Cracked's The 5 least courageous things ever done in a crisis got me thinking. Everyone, or at least every guy I've ever met likes to think that if there was a crisis, they'd be super brave. Like Mark Wahlberg preventing 9/11 brave. They'd do all the right things and be a hero, just like Sean Penn after Katrina. The reality is that most people, most of the time, turn into giant pussies when a crisis happens. Faced with a real and serious threat, self preservation instinct kicks in and they discover their french ancestry. I know all of you jackals have rescued babies from burning buildings and every one of you who ever thought about enlisting for the chair force saved a Delta squadron from an ambush single handledly, while drinking a martini. But have you ever been a giant coward? Had the chance to be awesome and bravely run away? Have you ever thrown someone to the bears so that you could make your getaway? Or have you ever been thrown to the bears so that someone else could make their getaway? Focus: Funny stories about cowards
I'm going to assume that you're talking about real life & death cowardice and are not interested in hearing boring story #10482 about someone being too chickenshit to ask out/talk to a woman. Focus: Whenever I get the impression that something of the bee/hornet variety is coming my way I'm either killing it or running like a bitch. The worst was probably when I was throwing rocks a a nest just to see if I could get a reaction (I was 13), thinking if I stood far enough away that the hornets wouldn't be smart enough to figure out who was disturbing their home. When I saw a couple fly out and head immediately toward me I was quickly divested of that notion and ran faster than I've probably ever run in my whole life. I was never a runner but holy shit those fuckers followed me a long way and I didn't stop running until I got back to my house which was about a half-mile away. I was convinced they were waiting outside for me and refused to go out until the next day. When I finally cracked under my parents quesitoning they just laughed at me, which I obviously deserved. I didn't antagonize any more bee nests after that.
When I was 12, I somehow accumulated a bunch of random boards and 2x4s to create my DITCH HOUSE. There is a cement ditch that runs along the back of my parents' property along a tall privacy fence. There is a shed, a wood shed and pile, and a row of azaleas in front of the ditch so the view is obscured. I laid 2x4s every 2 feet or so across the ditch, and then perpendicularly laid a shitton of flat boards to create a platform. Then I laid corrugated sheets of rusty tin from the back of the wood shed to the horizontal supports of the privacy fence. VOILA! A hangout! Anyway, any hangout is boring without some form of entertainment. So I strung God knows how many feet of extension cord out to my hangout and hooked up my radio. One boring afternoon, there I was, trying to get a station to come in clear. My little 8 year old brother is there annoying me. "UGH go away!" "Bewildered, what is that noise?" "UGH nothing go away stupid." "No. No...listen..." Finally, I turn off the radio to take a listen. From the other side of the wood pile I hear growling. My heart starts fluttering in my chest. THIS IS ALABAMA. Who the fuck knows what kind of hell is on the other side. Additionally, our neighbor across the street had a chow chow that was notorious for getting loose and wrecking havoc on my little brother. Was it the chow? Oh my God, there is a rabid dog loose. Then we saw a quick flash of peachy colored something. Oh my God, it's a possum. IT'S A RABID POSSUM. "Brother," I whispered, "I...I think it's a possum. It has rabies. What are we going to do? We're trapped." "Just run as fast as you can. You go first. Just run to the house." Me, completely barefoot, sprint faster than I have ever run in my life, through the leaves, the dirt, the rocks, the carport, and finally into the house where I slam the door behind me. I stand in the laundry room, so scared that I am literally shaking and tears are streaming down my face. I stand there weeping in the laundry room while my heart nearly beats out of my chest. The door opens. My dad is laughing so hard he is crying. "I've never seen anyone run that fast!" My brother is behind him giggling. My brother was smart enough to creep out and see what the hell was growling. Which happened to be my dad. Fight or flight? I guess we all now know.
I personally think I have every right to be scared out of my mind in this story, but in retrospect I think the details of my reaction are kind of funny. My first apartment in Boston was one of those apartments that's just a hallway with a row of rooms on one side and closets and the kitchen on the other side. My room was the one closest to the door. Our door didn't automatically lock, and we weren't always great with remembering to lock it when we were inside the apartment. We usually remembered to lock the door at night but, one night right when I was about to fall asleep (and I think I may have been home alone), I heard someone open the door without even trying a key in the lock. They stepped inside, closed the door, and didn't move. They just kept standing there, so it was obviously not one of my roommates. Clearly, I am about to die. Being there when someone breaks into my apartment (or coming home to someone having broken into my apartment) is one of my biggest fears. I was completely frozen, totally overwhelmed by fear, listening to this stranger in my house shifting their weight and breathing. So what do I do? I pull my covers over my head and hide, like a toddler scared of monsters in their closet, because obviously if a murdererapist is going to come murderape me he's going to respect the rule of "If I can't see you, you can't see me" and leave me unharmed. I had actually been in a similar situation before, and it was the only time that I have physically attacked and injured someone, so I know that I have the potential to react awesomely to a crisis. Only that time, it ended up being my friends playing a joke on me that went horribly awry, and this time I was in actual potential danger and I hid like a child. (After he stood there for a few minutes, he eventually left, so this has a very anticlimactic ending. I think it breaks down into three options: a 50% chance that it was just some drunk idiot who got confused and walked into our apartment thinking it was his and then realized his mistake, a 45% chance that it was actually an attempted burglary but then they got scared or maybe realized I was there and changed their minds,and a 5% chance that maybe it was just some intense auditory hallucination or one of those weird half-dreams you have when you're not fully asleep yet, even though I was VERY awake after they came in.)
