Death by Spontaneous Internal Yeast Suffocation

A couple of times a week, as my wife and I are sitting in our bed waiting for sleep to befall us, we can hear the not-so-faint cackling of a riotous pack of coyotes that congregate in the vacant land just beyond our yard’s back wall. And though it sounds downright crazy to have a herd of coyotes living just beyond your property line, I assure that this phenomenon is very real.

With the cackling and occasional agonized yelps of the coyotes setting the unnerving backdrop, Angela’s mind begins to conjure up scenarios of super-intelligent coyote committees that work in complete harmony to accomplish such goals as hop our 8-foot tall fence, open our locked doors, enter our home, devour us, and perhaps even steal our most precious possessions including her printer and my PC. Yet, surely there are many holes in Angela’s phobia of hyper-evolved coyotes. (For instance, if the coyotes were smart enough to pick the locks, wouldn’t they also be smart enough to take her Apple computer instead of my PC? I mean, come on, who wants to deal with “this program has performed an illegal operation and must be shutdown” six times a day?) However, in the moment of her fear, logic is placed on the back burner and raw emotion is the plat du jour.

We all occasionally fall victim to our illogical fears that unreasonably beset us and allow emotion to drive us wildly. I, for instance, am plagued with the nagging thought that if I eat bread that is undercooked so as to be doughy in the middle, the yeast will continue to react until it fills my stomach and throat leaving me entirely unable to breath. (Spontaneous internal yeast suffocation (S.I.Y.S.) would be an unfortunate way to go). It’s the same kind of half-cocked logic that makes us think twice before swallowing watermelon seeds lest they burrow themselves into the lining of our stomachs and begin to sprout, or that causes us to check a dozen times to ensure that our fly is in the fully upright and locked position before leaving the house.

Now, some experts might encourage us to question or challenge these preposterous phobias, that we might free ourselves from their grasps. And that would probably be a good idea. The only problem is that one of my illogical fears is that all the experts are together colluding for the purpose of convincing us that our very real fears (of things like coyote committees and death by S.I.Y.S.) are actually illogical. That way, when these “illogical” fears strike, we’ll be caught completely unprepared.