A Lion in the Street

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 13

"The lazy man is full of excuses.  'I can't go to work,' he says.  'If I go outside I might meet a lion in the street and be killed!'"

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

Usually, when I'm asked how long I've been anxious for, I answer, "since 1985".  That goes one of two ways with people-- it either abruptly halts the conversation in its tracks, which is almost always my preference, unless I'm talking to a young woman with size 34-B breasts, or it prompts more questions, which only make me more anxious.  People want to know if I'm "kidding" when I say that I've been anxious since I was five.  

No, I'm not.  I don't kid.  I don't know what "kidding" is.  Harvey Korman once said, "Funny is when you're serious", and I find that I'm never not serious, especially when I'm trying to be funny which, I guess, is what "kidding" is.  I don't like that word, though.  "Kidding" sounds like something a creeper uncle does in the basement to his nieces and nephews and then tells them not to tell.  I don't "kid", I tell the truth.  It's much funnier than trying to "kid".  

Once I learned about what death was, courtesy of "The Jewish Book of Why" (Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch, hardbound edition, currently housed on a 2nd floor shelf at my mother and father's house [the book, not the rabbi]) and I realized that death applied not only to me (which upset me) but also to my parents (which upset me greatly) I began my gentle descent into anxiety.  I thought about it, um, often.  That is to say, constantly.  While I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  While I was reading "Ziggy".  While I was yelling to my mother from the toilet that "My penis does tricks when I think about Vanna White!" While I played the cantankerous old man in my elementary school's production of "The Gingerbread Man".  While I slept.

Oh wait-- I never slept.  Because my parents could die while I was sleeping and then I'd have to wake up and pad down the hall to their room and find their bodies.  

(Of course, they would perish in unison-- that's how it happens, you know.)  

In my second grade picture, I have hair down past my shoulders and a terrible blue sweater and bags under my eyes to match it.  I'm trying to smile but it's hard when the photographer is saying, "Say, DEATH!" and you can't say it because you're too busy deathing about death.  Also, I'm leaning against a log in the picture, too.  A log?  What are we-- in Vermont, for Christ's sake?  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

In my brain, there are always lions in the street.  They're in the trees and in my bronchioles and in the cake batter, too.  They're in my shoes and in my heart.  I am filled with fear and dread and worry and petrified that, if I let down my guard, if I become a smidgen less hypervigilent, my parents will die, and I will go broke and the house will implode and my twins will go mad and my wife will combust and the car will get leprosy and I will, well, probably be relatively untouched except for a social disease or two that I'll have mysteriously contracted from having a nocturnal emission in the same time zone as a prostitute (or a quarrlesome woman) and I'll just be left there to watch it all happen.  Impotent.  Powerless.  Vacant, like a dream.  

A lion in the street?  Bring it, motherfucker.  Maybe that's what being anxious really means to me-- not being lazy.  I look at people who take a more cavalier approach to life and, mentally, I scold them.  "You're clearly not working hard enough at being cautious," I think, "at being miserable, at wringing every last drop of fun out of your life because life is scary and bold and furious and there are deer crossing and there are trains coming and there are pitfalls and layoffs and takedowns and there are lions in the street and you just have no idea and one day you will stand at a gravesite and say Kaddish or whatever over your mother and your father and maybe then you will understand and there'll be lions in the coffin and they're waiting for you with fur and teeth and eyes and claws and don't you ever stop looking over that bony shoulder of yours, mister, cuz I love you and you don't understand."

Okay.  You call it "laziness", I call it "anxiety".  All's fair in love and war, Mr. Potato Chip Man.