College boyfriend. Spring vacation in Hawaii. Snorkeling in beautiful Hanauma Bay. Gorgeous fish, reef, turquoise water. Only here's what they don't tell you: you take your little $1.25 bags of fish food, you get out into the water, and you realize that the water near you is churning. And the fucking fish are coming for you, and they're slippery and cold and insistent and decently powerful and there's a LOT of them. Once they started nudging at me and my bags of fishfood, I freaked out...and they can't hear you screaming when you're wearing a snorkel mask. My gut instincts kicked in, so I did what anyone would do. My boyfriend was ten feet away and swimming up to see how I was doing...so I chucked my bags at him and swam in the opposite direction....the open plastic bags immediately exploded fishfood pellets around him like confetti. The last I saw, the water was starting to churn around him. ========== Come to think of it...husband and I vacationed in Paris a few years ago, and got a nice little vacation rental pied a terre. We obtained our key, and found the little apartment foyer. My dear sweet loving husband then climbed up the very steep and narrow, very dark spiral stairs to try and find our place. He came back down, unable to figure out which one was ours, reporting back that the staircase just got darker and darker the further he went up, and it was impossible to see which apartment was which, and he could hear noises but he didn't want to knock on anyone's door to ask what was what. At this point, I was pissed, so I grabbed some bags and started up the stairs myself and told him to follow me with the rest of the bags. The staircase was so dark and narrow it felt like an MRI, and he was right, it was impossible to tell what the apartment numbers were or what floor was what. We were still climbing slowly upwards, but were now hearing strange noises, and it was completely dark at this point. "OK, turn around....turn around!" I hissed at him. He was hauling our two huge duffel bags, so he was slow to maneuver his turnaround below me. My only thought was to get the fuck out of there immediately, and that moment, with my dear sweet loving wonderful husband, was blocking my escape route. As he was huffing and puffing and trying to maneuver in the pitch dark in what was basically a small tunnel, I contemplated pushing him down the stairs. I figured he'd roll down the stairs with the bags, and it would be the quickest escape route. I settled for nudging him down the five floors, and landing on top of him and the duffel bags at the bottom. ============ Husband and I also have a standing agreement, based on his original offer, that if we're in public and I fart, I can blame it on him. Is that cowardly?
I was 14, and my friend's dad decided to turn a play date into a paintball outing. I had never gone paintballing before, and I had absolutely no idea what to expect. It was rainy, cold, and honestly just a shitty day to go shooting. My goggles fogged up, and my squad of teammates was heading up a tunnel Vietnam War style. It was sorta above-ground, but it was narrow and dark and quite honestly scared the shit out of me. Shots started hitting around me, (the other team had the jump on us and was lighting us up) and I curled up in a ball and screamed like a bitch. You know that scene in Band of Brothers where the dude was sitting in the foxhole screaming as bullets pinged around him? That was me, except it was paintballs. Plenty of kids (including those on my own team) started laughing at me, which I responded to by quitting and calling my mom to take me home. Very, very masculine.
My mom always harrasses me about how when I was younger about cowering whenever we walked through bad neighborhoods and would flee with my own self interest first and foremost when danger arose. I think I grew out of it a bit, having little sisters helps. Worst I've seen is definitely the dude I saw last week walking his daughter in a stroller. A car swerved and for a split second looked as if it was coming for the sidewalk. Homie literally dove into the bushes leaving the stroller, and his offspring within, on the curb. What a pussy.
Mine is similar to Nicole's. I was about 12 or so and snorkeling with my sister in the Caribbean. We're trucking through a shallow part of the sand/grass mix looking at the fish when we see a dark spot ahead of us. I go investigate thinking it was just a hole in the sand, but when i get closer, a stingray emerges from the spot and swims away. I scream like a little girl and run/swim away as fast as I could, all the while my sister is a safe distance away laughing her ass off.
Buddy of mine and I went night hiking on Monte Sano Mountain in Alabama. Night hiking, it's hiking, at night, no flashlights, the trail often looks exactly like stuff that is definitely not the trail, and it's in general a terrible idea. We're about an hour in, so about a mile at the slow pace you have to go, and we hear something growl. "That was bigger than a breadbox." Cannot see what it was, and yeah, THIS IS ALABAMA. There are thousand pound pigs here: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275524,00.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275524,00.html</a> I didn't run though. I'd like to say I was brave and my fight instinct kicked in when I readied myself to kick at any sign of movement. But, no. I didn't run because I couldn't see where to run to. Nothing happened though, was just growled at and got real scared.