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I Want to Get Paid for Being Afraid

I want to have a job doing something I am good at. I am good at being afraid. I think I am good enough to get paid for it. I am expert enough at it to be paid for being professionally fearful, not this pissant amateur stuff, like being afraid of the dark and being afraid of ghosts or bumps in the night. Pfft! That shit is easy. Any dork with a nervous system can be afraid of those things, including possible monsters under the bed, or creepy things in the closet. Those take no imagination whatsoever. Everyone knows that monsters hide under the bed and those other things are in the closet because under-the-bed monsters tend to be very large and selfish and also drone on and on about their big monster problems, so you, as a smaller, and probably healthier creepy thing, wouldn’t want to be under the bed with them anyway because who wants to hear about their boring large monster problems?

I’m more creative than that. Way more creative. That’s what I would put on my Fear Resume:

• FAR MORE AFRAID THAN ANYONE ELSE YOU KNOW
• AFRAID OF SHIT IT WOULD NEVER OCCUR TO ANYONE ELSE TO BE AFRAID OF
• Able to multitask and BE AFRAID OF SEVERAL THINGS AT THE SAME TIME. (My personal record, occurring this afternoon, 20 things, and if you give me a minute, I’ll make it 21.)
• Able to drop everything and BE AFRAID AT A MOMENT’S NOTICE
• Also ABLE TO BE AFRAID WHILE DOING OTHER THINGS, so the future employer will know that I’m just not sitting around on the couch eating bon-bons being fearful, but that I pretty much can do anything AND BE AFRAID TOO.

So it will be very much like hiring TWO PEOPLE instead of one. You can hire me to wash the dog and worry about having anaphylactic shock from the soap, fleas  from the dog, germs from the dog that carry a special brain disease that only people with blonde hair and blue eyes get, and so that research for the cure is underfunded and what cure their might be is almost totally inaccessible and really expensive; plus, given I don’t get paid enough to even buy 1/8 of the vaccine under development, and since it can only be grown in one strain of African-violets that don’t grow in New Mexico where I live, I can worry about the inaccessibility of obtaining a vaccine that doesn’t really exist yet and that I can’t afford because                      a) I’m a dog washer,  b) I live in New Mexico where wages SUCK, and I can also be afraid that if the pending vaccine  devastates the population of the African violets, it will cheat the world of said African violets, and also kill off a special population of mites that only grow in African violets, that, as it turns out, would be the answer to curing stupidity in humans, so then I might have to also be afraid of the fact that, if I save myself by taking the vaccine, I might have just killed off the human race.

Am I hired yet?

I can be afraid of anything. Give me a minute and I’ll find a reason to be terrified of the color shirt you are wearing. Yes, I am that good.

WHY WE SHOULD PAY PEOPLE TO BE AFRAID

Why, you ask, should we pay people to be afraid? A very good question and right now I won’t be anxious about why you are asking me that, and I won’t worry about feeling invalidated or that I might have just proposed the stupidest thing ever. I figure that if we can pay the guys on Jackass who injure themselves on purpose on video, and hire that rich ignorant bitch Paris Hilton to do commercials, I can get paid for being afraid. Right now I also won’t be concerned about the fact that you are thinking I’m the biggest pussy ever. My usual response to that accusation is: Just because I have a pussy doesn’t mean I am one.

I can also turn the fear off, for a while anyway, which is handy while I’m receiving instructions from the aliens, no ha ha, just kidding, my boss (who I have been assured is not an alien although he kind of has that “look,”—those of you who are familiar with aliens know what I mean­­­) anyway, while receiving instructions from my boss, I can turn the fear off long enough to listen without worrying about if the boss is trying to kill me, or what he really means when he says, “Make sure you get the dogs wet when you are bathing them.” (Yes yes everyone makes foolish mistakes sometimes. You can’t dry clean a dog apparently. Apologies to Mrs. Dunham. Your new dog is being shipped to you on a drone by Amazon. Accessories will have to be dropped on your house separately).

