Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: A short piece on fear

Some of the scariest things in life aren’t phobias but necessities. When people grow up they put better names to things, but when we’re young we don’t have sociophobia, agoraphobia, and necrophobia, you’re just scared, of things like strangers, being alone, and bogeymen.

I do not know about you, but most of my greatest fears in life are those same things I was afraid of when I was just a little kid. But I’m not talking about losing a toy or a person or yourself, I’m talking about that feeling you got every Halloween that’d cause you to bring your legs up close to your body in bed just in case a madman tried to chop off your legs. Before I even knew what a madman was, what was really mad, what Friday the thirteenth meant or why white vans were terrifying I knew I was scared of all of them, with no little help from my older brother. For years I slept in the center of my bed, clutching a heavy flashlight (and in later years a police baton), my arms folded over my chest like some ancient honored pharos, just out of reach from any hands from any place under my bed. Before I knew what anxiety was I had seen hell’s fires, Bram’s asylum, crazed dogs and lost children, greater fear’s than fevered dreams, things far worse than Goosebumps, X-files, and Are you Afraid of the Dark?, horrors unheard of but ever imagined since the first sons of man were old enough to torment the second sons, because what else are older brothers good for. Shit! It’s a wonder any of us ever left our rooms on some of those darker nights. But through it all there has only ever been one fear that has always stayed with me, that one fear (besides seaweed) introduced to me by 1941’s The Wolf Man: Gypsies!



I’m not too worried about strangers or being alone any longer, but bogeymen and gypsies still scare the daylights out of me. I don’t know what did it, if it was the ragged clothes, the eeriness of the fortuneteller’s eyes, all black and white, a Dracula in different clothes Bela Lugosi nearly plays himself, a wild European madman staring out of cursed eyes. Or, maybe it was just the fact that they traveled in wagons, lived in them, from village to village, like some sort of communist trailer park carnival people, which is quite possibly the most evil amalgam of Euro/Anglo/Americana trash known to man. The Wolf Man’s story draws it’s plot and circumstance from folk lore, making use of myth and storytelling to build the Wolf Man as an ancient evil. And that’s what gypsies are- ancient evil folk people. So you know they’ve got nothing to lose, and that is scary.

Most fears are irrational, and the scariest stories, murders, monsters and ghouls are spun of spider webs already in our heads. But even so, this one fear of mine, this one real fear I have left over from childhood I think I’d rather like to hold on to for as long as I can, no matter how irrational it is. There are far worse things in life to be afraid of than gypsies, and once we get past all our irrational fears all that’s left are the rational ones, and all those are truly terrifying.



Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

-Caleb, un-truly terrifying