1. I grew up in the country and we had maybe a quarter mile of open space in front of us and then a hill. And so we have binoculars on the couch. So we just look out the window and see what was going on on the Hill. You know what I mean? And I remember one day my mom was looking through the binoculars and she's like What is that. It's just like just like brown creature that was like rustling around in the field. And it was a badger building a den. And for that entire summer my mom like kept me at close range. She's like I don't want you going over there and getting eaten by that badger. To this day whenever I see a badger I'm like mmmmmm, I don't know about that.... 

2. Well I think I have it mostly in check these days like I can be a little bit hypochondriac. My dad was a doctor and like I know ...I know this wasn't his intention but his dinnertime conversation when he came home from work was not...always good for my brain.

3. When I was a kid I... There was a period of time where I thought that someone might have swapped out my dad. I would do this thing when he would come home. I would really quietly run downstairs when I heard the garage door opening and my dad had this pair of coveralls hanging up right behind the door and I would stand behind the coveralls. And then when he came in the door I'd like jump out and scare him. And even though I did this every single night it would still scare the crap out of him. I remember after I had done this for a little while that like my reason for doing it changed to see if I could catch him like getting into costume. I just kind of wondered if he was not who he said he was. And he had fooled us all.

4. Elevator doors. I kind of thought this was something everyone is afraid of.

5. I didn't stop wetting my pants in the daytime until I was in sixth grade. I just did it every single day. The thing that made me stop is that I had a big crush on a girl in my grade. And I realized that she would never like me if I met my parents. So I shamed myself out of it. I used to be afraid that I would do it for the rest of my life though. I think my parents were too.

6. Plucking out all the hair on my face.

7. Pseudo scorpions. It came from one of those like really unhealthy late-night Wikipedia sessions. I think...I think this is like maybe in my freshman year in college. Because I had a roommate that I like-- I tried to avoid. He only listened to two kinds of music and one of those was the band Tool and the other was The Age Of Empires soundtrack. He would wake up at 6:00 to do his exercises and he would make himself a pot of coffee but he would use that same coffee maker to make instant ramen in the evenings. It was like hot chicken broth and coffee was what the smell of the mornings was and it was at a time when I had very long hair and I would have really terrible sleep because my hair would wrap around my head and it would tickle me under the nose-- [coughs]

God a bug just flew in my mouth. Mm hmm mm hmm mm hmm. I'm just having all sorts of trouble today. I'm sorry. And I'm getting off point. 

Like that was the milieu of when my Pseudo Scorpion's phase was and as someone who works with fear professionally, some of my fears I feel quite fondly of, and this is one of them.

8. Mercy killing an animal.

9. Doing exactly the wrong thing when I think it's exactly the right thing. Every now and then when I'm feeling a very certain flavor of misanthropic I'll look up videos of people who have proposed to their significant other in a sporting event the ones where people say no is a ridiculous feeling that person who gets down at the half court mark and like gets on their knees and opens up a ring box to someone who doesn't expect it -- like the line between thinking you have everything figured out and having nothing figured out is way closer than I think it is.

10. Lightning strikes. I think I was a Boy Scout camp one year, it was like 'sometimes right before people get struck by lightning, hey feel like they have a penny on their tongue'. And so every once in a while I feel like I have a penny on my tongue. And I'm like OH SHIT IT'S HAPPENING.

I'm Jeff Emtman and these are ten things that scare me.

Is that a penny? Do I taste a penny?