Your irrational fears now

[Toby Gymshorts]

As a spin off from the other thread, what are your phobias now?

I'll go with:

• Clowns. Nope. Nope nope nope. I had to be removed from a circus at the age of six when the clowns arrived as I started screaming and would. Not. Stop. I imagine my reaction would be largely the same now, only with more hurling of chairs and targeted violence.
• Spiders. Not even going to explain, as it's obvious.
• Porcelain / Masquerade masks. Expressionless, eyeless masks scare the shit out of me. Weirdly, however, Halloween is probably the least scary horror film I've ever seen. Go figure.
• Buttons. Yes, I know. My mam kept a button jar for years and there was something about the contents that made my skin crawl. To this day TLMG has been known to ask my opinion on an item of clothing and I've had to veto it on account of finding it hard to look at. Large, detail buttons are the worst. Before anyone asks I can deal with normal, functional buttons such as shirt buttons.

I'm often convinced I am not right in a number of ways.

[Capybara]

Clowns I can see, but not a problem for me. Spiders I get along with OK which is just as well. The mask thing, well, when I worked in a small town in Surrey there was a shop that sold nothing else. There was never anyone in there. Weird. But the last one, well I can't even bring myself to type the word. I'm feeling nauseous already. And the smaller and more functional they are, the worse it is. No other irrational fears.

[Third rate Leszno]

I'm not great with big spiders - and it's not just size, it's speed. I'm happier looking at a slow moving tarantula than a house spider which I just know is going to canter towards me at a great rate of knots.

I wouldn't call it a fear, but I really, really dislike coleslaw. If I get any on my hands when I'm clearing plates away then I'm nearly bowking, I have to get it scrubbed off asap. Much the same aversion to any vinegary products, chutney, brown sauce, ketchup etc. Fuck the lot of them, dirty stinking bastards.

Heights. Not wholly irrational, but my balance is shit since I got older and I now feel physically sick if I see people messing about or being casual around the sort of heights where a fall would cripple or kill you - even though the likelihood is that their balance is fine and they've not the slightest chance of falling.

[WOM]

Sunken boats. Cars under water. Airplanes under water. Good God. Just horrible.

[Third rate Leszno]

Sunken boats. Cars under water. Airplanes under water. Good God. Just horrible.

How are you with submarines on land?

[ChrisJ]

I have lots of fears but they are all completely rational, including the one that stops me sleeping; that tomorrow, something utterly awful will happen. Pretty much every news cycle since 2015 has borne out this out.

Mrs CJ remarks that she has clowns and ships out of water.

[Gangster Octopus]

Going outside.

[Toby Gymshorts]

If that's a recent thing I wouldn't consider it all that irrational.

[Gangster Octopus]

Fair point.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Heights. Not wholly irrational, but my balance is shit since I got older and I now feel physically sick if I see people messing about or being casual around the sort of heights where a fall would cripple or kill you - even though the likelihood is that their balance is fine and they've not the slightest chance of falling.

At the risk of "look at me I'm special", and undermining my own thread, I don't have this at all. I'm not sure what your thoughts are on glass floors but I'll refrain from posting the pictures of me dicking about in the CN Tower.

[WOM]

How are you with submarines on land?

I actually think boats on dry land in weird places are rather sexy. But things underwater that ought not be underwater...shudder.

Just off Pea Island, NC, there's a visible boiler/engine from a Civil War ship that was sunk over a hundred years ago. It's maybe 200 feet off shore, and gives me the creeps just looking at it.

[Patrick Thistle]

Not keen on bugs and spiders. Can deal with most things. Centipedes completely gross me out though. Blech!

[Greenlander]

Not heights as such but that my glasses will fall off and disappear into void or smash into a dozen pieces when I'm at the top of a tall building or looking out over a clifftop, especially when I'm on holiday. Apart from getting hit in the face with a football or getting into scraps as a small kid I don't think my specs have ever just dislodged themselves from my head but the thought of being miles from home and being able to see the square root of fuck all freaks me right out.

