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The other day, courtesy of Street Bike Tommy*, I learned a new word: ergophobia, which can loosely mean the irrational fear of work or the workplace. I don’t believe I have ergophobia per se, but I do have a fear of being contained in a cubicle-oriented environment**. So whenever a Dickhouse production gears up it’s always good to be budgeted in on the travel end of matters. Wildboyz was the prime candidate for this, what with all its globe-trotting adventures, but the series also coincided with the first couple years of my son’s life on Earth and that was something I wasn’t going to miss out on.

Undeniably, though, there was an ulterior reason for my staying home and that’s my irrational fear of exotic bug species. Specifically spiders. And had that been me in Brazil, you can bet your scared bottom dollar that I might have been two or three times the figurative girl that Trip Taylor was in this featured clip. I must admit, however, that I’m not so sure I could have contorted and spun my body in quite so graceful a manner as he did. Mine would’ve been much more akin to that of an epileptic seizure, whereas his poise clearly comes from a lifetime of surfing.

I should say that my arachnophobia has lessened throughout the years, but at one time it was downright textbook pathetic. Luckily I have no shame in the matter, so here’s a portrait of the phobic as a young man:

The year was 1992. I’d just finished up visiting with a friend in Santa Barbara and was making my way over to the 101 southbound for the return trip to Los Angeles. As I was driving down Calle Real, a stretch of road running parallel to the 101 northbound, I took note of a skittering motion on my dashboard. It was one of those industrial-sized mosquito-looking insects. Technically, no, it’s not a spider by any stretch of the class (six legs versus eight, for starters), but what it does trigger deep within my psyche is the terrorizer of my youth, the daddy long-legs spider.

Very calmly—and I must stress this state because it is wholly factually correct—very calmly, I opened the driver’s side window and reached over to the passenger seat to pick up a magazine. With my right hand on the steering wheel, I attempted to brush the insect—which was now headed directly toward me due to the newly created vehicular air currents—out of my personal cabin space. With 100-percent of my attention now focused on the bug, I realized that it was actually just a dead and dried out husk of its former self—and that’s the point at which the steering wheel violently wrenched from my grasp as the right front wheel struck and jumped the curb at approximately 40mph.

I believe it was then that the front axle broke, but not that it really mattered because I still had 30-feet of chain link fence and a stump or two to take out before my car ground to a halt, precariously balanced on its driver’s side, no less than 15-feet from going into the oncoming traffic lanes of the 101 northbound. No less miraculous, was the fact that I had not been wearing a seat belt at the time yet had not a single bruise or scratch on my body. It was bizarre. One second I’d been driving, the next I was laying on my side with my shoulder in the dirt—all destructive else that had taken place went down in the mere seconds between.

What was going through my head at this point? Well, the first thought was, “Fuck, that was dumb.” The second was, “Aw, man, my fuckin’ Girl Scout cookies are in the dirt!” (It’s true … I’d been finishing off a column of mint chocolate disks just before all hell broke loose.) And the third was, “Uh, now what do I do?” Luckily there wasn’t much time for thought after that, because some dude anxiously popped his head into the passenger’s window (that was now oddly above me) and asked if I was okay. I calmly assured him that I was and, with his help, started to crawl my way up and out of the vehicle. Apparently he’d been driving behind me at the time my shit went haywire, and if it wasn’t for his “Good Samaritan” act I don’t know how long I would’ve sat there in the dirt; it’s just my mellow, inert nature.

I guess I was acting too calm for my own good, though, because he sternly suggested I go and sit over by the fence—the part I hadn’t obliterated—thinking I was in a state of shock. Or maybe stoned? I don’t know. A CHP officer showed up shortly thereafter, and upon ascertaining that I was physically fine he asked me what exactly had happened. Without skipping a beat, I told him that a wasp had flown in my window and started acting all crazy-like, the manner of which caused me to lose control and total the vehicle (that’s right, I totaled it over a dead mosquito impostor). He looked at me funny, but down it went into police record; a lie that Mother Nature would attempt to karmically correct in the coming year on no less than three separate occasions when a bee actually did fly into my car. Finally, after the third incident, I could bear the weight upon my soul no more and spilled the truthful beans as to what really went down that day to a few very close friends—most of whom still remember and reference the tale to this day, seventeen years later.

But, like I said, I’ve gotten a lot better since then.

* I’d like to clarify this post was written and scheduled days prior to Emma’s coincidental topic in the discussion zone. I’d loaded up this week’s posts last week in anticipation of potential spotty Interweb connections while in Costa Rica. So all you potential naysayers can suck it!

** While my current day job is very much a “desk job,” it’s also one that really isn’t a “real job.” Watch the web cam, you’ll see what I mean.

more wildboyz:

	more videos from wildboyz season two
	wildboyz on jackassworld