Asking The Girl At The Coffee Shop to Fill My Cup All The Way To The Top

It just makes me feel like such an asshole.



So look, I take my coffee like I take my men, black and hot and usually in a cup. And I'm talking real black, here, no cream, no sugar, no nothing. Just coffee brewed as nature intended. Empty calories and caffeine, yessireebob, that's the joe for me.

Problem is, the rest of the world doesn't drink coffee the same way I do. Not many people anyway. Most take a dash of cream or milk or soy milk or 'flavour shots' or some shit and that's cool. I'm not a coffee nazi, you take your coffee they way you like to take it, man, I'm not going to judge.

But nearly every coffee shop employee has been conditioned to leave that little bit of space for various add-ins. Makes sense, I guess. Cuts down on waste and caters to the majority. Thing is, I kind of feel ripped off by that extra inch between the scorching hot happiness and the lid of the cup.

Every once in a while, I'll come across a coffee-wizard that asks 'Would you like room for milk or cream?' to which I respond 'NOPE!' and then mumble 'thank you for asking' and look like a weirdo because I'm really bad at making conversation with people I'm buying things from. Those days are good days, as I get a full cup of coffee.

More often than not though, they just hand me this half full sadness-cup, a 'tall' coffee disguised by a Groucho Marx mask made out of a 'grande' cup. While I could simply request that they fill it up to the top or 'top it off,' as it were, I do not. I do not do this because that is like telling someone that they are incapable of pouring warm liquid into a cup for my enjoyment, that they are too stupid to handle the simple task of filling up a cup. And only a complete fucking a-hole would criticize someone's ability to make a cup of black coffee.

I do not want to be that a-hole.

Hurting Animals

I would not necessarily call myself an animal lover. Sure, I like them and all. Dogs especially (not scary dogs though, like fuckin' Cujo.) and while I am a vegetarian, it is predominately for health/dietary preferences and not really because I'm against the idea of eating animals (I mean, I guess I am against the idea of eating animals, but it's just not top of the list for why I don't eat'm, y'know?) I've had pets in the past and I liked them very much, especially Molson, a beagle who lived for 14ish years, and Bear, a shitzu that now resides on a farm somewhere and has changed it's name to Princess (uhg.)

Anyway, I was hanging out at a friend's place the other day, and he recently started dating this girl who worked in a pet store. He had two cats the last time i saw him, but now he has those same two cats, like a million snakes and two of THESE:



Sugar Gliders! Anyway, the dude's girlfriend was all like, 'man, pick them up and play with them' and i was all like 'no way' and then the sugar gliders were all like '-a terrifying sound impossible to type-' and i was like 'jesus christ!'

I also wasn't too keen to hold on to the snakes, even though loved to pick up snakes at the cottage when I was a kid and throw them at my sister. Inevitably, I was accused of being afraid of animals. But that's not the case, dudes!

The truth is that I am afraid of my own amazing strength. While I am not an animal lover, I take no pleasure in the pain or death of living things. Seeing a helpless animal shivering in pain has been scientifically proven to to be the most heart breaking thing in the world, next to a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake alone in a room because no one showed up to his party. I would not be able to take it if I accidentally broke the snake or pulled a Lenny from Of Mice and Men on the sugar glider. Who knows what Hulk-like creature lurks under this Bruce Banner physique?



I guess that's why I like dogs. It is pretty hard to accidentally hurt a dog. You'd pretty much have to do it on purpose, in which case you are a monster. Unless you are my brother, who recently stepped on his puppy and broke it's leg.



Don't worry, everyone, he feels terrible.

Running Out Of Toilet Paper When You Still Need Some Toilet Paper

WHAT WOULD YOU DO!?!?

Falling Down In Public

Yesterday I went out for a walk, stopping by several book stores along College St looking for a specific book and generally having a nice little Sunday. When I decided it was time to head home, I grabbed the High Park street car, which lets you off at some random point in the south-easterly section of High Park. I live at the central-north section of the park, so I figured a nice way to cap off my Sunday would be a pleasant walk through the park.

I decide to veer off the road and take a path through the trees and bushes, as it didn't look to be too messy. It was pretty. What I did not realize though, was that i was headed in the direction of the off-leash area of the High Park Dog Park. For obvious reasons, the dog park is fenced in.



So I'm walking through the tress and the bushes and I come to this fence. On the other side are a hand full of people walking their dogs. To my left is a gate, so i walk to it and push on it only to find that it is bolted shut, something they would do to discourage use of the icy trails in the winter. So I grab the gate with my hand and throw my leg up. Once I was sure I had good footing, I swung my body to get myself over the fence. Only the gate swung open, ruining whatever precarious balance I had. My legs go completely out from under my and I have become that idiot that couldn't operate a gate and instead fell flat on his face.

I pick myself up off the ground and let out a quick chuckle at the shocked "oh my!" that came from one of the dog owners who saw this whole thing. I brushed myself off and zoomed outta there as fast as I could. HOW EMBARRASSING!



And this is my point. Falling down is always embarrassing. It is always the result of being too stupid to pull off an everyday maneuver like 'walking' or 'sitting on a chair'. In this case, i was the weirdo who emerged from the woods and was too stupid to operate a gate. In other cases, I'm the idiot who couldn't turn around during a basketball game. Or the moron who couldn't balance himself while walking down a hill.

