A couple of years ago I wrote an essay titled "Choose Your Own Adventure For 80s Kids." ” It’s an essay about the collective fears those of us who grew up in the 80s felt, such fears including nuclear annihilation, Satanism, and board games, and it’s the first essay in my new book,
Constantly living in fear can be debilitating. I’m so glad most people no longer pay attention to these things and that such lazy propaganda isn’t brazenly pushed anymore. It does no good for anyone to be always sceptical about their neighbours or people in a foreign country.
And piranhas aren’t particularly prone to biting people. It seems they typically use those massive teeth to nip off bits of the fins of other fish. Fins. Not even flesh.
I remember going bowhunting with my dad and walking through muck, and mentioning quicksand. The hunters all said it didn't exist, just sucking mud. We didn't get any deer that day, and a little part of my childhood died.
Do you think those fears formed a strange sort of inoculation? Like, when everyone became afraid that Putin might use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine, I breathed a big sigh of relief, like, yeah, I grew up with that fear. It's familiar and therefore, not as scary. Been there, done that.
My own version of quicksand was hostile alien invasion and takeover, inspired solely by V the mini-series. That show scared the crap out of me. I had a place in my house mapped out where I would hide from the alien invasion. None of the benevolent alien movies--E.T., Starman, Cocoon--could erase the terror of V.
Retired children's librarian here: in 1984 The Quicksand Book by Tomie dePaola was published. As a young girl sinks into quicksand, the nerdish rescuer takes the time to give her a lecture on facts about the subject. Too bad you didn't run across this book as a kid.
Constantly living in fear can be debilitating. I’m so glad most people no longer pay attention to these things and that such lazy propaganda isn’t brazenly pushed anymore. It does no good for anyone to be always sceptical about their neighbours or people in a foreign country.
And piranhas aren’t particularly prone to biting people. It seems they typically use those massive teeth to nip off bits of the fins of other fish. Fins. Not even flesh.
I remember going bowhunting with my dad and walking through muck, and mentioning quicksand. The hunters all said it didn't exist, just sucking mud. We didn't get any deer that day, and a little part of my childhood died.
Do you think those fears formed a strange sort of inoculation? Like, when everyone became afraid that Putin might use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine, I breathed a big sigh of relief, like, yeah, I grew up with that fear. It's familiar and therefore, not as scary. Been there, done that.
My own version of quicksand was hostile alien invasion and takeover, inspired solely by V the mini-series. That show scared the crap out of me. I had a place in my house mapped out where I would hide from the alien invasion. None of the benevolent alien movies--E.T., Starman, Cocoon--could erase the terror of V.
Retired children's librarian here: in 1984 The Quicksand Book by Tomie dePaola was published. As a young girl sinks into quicksand, the nerdish rescuer takes the time to give her a lecture on facts about the subject. Too bad you didn't run across this book as a kid.