[Uncle Ethan]

No fear is irrational is it? If you have a phobia, you have one. Doesn't make you weird. I had a colleague who had a phobia on public speaking. Another developed a deep fear of flying after a bad experience on a flight.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Well, I don't know. My fear of spiders is fluid; money spiders don't worry me at all, and I'm happy to entertain them running over my hands. Smaller house spiders I've been known to pick up in my hands and take outside.

Any others? Guaranteed to turn me to a gibbering heap of blancmange. Seems fairly irrational, that.

[Artificial Hipster]

Heights. Not wholly irrational, but my balance is shit since I got older and I now feel physically sick if I see people messing about or being casual around the sort of heights where a fall would cripple or kill you - even though the likelihood is that their balance is fine and they've not the slightest chance of falling.

This. We've just watched Far From The Madding Crowd. In a frankly preposterous plot twist a sheepdog has just driven Gabriel Oak's entire flock of sheep over a cliff to their deaths. As the anguished shepherd is gazing down at the carnage on the beach below, little realising that this is but the first in the series of setbacks he must endure before the beautiful but not a little annoying Bathsheba Everdene will accept him into her arms I'm aware of nothing more than the churning in my stomach as I will him to step backwards lest a sudden gust of wind or loss of balance cause him to slip over the edge himself.

[Jah Womble]

No fear is irrational is it? If you have a phobia, you have one. Doesn't make you weird.

I think they all are, aren’t they? That being implicit within the definition.

’Irrational’ in this instance should never be equated with ‘weird’, ‘wrong’ or ‘plain daft’, however, no.

[San Bernardhinault]

I don't know how irrational this is - I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be terrified of should it happen, but it's never going to happen to me: it's when I'm watching movies or TV shows and someone is doing an untethered space walk. It gives me the absolute worst vertigo and I feel horrific. The idea of just losing contact and drifting off into space unable to do anything as your oxygen slowly runs out (or even worse, doesn't) as you just float off forever unable to make contact with anything again in the deepness of space is, reasonably I think, existentially terrifying, a proper cruel and unusual death. But I'm only watching it in a bad film. It's not something that would ever actually happen to someone who's stuck on the planet.

(As an aside - why the fuck do space stations and spacecraft generally not have really long tethers so that anyone doing a spacewalk can easily get to any part of the vehicle?)

[Amor de Cosmos]

Sunken boats. Cars under water. Airplanes under water. Good God. Just horrible.

How would you be with towns underwater? In Derbyshire there's a village, Derwent, that was flooded sometime in the early part of the last century to build Ladybower reservoir. After there's been a very hot spell the water level drops so you can see the remains of the village, including the church steeple. One of the creepiest things I've ever seen.

[scratchmonkey]

(As an aside - why the fuck do space stations and spacecraft generally not have really long tethers so that anyone doing a spacewalk can easily get to any part of the vehicle?)

They do, according to the spacewalk Wiki article, there have only been three ever non-tethered spacewalks, and they were all done as tests of maneuverability devices.

[San Bernardhinault]

They do, according to the spacewalk Wiki article, there have only been three ever non-tethered spacewalks, and they were all done as tests of maneuverability devices.

They don't in films and on TV, though.

[caja-dglh]

They don't in films and on TV, though.

Which is odd given Treibeis knows America better than any native based on that oeuvre alone.

[Sporting]

Heights. Not wholly irrational, but my balance is shit since I got older and I now feel physically sick if I see people messing about or being casual around the sort of heights where a fall would cripple or kill you - even though the likelihood is that their balance is fine and they've not the slightest chance of falling.

Pretty much this for me, too.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I can handle spiders - I've had to escort a few king baboon spiders out of our house - but loose horses put the fear of god into me.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I find clowns disturbing too. Ditto rats.

The other one would be old-fashioned ventriloquists dummies. The Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky is my worst nightmare.