fear of crocodiles an extension of this). It also touches on being alone, being lost, being preyed upon, being cold, being wet, being naked and wet, being naked and wet in public. 'White people' rounded out the top five, and I think this stands in for a lot of the 'proper' fears I have ie. that people hate gays, that there's third world debt, global warming, etc. White people aren't necessarily to blame for all those things, but they probably had a hand in most of them, and I guess by 'white people' I really mean, maybe, capitalism, America, John Howard, the 1950s. Those things are all pretty scary, I think, and they all have white people in common.

Lots of other people have since done the survey (Facebook seems to work like that), and it's interesting seeing patterns in answers. There's the normal stuff - birds, being eaten by birds, spiders, spiders crawling in your mouth while you're sleeping, spiders being on your body and you not knowing about it. The guy I'm working with reckons top of his list is the little things that look like Cheezels but are in fact polystyrene box packers. Someone else suggested that their top fear was 30 Rock being cancelled, or Tina Fey being a douche.

It's all very funny and scary, but it's not real fear, is it? None of the things on that list are PROPER fears. They're not fears I care to admit to. I'm pretty scared about cancer, for example, and that's not in there. It's not in there because I think it's actually too hard to be simultaneously scared of cancer killing your friends and also live your life. I find it easier to be scared of a fictional man in a pig suit. Which doesn't make any sense, really, except it does, because I know that whilst a fictional man in a pig suit can really only hurt me, other things can hurt other people. And at the end of the day, that's the most terrifying thing of all, the people you love being fucked around. Not to get all deep Debby on yo' asses, but that's just how I feel. So I guess maybe it does come down to 'being left behind by the boat while scuba diving' - you're the only one left, your friends and family all got eaten, and then the sharks went "nah, we're full, you can just sit there and think about what we've done, you can just swim about in everyone's blood and guts and know that we're just over here on the periphery, but we don't really want you right now".

Goddamn.