Knitted Fury

There was the Mouse Incident of 2009, where I was incapacitated by the sight of successfully poisoned mouse corpse in my garage. Phobias are called phobias because they're a psychological category characterized by the irrationality of the fear response, so it's not that I'm embarrassed about it. Well, not all of it. The hyperventilating was probably a skosh over the Reasonableness border, nevermind the wailing and teeth-gnashing. And the fact that I had to be "rescued" by my then-10-year-old son is something I'm not proudest of in my life. I tell myself it was an opportunity to demonstrate in action the extent to which I do not prize the machismo pose as a sign of put-on or requisite manhood, but when the lights are off and I'm all alone in my bed, I know the truth. Which is: there could be a mouse in here with me right now. But luckily my blankets are imbued with the same magic omnibus prophylaxis all blankets carry, so if I pull them over my head, no monsters can get me, no matter how small or furry or disease-vector-y.

So it's possible for me to be scared. I'm scare-able. I tell you this because I don't want you to think this next bit is me saying how shit don't bug me none because I'm all butch and whatnot. Remember the mouse. The dead one.

But I got over 9/11 pretty quickly. Not emotionally, not in terms of mourning or horror or shock, but the fear part, the part where I wouldn't do anything relatable to those acts to prevent the same thing happening to me, that never really stuck. It was almost the opposite, to where I had all this misdirected and unreleasable frustration and rage, I almost wished some squirrelly-eyed nut on a plane would brandish a box-knife at me. Ideally this is an empty plane with just me and the one guy or maybe he's got four friends, but the plane is chartered to carry the U.S. Marines Corps special-forces anti-terror ninja cyborg sorcerer squadron,* but whatever the situation, after being informed of the threat of the box-cutter suicide no-landing pilots, the odds of that exact thing happening again approached zero. And again, that's not just me. We all got over that same thing not just fast, but that exact day, while the terrorist attack was still happening, on United 93. I hurt and I grieved, but I wasn't afraid to fly.

Overreacting by preparing for an exact repeat of the thing that just happened, that's the job of law enforcement and your friendly neighborhood government. Shout out to my friends at the TSA and the body scanner that shows them my scrotum.

The attack this past week in London is something else, though. Two guys decide to hit a guy with their car, shoot him, then hack him up with some common kitchen cutlery, on a public street in the middle of one of the largest, busiest Western cities in the middle of the day. This is not something I'm prepared to assimilate. I don't really imagine it's going to happen to me, but unlike the zealots-with-exacto-knives-in-a-confined-space scenario, this one is a bit harder to even play out safely in the most idle of revenge fantasies. What do we even look out for? Cars? People who buy utensils? Short of a universal application of the Doc Brown Brain Wave Analyzer, I'm at a loss as to how the TSA nips this threat in the bud.

I'd go as far as to say that after Bush v. Gore and all things rodentine, this is among my most freaked out states of being.

Normally the response to something like this is organized nationally and usually involved someone else's nation and the subsequent invading of it, right after (or arguably, during) a mass hysteria-gasm manifested in spontaneous gatherings of bouquets and teddy bears, a prayer breakfast and something to do with flags.

But luckily for us, as with United 93, the right answer manifested itself during the actual debacle. This time, it was old ladies.

Youngish, crudely-armed men on the street targeting private citizens for gruesome murder and dismemberment rampage? The right answer, obviously, is a lady pensioner on a passing bus holding the whole universe of that street corner together by the force of human compassion and an utterly unexpectable calm.

That certainly takes the sting out of my imaginative leaps of unhingedness. This crisis has an answer and it probably carries hard candies in its purse.

And I hope our own government is watching. Old ladies might be the answer to everything. Once we figure out how to fit them with stealth technology and pilot them remotely onto target, we might just get somewhere.


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*I'm obviously the stewardess in this particular Chuck Norris film