THE INTROVERTED TERRORIST

Okay, so why should I get paid handsomely for becoming a professional Terrorist?

The word terrorist is misunderstood and misused. A terrorist should also include someone who can instill terror in him or herself, thereby obviating the need for extroverted terrorist types to spend time and money trying to make me afraid because I, being a total professional introverted terrorist, have been able to do that for myself. To show you how accomplished I really am and how much you need to hire me: I was afraid of Ebola, George W. Bush and the Tea Party before they even existed. There. That should convince you that out of all the scared people in the world, I am the one worth paying.

I am negotiating with the extroverted terrorists as we speak: they could pay me to automatically be afraid of them at a fraction of the cost it would take them to make me afraid of them. The government should pay me for my public service.

So should you.

I can also teach others to be introverted terrorists. See, mom, that Ph.D. wasn’t for nothing!

I AM BETTER AT BEING AFRAID THAN YOU

So why you should pay me to be afraid? Because I can be afraid of the things you would be afraid of if you could just expand beyond monsters under the bed, creepy things in the closet and death. That one, especially, is so yesterday. Any person with consciousness, skin and an email account can be afraid of death. What you need is someone to be afraid of things you never thought of so you don’t have to do it, and to also take over being afraid of what’s in the closet, under the bed, and in the afterlife (which is a really weird term if you think about it….if you are still alive how the hell is it the afterlife?).

Also the thing about being afraid all the time is that it has a threshold; if you are afraid of something long enough, and think about it all the time and imagine all the possible scenarios, eventually, you get bored and also your nervous system collapses and you couldn’t be afraid of it if you tried. But this is time consuming and dangerous. People can die from being afraid. If you hire me, I’ll save your life.

WHAT MONSTERS SAY ABOUT ME

Basically I am so afraid I wear the fears out. They get up and go home and complain about me to the other monsters in the closet, “Oh my god, so needy. One or two ‘boos’ or ‘gotcha’s’ or ‘I’m here to kill you and take your soul to hell’ does the trick with most people, and then I go home and watch Ghoul-Flix. Not with her. We scare the crap out of her and she comes back for more. It’s like a nagging bratty spoiled child: what else can I be afraid of? What else can I be afraid of? Huh? Last night I ran out of shit to scare her with!

“She used up fearing having no transportation, being unemployed, having breast cancer with no insurance, having no friends who would help her during the breast cancer treatment, being diagnosed with M.S., (that’s Multiple Sclerosis, not a master’s of science) never having sex again, never having love again, not being able to write because she’s living in a box, with breast cancer, MS, rats, and other dirty people who can’t spell because of the outbreak of texting, and because her computer broke and she couldn’t replace it; going insane, having Ebola, having the Republicans take over the Senate, having the Republicans steal to 2016 election, making Fox News the only news channel in the U.S., having to relocate to Oklahoma; Roe v Wade being reversed, birth control being outlawed, and being made to adopt a baby at age 47 and care for her with no money and being made to shop at Wal-Mart on Black Friday every year until she dies; and after it was said and done, Debbie still said: Okay, what else you got?  I was tempted to say, ‘And you want to be a published successful writer!’ but even I thought that was over the top. I’m a humane monster. If she’s dead, she can’t be afraid anymore and what is the point of that?

“I had to make up some shit about how lint can get stuck in your belly button and cause almost instant ovarian disease in women over forty-five, who are blond, experiencing peri-menopause, who have a history of using nicotine gum to get over smoking, and who teach at UNM, read Nancy Drew as a child and have bad gums.”

“Wow, Gerald (the monster’s name is Gerald), that’s some amazing individualized targeting,” says Gerald’s buddy, whose name is, predictably, “Creepy.”

“I know! Can you believe it? I should get overtime for this shit. I had to get the Gene Identification Team on it,” says Gerald. “You should see her fucking genome.”

“That must be really scary,” says Creepy shuddering.

