The Wikiness

Ten-year-old me is afraid…

• …that even though I have asked the Lord Jesus Christ to be my personal saviour, there is always a chance that it hasn’t worked, and I will be thrown into the Lake of Fire with all the other sinners. Then, when the Rapture happens I will have to live through seven years of tribulation under Anti-Christ, just as The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay and dozens of Chick tracts have told me.
• …that we will run out of our 8-packs of Coke or Pepsi, and I will have to make do with an-off brand of corn syrup-sweetened caffeinated beverage. My fear is the addict’s fear of running out. This bubbly beveridge makee my life reliably cheerier, if only for a biochemical moment. I am a pop fiend at age 10. 
• …that even if I am saved, my Roman Catholic buddies will all burn in hell, and I meanwhile will be bored the eternal church service of my family religion’s heaven.
• …that Mom will embarrass me again in front of my friends and teachers by acting in psychotic ways. She is prone to doing so when not in a self-induced coma or institutionalized.
• …that Russian missiles will strike ground zero for Chicagoland, the corner of Harlem and Lake, and everything I loved and I myself will be instantly vaporized.
• …that someone will  put my hand in warm water at my next sleepover and provoke me to pee my sleeping bag, destroying whatever status I have and consigning me to loserhood. 
• …that like Brian Piccolo in Brian’s Song, a specific episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., and my third  grade classmate Tim Keifer, my life will be cut short by cancer
• …that Mrs. Edwards will use her harsh words and unkind tone on me when I’m not sure how to do the math problem correctly. 
• …that someone will discover my theft of her teacher’s edition.
• …that my home life will continue to get worse and worse, as it has for as long as I can remember.
• …that my male friends will see me coming from or going to Sunday School and tease me mercilessly.
• …that the Indo-Pakistan War will bring on Armageddon.
• And finally, I am afraid that rats, such as those in the movie Willard, will swarm over and eat me, and that my house could be haunted as in the Steven Spielberg-directed TV movie Something Evil, and that dying a sinner and sent to hell’s ante room, I will endure the suffering depicted in the British film Tales from the Crypt–especially the ripped out, beating heart, the body convulsing from embalming fluid, or the death by razor blades perpetrated by inmates at the home for the blind. I saw that movie twice at the Ritz.