PNG'd

The one thing I can say about my parents and about my grandparents and all their grandparents and that guy in that painting in the living room, who is allegedly an ancestor from back when the family name meant something but now never will and your father and I are so disappointed, or might just have been bought at a garage sale I can’t remember, is that they were survivors. And not just any survivors! They were survivors who got laid.

And how do I know that my parents liked to screw? Because I’m here. (And because I didn’t hear them yelling ‘don’t open the door’.) In the absence of any metric to determine in advance who will survive and get lucky you have to look at the outcome to determine who those people were.*

It’s kind of the same for figuring out who will freak out here. Are you the kind of person who’s going to be a liability in a tense situation? Are you inclined to panic over the regular thumps of mortars and rockets? Dunno. You might be you and you might not be. And you probably won’t know until one goes off.

Am you going to jump every time you hear nearby gunfire? No. But frankly if you’re coming out of a city or off a farm and guns scare you…
Will you freak out when explosions rattle the walls and make your ears pop? No. But I might have if I hadn’t been so worried about dropping my beer.
Will I freak out when someone shoots at me?
Or when I’m knocked off my feet in an explosion? Dunno. It hasn’t happened.

There’s no reason to expect that you will be able handle it. So you stay prepared, keep your armor close at hand, and practice in your head what you’re supposed to do. Which is always: Get your ass flat on the ground and crawl to one of the ubiquitous concrete shelters. They’re bright yellow and labeled “Duck and Cover” like the cold war jingle.

But you can’t be paranoid and jumpy all day long. Because almost all day everyday - things are OK.

So relax.

There’s beer in the world and the sun’s out.