Avast, me mateys!

Guess what? I am like a full-blown adventurer now.

Last week, I was up to my cooch in whitewater.

This week, I boarded the H.M.S. Bounty.

Yeah, the other night, around midnight, I crept silently down the dock in San Pedro where she was berthed, climbed up the rope ladder and boarded her. Had a look around. Took the helm. You know, your basic sailor/pirate-type stuff.

We were dropping off Spooney’s visiting nephew, who’s a crewmate on the Bounty, after a night of plying him with margaritas and tacos carbon – which he mispronounced “tacos cabron,” by the way, which is definitely NOT something you want to say to a Mexican waiter in my neighborhood. But, anyway, the best part is that he’s going to invite us back during some tall ships festival thing in a couple of months and let us stand on the deck while she’s actually in motion and everything.

Whoooooooooohooooooooo!!! I’m the king of the world! Listen, don’t you ever call me a dried-up old cougar, man. I’m not a cougar. I might wrestle one, though. Yeah. That’s my next adventure: wrestle a freakin cougar.

Although I’d hate to injure a cougar. Or a puma, or a mountain lion, or whatever you want to call them, because next to a black panther, a cougar is like the most beautiful cat there is. Well, okay, Siberian tigers are pretty stunning, too. So are jaguars. In fact, all cats are beautiful, except for this one.

So, anyway, the point is, during the last couple of years, I have been making a concerted effort to combat the approach of fear creep.

I first noticed fear creep about 3 years ago, when sis and I were in Vegas for Xmas and we decided to ride the roller coaster in that casino that’s pretending to be New York City. That coaster is so tightly coiled that as we went roaring past adjacent tracks and jutting supports with mere inches to spare I suddenly became very frightened that the car was going to send us crashing into something. I became so frightened of that prospect that I did not enjoy the ride. That is not like me. I freaking LOVE roller coasters. I love to scream. I love being scared. It is so not like me panic on some pansy-ass Vegas excuse for a roller coaster.

You’d think that as we get older, we would be less afraid than we were young, because we already have a good part of our lives behind us, and therefore…um…less to lose?

But of course it doesn’t work that way. And that is why we have Republicans.

You’ve all heard some version of the joke, often misattributed to Churchill, that a young conservative has no heart, and an old liberal has no brains.

First of all, while probably touching upon some kind of basic truth, that statement is also the single most cynical thing I have ever heard in my life. Is this what life experiences are supposed to teach us, to be more selfish?

Wait a minute, am I equating Republican philosophy with selfishness?

Hells yeah. Which is why, I guess, I don’t understand why, in this country, everyone always acts as is the opinions of both sides have equal validity. Opposing civil rights for gay people is not a valid point of view. Letting poor people suffer or die because they can’t pay for health care is not a valid point of view. Enabling business to obstruct the rights of workers to organize is not a valid point of view. Those are not examples of valid, alternate thinking. Those are examples of WRONGNESS. Wrongity-wrong-wrongness, in fact. Those are examples of “what’s good for business, is good for the country,” and that philosophy is wrong. It just is. Business is, by its very nature, selfish. And selfishness is wrong, right? We were all taught it. The great philosophies of the world espouse it. Jesus was so on it.

But then, once your income hits a certain figure, and once the word “portfolio” enters your lexicon, and once it becomes acceptable to loudly blather in public on your cell phone at Denver International Airport about your income, and your next boat, and how “it’s all good,” outrageous self-interest suddenly becomes socially acceptable. If it were up to me, people who say things like “get me drunk sometime and I’ll tell you how much I make” should be taken out by the INS and put up for sale to other countries. Because I’m sure there are some underprivileged nations in the world that are in desperate need of overinflated tools.

I’m not saying that I’m not way, way, too selfish. Hell, my shoe closet speaks volumes about my priorities. But I also think that our government is there to aid in our civilization, and what is civilization if it’s not about trying, as RFK said, to “make gentle the life of this world”?

So I’m probably not going to wrestle any cougars this weekend, I mean, unless Kim Catrall throws the first punch, of course, but I think I will ride my bike very fast on the bike path, and maybe eat something I’ve never tried before, or, at the very least, listen to some music that everyone my age thinks is “just noise.” Anything to keep the fear at bay, people. Anything to chase the fear from my heart.