Rats.
big, ten-pound filth magnets that stand up on their hind legs when you're in their territory.

damn I hate those little guys. It's not like I couldn't stomp the shit outta them, but for theat split second when they get all indignant about my presence, they can be frightening.

and then I get my stick, that's right, the whacking one.

Ooo, and its evil cousin, vermin guts. Once I whacked a cockroach, and its entrails stuck it to the floor. But the thing kept trying to creep away! It dragged itself in little circles, smearing its innards all over the kitchen floor!

My, what a wonderful image you have conjured up to go with my morning coffee.

oh that was it - I forgot rats.
recently, I overcame my vertigo and walked on a narrow ledge in a conservatory. So I thought I had the fears under control. Till you brought up those miserable buggers.

Maybe not so much fear, as irrational disgust.

Same as the charming cat, going to prison. *shudder*

That, and the aforementioned pod people.

"Must. Ingest. More. Crank. Can't sleep, pod people'll get me."

That I won't wake up.
Speaking in front of large groups of people.

Wait no...you can't use those against me. Damn you, thought police, foiled me again.

left-wing government. irrational? hope so.

Barking dogs. Even a small barking dog that makes an aggressive move at me stands up the hair on the back of my neck, cold sweat starts rolling down my back and adrenaline starts pumping through my bloodstream. I figure I must have had a bad experience with a dog as a child to get so worked up about dogs now.
Of course, other people find my reaction very amusing. I especially love going to people's houses where they have a barking dog that sets me off. That's a great laugh, that one. I tend to go from abject fear to smoldering rage at the dog after it happens, so while everyone is laughing I'm telepathically telling the dog that I am going to rip off his head for him.

My wife is afraid of moths and cranes (the machines not the birds). My sister is afraid of escalators. Everytime I find an article about a crane or escalator incident, I can't resist passing it along to them.

my sister is also terrified of moths... she will run screaming from a room.

my father told us that moths ate eyebrows when we were little, and we were all scared of them. She never out grew it.

I don't know about irrational fears. Insects creep me out a bit, particularly mantises, grasshoppers and crickets. I've become used to cockroaches - you have to in this city. Having a quiet evening at home Friday night and eight of the bastards came into the living room through the windows, over the course of half an hour(these were the big black dudes who live outside and only come in to forage; the little brown pricks - "German" cockroaches - are the ones you don't want to see because they'd be part of an infestation). If I was really scared of bugs I guess I would have run screaming from the room instead of coaxing each little blighter into an video case and tossing them out the window again. What freaked me a little was that two of them had taken to wing - which Australian cockroaches almost never do. They can fly, they just choose not to. Perhaps it was mating season or something.

Other than that I'm just a general coward. Scary things scare me. I'd never swim in the ocean - in fact, the whole idea of stepping into the turf of large toothy beasts strikes me as no kind of fun. I'll stick to the environments where I'm top of the food-chain, thanks, like the local takeaway. But if a thing's not a threat - or a bug - I really won't mind it. Non-poisonous snakes. Bats. Lizards. Frogs. No worries. I quite like rats, not that I'd want to be gnawed to death by them. But then I wouldn't want to be gnawed to death by kittens or baby lambs either, so that's not really a rat thing.

pH34r teh 14M8$!1!!


I tried to dig up the Sartre essay where he uses the fear of throwing oneself into an abyss to illustrate the concept of anguish, but couldn't find it. Anguish (*thinks back to first year philosophy 1985*) is essentially the anxiety that results from realising that we have no control over what our future selves will do; and are not bound by the decisions of our past selves. JPS gives the example of the gambling addict who has made a solemn vow to herself that she will never gamble again. The next time she walks into a casino she realises that this promises means nothing. You live in the present; you act in the present. A similar realisation that our future selves live in their own present and are not controlled (at least mentally) by the decisions we make in their past is what informs the example of the man who shrinks back from the cliff edge, not because he is afraid he will fall, but that he will throw himself over. The man who shrinks back would not; but who can say what the future man, standing closer to the drop, might do? Whatever he does, here in the present we have no way of stopping him.

So I thought Crash's and Colin's posts were kinda cool.

And I can see where Eric is coming from.

Typos. I'm deathly afraid of typos.

Me agrees with uroborus. It is not that I'm afraid of heights. I'm afraid that I'll just actually do want I so despertly want. Jump. I so much want to jump. I know bunjee is the solution but haven't had te opportunity yet.

What i sometimes think and get a little anxious is if I get faulsly accused of a crime and cannot prove my innosence.

As of typos, I'm used to them by now! You know all shit about facing your fears!

Scurvy. They taught us about it in grade school and ever since the hypochondriac in me starts wondering when was the last time I had a decent source of vitamin C.

Also trains. Not riding on them just being too close (oh say within thirty feet) to the tracks when they zip by. Irrationally fear that somehow it will pull me uder in some freak wind or something.

quote:

Originally posted by Pauline:
Ooo, and its evil cousin, vermin guts. Once I whacked a cockroach, and its entrails stuck it to the floor. But the thing kept trying to creep away! It dragged itself in little circles, smearing its innards all over the kitchen floor!

Cockroaches have two brains. One in their head, and another along their back.

If you cut ones head off, it will live for about a week until it dies of starvation.

that made me shiver, lithos. eewww.

Rich, I know what you mean about the trains. It's a much milder thing, but when I was a kid I was scared of escalators. They all appeared to me like human shredders hungry for my toes.

I am older now and have mastered the escalator.

Having my kidneys stolen.

Hey, it's not like I use them to the max, but that's my sixty thousand buck piece of offal there.

Hey, what the fuck am I doing in this bathtub full of ice?

a friend of mine actually told me of a guy he knew whose kidney was indeed stolen. he was having a coffee with a friend and a woman sat at the next table. all so lonely and willing. and that guy hit on her and they went off together and he went missing for a couple of days after that. then someone phoned his family and told them where they could find him and when they did, in the bathtub of a hotel room, he was missing one of his kidneys. shit do happen!

quote:

Originally posted by yer.andreas:
a friend of mine actually told me of a guy he knew whose kidney was indeed stolen. he was having a coffee with a friend and a woman sat at the next table. all so lonely and willing. and that guy hit on her and they went off together and he went missing for a couple of days after that. then someone phoned his family and told them where they could find him and when they did, in the bathtub of a hotel room, he was missing one of his kidneys. shit do happen!

So you know the guy who knows the guy who was the source of the urban myth?