HOW EMPLOYING ME WILL MAKE YOU RICH                       

So, you see basically someone who is willing to be afraid not only of what they are afraid of, but what you are afraid of, can eventually wear out the fear to the point that it doesn’t exist anymore, and yet you didn’t waste any time on it. I did. So basically you compensate me, because I’m way better and more efficient at being afraid than you are, for doing the dirty work and you can get back to being brave, and winning the Nobel Peace prize, or at least conquering level 23 of Candy Crush with a focus not yet seen among human beings.

And I will be able to buy myself dinner and stop eating Ramen noodles, because if there ever was a scary substance, that one is it, just behind pork rinds, and whatever the hell tofu really is. And that seitan shit? That stuff is pure gluten. Seriously. Look it up.

THE U.S. ECONOMY RUNS ON FEAR

Seriously, I should also be paid to be afraid because our economy runs on fear. People are afraid they are fat, so they go on diets, buy diet books and diet products to make them thinner. People are afraid they are ugly and unloved, so they buy    make up and cars to compensate. People are afraid of jihadists flying airplanes into more buildings, so we support an economy based on the implements of war. Fear is very profitable to businesses and very expensive for people. So for a very reasonable fee, I can be afraid for you. You can spend the money you would have spent on Prozac and Xanex on me. All the money you would have spent on fear based products, you could have spent on me instead, and I could make all that foolish purchasing on your behalf, thereby saving you money and rescuing our economy at the same time.

If that economic plan doesn’t quite make sense to you, turn on Fox News, and listen to any Republican on T.V. (because they don’t let the smarter ones talk anymore for fear of an outbreak of reasonableness), especially a Tea Partier, or anyone in Congress. After a day of that, you’ll see my reasoning is absolutely spotless and that you should pay me to make all your Fear Purchasing for you, and I’ll throw in actually being afraid for you for a nominal fee and free you up for all that time consuming, heartless capitalism you’ll be employing instead because you’ll no longer be afraid of hell, or instant or time-delayed karma. You can invest freely and suck the world dry.

FEAR: A POLITICAL SOLUTION

Politicians instill fear so they can pretend to be the solution, which is the reason why the idiots running Maine, New Jersey, and New York State are quarantining people who have been in West Africa, despite well documented evidence that unless someone has a high fever and is vomiting and shitting uncontrollably all over the place, they are not contagious. The elected officials are doing this to get votes. Here’s how it works.  First, you create more fear by ignoring the facts provided by the CDC and then you take care of the unreasonable fear by implementing strategies to prevent infections that would never have happened to begin with so you can argue that you were “looking out for the people,” and garner votes from the part of the population that doesn’t bother to think past Fox News and CNN, which is mostly everyone. Obviously making the right people afraid is powerful, so let me help you get your favorite politicians elected by me developing all the needed fears and then voting in all the right places, since apparently voter fraud is endemic in this country and I can get out the FEAR VOTE as many times as I want.

PAY ME TO SCARE OTHERS AND PROFIT FROM IT

Since fear is contagious (I have no idea why it’s never been quarantined. I should definitely be locked up) I can help make others afraid and get them to do what you want to do for your business or political aspirations, by simply being afraid in the most professional ways possible. Want some people to be afraid of the sun? Hand it over to me. Not only will I find ways to be afraid of sunlight that no one else ever thought of, I will induce that fear in someone else, so you can sell that new product for skin and also for FEAR that you have now developed because you were smart enough to pay me to be afraid for you and then I gave the fear to other people and now you can sell your new sugar pill to everyone I’ve come in contact with. (Note that I’m hypoglycemic and the placebo won’t work on me).

I blog therefore I can spread Fear like an air-born virus and all without throwing up on someone’s leg. Hire me. I’m better at being afraid than anyone else and I’m very sure that by employing me, you can profit from it.

And I will get to do what I do best: be afraid!  I fucking like it! Who wouldn’t? We all like what we’re good at. 🙂

Fear has turned me into a monster.

And look out: this year for Halloween I will have the scariest costume ever. I’m going as gluten.

BOO!

The Laughing Coyote