This reminds me of a clip from my favourite film, Kes. Sound quality is a bit poor and the accent may be a little thick for non-Brits to fully understand.
Phone calls, and visitors. I attribute these fears more to being an introvert than anything else, though.
Kinda dumb, but when I'm parked and sitting in my car and the car next to me starts backing out, I panic brake when I see that out the corner of my eye. It's one of those illusion things that makes it feel like you're moving when you're actually not. Driving on narrow roads without guard rails, and steep hills. People who are probably perfectly decent and normal, but give off some strange vibes, squig me out. Scenes in movies where something is under the skin moving or put there. People missing normal features like eyebrows, nails, or some other obscure feature that makes them looks uncanny, makes me feel uncomfortable. The sound of nails on a chalkboard, it makes my skin crawl.
Oh, yeah, definitely. That happens to me all the time. Heart jumps right into my throat and I pop my clutch and stall if the car's running. It's like there's a cognitive crisis where I know intellectually that I'm parked, but because the shit is moving, I can only conclude that I must have fallen asleep at the wheel, took myself for a somnambulistic drive, and shaken myself from my own nightmare. One time it happened to me twice in the same parking spot with a car on either side. It was my old apartment building where I was always parked inline with a bunch of cars. I think I was waiting for my wife to join me or something because I was out there a long time with the car idling. Then the dude on my left did the thing followed by the dude on my right doing the thing. Think I probably made my wife drive after that, haha. Shit, come to think of it, one time I was in traffic with my foot on the brake already. saw the guy on the street back up, panicked and took my foot OFF the brake to reapply it again (because clearly the break must not have been working properly) and nearly hit the dude in front of me.
The ocean. Back home, I like to sit on the sand and watch it at night, crashing upon itself. It's much scarier at those times, since it appears like a void, stretching forward, reaching for me wordlessly. Bonus points if the full moon comes out to play. Another is driving up or down a mountain. The roads without railing bring up some anxiety, but if you add the headlights of another car coming on a dark night....why yes, I might have the urge to shit myself. Last one is talking to my grandmother in-law. That is the worst of them. I'd rather die than do that again.
Deep water bothers me a lot. You're floating on top of it and you know that there's something down below watching you. You're just a flake of food to it, and it could come swimming up at any minute and swallow you down. (Being eaten by an animal is the most humiliating death for a person. It's like you failed the species. In my will, I'm going to insist that my corpse be poisoned. Anything that bites me dies.) Also, related . . . If you look up at night and see the stars, there's literally nothing between you and them. If earth's gravity failed and you started to fall toward them, you'd tumble along for a billion years, screaming. I imagine myself screaming, though I know I'd need air for that. It's also worth noting that that same gulf of nothingness is below you. The stars wrap all the way around us. You can't see them because the ground is in the way, but we're surrounded by an infinite abyss. We're a single speck of existence in a hungry void.
That’s a good one. On the rare occasions I’m somewhere with little light pollution, the night sky doesn’t so much scare me, as have me in total awe of its infinite nothingness.
I fear God. He scares me the most since He's the one who decides if I make it t to the Kingdom of Heaven.
-> Driving on narrow roads. The only time I feel claustrophobic, frankly. -> Roaches, and small, fast-darting critters. -> Open water so deep I can't see the bottom.
This just came up in my alerts when somebody liked it, and yep: check, check, check, and check. All of these things are worse and twice as scary as when I first mentioned them. Wholesale food prices are murdering my business and pushing me into corners I never thought I'd be in. $18# scallops, $16# lobster, $21 Prime Sirloin, $18 tuna.... Even fucking parsley and scallions have doubled in price... and my distributors will only sell them by the case instead of the "each." I don't need 24 bunches of fucking scallions, but I can't really go without them either. High end booze? All the champagne people like to drink is completely unavailable. My white wine room in virtually empty. And some of my whiskey portfolios just jumped $10+ a bottle. Who wants to spend $17 on a Manhattan? Staff shortages have actually gotten a little bit better. Enough for me to reopen a sixth day in a few weeks and add a few more tables to the floor plan. Of course, I have to pay line cooks $20 - $25 an hour to get there. That's nearly $60 fucking thousand a year with approved overtime, which I need, because I don't have enough bodies to cover the shifts. Not if I want to be open six days and add the extra $8K in sales I need to keep the joint open. Do you know what a competent line cook made pre-Covid. About $15. And a rock star might get $18. Now, well, shit, how about a $60 steak to pair with your $17 Manhattan so Uncle Homer can afford to pay his staff. And fuel prices? Heh... just pray that truck you need to deliver the things you need has less than 50 miles to travel. They ain't running coast to coast anymore. And my specialty shit from overseas? Gone, gone, gone... and gone. Unless you're a corporate restaurant group that can sign 10 figure distribution deals.
That is perfectly dreadful, Homer. My son and I have a small herd of beef cattle and are looking at having to sell a couple in order to buy hay for winter. Oy. I can tell you at least part of the reason sirloin is $21 a pound. We eat game at our houses- can't afford to eat cows.
Poor prime yield is the latest story. Only 6% graded out as prime as opposed to the usual 11% or so. Also, nobody wants to ship out to the Northeast. The lack of manufacturing in the area means the trucks come home empty. Or it's the shortage of drivers. Or parts for the trucks. Or Covid outbreaks at the food processing plants. Pick a story. Any story. There'll be a new one next week. If they told me that aliens abducted all the cows I would believe it as this point.
That only happens in New Mexico around Roswell. True story: as a legal assistant preparing for trial, I had occasion to call the ranch manager for the LDS Church to ask if anyone had brought a lawsuit against the church for cattle rustling. Claim was made by a plaintiff who (thank you, St. Ivo of Kermartin) was not our client. From that guy, claims of alien cattle rustling wouldn't be much stranger.
Fear of real pictures of the earth-? Looking at it kinda gives me a terrible feeling or maybe goosebumps. I don't know, I'm not really THAT scared just a small shock each time.. (maybe that's why I don't use google earth. never.)
Reading the replies I realize that I must be some sort of freak. I have come close to losing my life many times. The two most recent involved serious injuries with the prospect of death the most realistic outcome, and lots of time to think about it in the process. The last one included airlift in a helicopter and 5 days in intensive care 6 weeks of recovery and tons of pain. I would list that day as one of the luckiest days of my life. Each time have I had a serious accident or mishap I had a huge surge of adrenaline, I did not panic and each time managed to survive, every time after that it took more of a shock or incident to create the same adrenaline high and also kind of gives you what I am sure is some false sense of invincibility, but still real for the moment. Every good lesson I learned in business was the result of a failure. All the good things in life I have today are the result of when things went wrong. On dark, rainy days when all seemed doomed means only to me, something good or something better is just around the corner. I have come to realize that nothing worthwhile is learned on bright sunny days when everything goes right. While I appreciate those days more than most, realizing I shouldn't even be here. I am trying to think of a single example of when I was scared in the last 15 or so years, or worried. Must be I am just an optimist or a total fucking fool. I sleep well at night and I am always in a good mood so it must work
I have been a farmer, a logger, a commercial fisherman, an iron worker, a motorcycle racer. Plus a bunch of other safe job descriptions, but those are the ones that had the most risk. My brother who is a psychologist, says guys like me don't normally live past their twenties. I am in my sixties and must be really lucky. Early in life I learned that with great risk comes great reward. I also love anything epic, all good adventures have epic in their description.
