death

Upon writing this, I am 22 years old, and have driven a car for less than thirty minutes total in my entire life. My inability to get behind the wheel of a vehicle does not stem from some secret, cruel and undeserving phobia as I so often claim in casual conversation to avoid talking about the subject at length, but rather from my poor depth perception when it comes to things that are directly in front of my face.

You see, I am naturally a terrible judge of distance in cases when things are less than fifteen feet away from me (like the hood of a car is). As a result, I often find myself bumping into walls and low counter tops with my shoulders and hips, and will often stub my toe on anything my foot happens to swing by.

Aside #1: This is precisely why I have broken both of my pinky toes at least two times each.

Because of this strange ailment, I am not exactly faithful in my ability to drive without constantly scraping the sides of my tires along the edge of the curb. While that isn't life-threatening, there are plenty of aspects of driving that are. Coupled with my middle-distance blindness, any car I'm driving may as well be a death trap for anyone inside. And that is where my fear with driving truly lies.

But this fear of death is not a conventional one. My fear of death in this particular situation (specifically: driving by myself, getting into a car accident and being the only fatality because I was the one that fucked up so badly) is not a fear because I am afraid of death, but rather because I am afraid of dying alone.

Aside #2: I'm not going to play the pseudo-badass here and pretend that I am not afraid of death, but I will admit to likely being more curious than most as to what comes after "all of this." I want to know if I'm right or not. Curiosity will someday kill this atheist.

I do not mean dying alone in the romantic, familial or friendship fashions, either. I mean, literally, dying with no one else passing away by my side. Sure, there is a chance that I'll hit another vehicle, and maybe have a passenger with me, and maybe some of said people will die; but there is no guarantee of this.

No, if I am to die of anything other than old age or cancer, it had better be in a tragedy of epic proportions. I want to die in a plane that goes missing with 112 other people, crashing into the deep jungles of Brazil. I want to die on a roller coaster that derails and kills everyone riding and some that were waiting in line. I want to die on the bus that crashes into a freezing lake and kills us passengers with hypothermia before we are able to drown. Any tragedy is game, when it comes to my demise. The bigger the better, as they say.

Aside #3: My ideal scenario is set in South America and involves the biggest herd of army ants the world has ever seen invading the small town I am staying in. Death by ants would be painful, but it would make for an awesome epitaph.

My reasons for wanting to die in such an (admittedly) ridiculous manner don't stem from me wanting to be held with any sort of notoriety on any news program that may cover what finally does me in. In fact, I don't care about this at all. I just want the ripples of whatever happens to be felt outside of the small circle of people that would care if I were to suddenly die. At least then the few of them wouldn't be the only ones who had lost someone.

It's a lot easier to just say I have a phobia, though.

Albums that I listened to while writing this:
Battle Born - The Killers
Twins - Ty Segall
Um, Uh Oh - Say Hi

Amount of drugs I was on while writing this:
One hit of hash wax.
Two bowls of marijuana, smoked via bong (strain: Cheese).