It is made worse by the fact that usually when you fall, the people around you do not fall. You really can't help but draw attention to yourself when your feet go out from under your arms flail in every direction and you let out a loud "whooaaaAHHH!" And I know for sure that everyone around is thinking "Oh man, what a bafoon! That idiot can't even walk! Hilarious!" How do I know they're thinking this? Because this is exactly what I am thinking when ever I see someone fall. Seeing someone fall is consistently funny, and I think most people agree.



When you fall, it is like becoming a baby for the briefest of moments. Even small children can walk and stand and sit and keep themselves generally balanced. You're an adult, man, how dumb to you have to be to fall down?

Mold

Mold freaks me the fuck out.

Mold is not unlike a tiny world that grows anywhere it damn well pleases. Mold has no regard for what it may grow on or whom it may poison. It is just this living parasite that envelops prey, feeding off of it until there is nothing left to eat, growing until it can grow no more, unstoppable and inherently dangerous.

Imagine if you will, a tree. Now this tree has roots that dig into the earth so that it can collect water and nutrients from the soil. The tree takes up a certain amount of space, some trees growing very big, but the tree has a limit to how far it will go. It will not take up all the soil.

Now picture a tree that has roots that go fucking everywhere! Now imagine other trees popping up from those roots and like some bushes and shrubs and shit, just popping up everywhere. Boom, tree pops up in the middle of your kitchen! Whooosh, shrub in the bedroom! Soon it is a world of greenery and the humans can do nothing to appease the horrible tree monster as it wants nothing other than to take over everything.

That's what mold does, but on a smaller scale.

Did you know that people can get mold on there bodies? I was once a told a completely unverifiable story about a guy who never toweled off after a shower. He just got out of the shower and whipped his clothes on and then, I guess, sat there is kind of wet clothes for a bit? I don't know. Anyway, he got yeast infection on his chest from it! GROSS! (On a some what related note, do not google image search 'yeast infection on chest' unless you never want to have a boner again.)

Now, I know what you're saying, most mold is harmless, just throw out your fruit when it gets moldy, why are you keeping fruit around long enough for it to get moldy etc. But it's not just food mold! Moisture mold is the real scary mold because you don't even know that it is there! Any of you fuckers that live in a building that is over ten years old, chances are somewhere in that building there is a downright insane amount of mold inside some walls. Seriously, knock down a wall, you'll find mold.

I worked in Disaster Restoration for a period of time, which was not as glamorous as it sounds. It involved cleaning up floods/fires/wind damaged things etc. Most often, it was a simple flood, like the basement just flooded or something. Sometimes they flooded with poop and poo-water. In many cases, the insurance companies covering the jobs took their sweet sweet time to give the go ahead to let us finish the job once the disaster itself was taken care off. So sometimes these soggy basements, soaked in poo-water, would just sit there for a month or so. Let me tell you: I've seen things that change a man. Poo-mold related things. And if there is one thing that my boss drilled into my head it was that that stuff will kill you.

It's caused by a leaky pipe or heating or poor weather proofing or any number of normal everyday shit like taking a shower. All that steam and moisture you make when you are taking a shower, it's seeping into the walls and getting all moldy and someday you're going to be carrying a big box and you'll trip and fall and put a big hole in the wall and all the little dormant mold spores are going to burst out like a Glade air freshener and you are going to breath them in and die and then you'll be like 'so that's why Jake was afraid of mold.'

Finding Fully Formed Chicken Parts In An Egg Once I Crack It Open

That would ruin eggs for me, and I LOVE eggs.

Biking Up A Hill That Gradually Gets So Steep That I Flip Over Backwards And Snap My Neck

"Oh hey, that hill don't look so bad, I'll go that-a way."

*bike bike bike bike bike biiike biiiiiiike biiiiiiiiike WHOA flip SNAP dead*

Any Animal That Can Eat Me

Sharks

Bears

Komodo Dragons

Large Dogs

Wolves

Dinosaurs

Giant Birds

Tigers

Really Big Fat Guys

Lions

Wolverines

Piranhas

Whales (most whales wouldn't eat you on purpose, but they've got really big mouths you could accidentally find yourself in.)

Really Hungry Monkeys

Cheetahs

Big Snakes

Hyenas

A Cyclops

Any robotic versions of the above animals.

Seeing My Own Skeleton

Skeletons are probably the grimmest reminder of our own mortality. That makes them scary in just a general sense.

A skeleton's cavernous eyes and menacing smile replacing the familiar comfort of a human face. The thin, wonky movements. The pure evil that is managing to keep those bones together and keep them animated. Little subtle reminders that this creature was once human. It's an awful image.

Really, how do you fight a skeleton? I mean, it's already just bones, and what are you going to do to bones? If something has been stripped to the bones, there is nothing left you can threaten it with. You're left to just be mauled by a skeleton until you become nohting but one yourself. A skeleton is a human stripped of it's identity, a blank canvas with which only pure evil applies it's brush.

That's why it is terrifying when ever you skin a finger, or suffer a horrific arm break, bone jutting through the skin. It is in these moments that you are reminded that there is one of these right inside you! When you suffer an injury such as this, it is as though your skeleton is trying to get out. Don't kid yourselves, people. Laying in wait beneath your skin is a monster just waiting for the chance to escape.

All Music Being Erased Except For The Songs Of David Wilcox As Performed By David Wilcox

Not necessarily a fear of mine in and of itself, but if this ever happens it can only mean that hell has broken out on earth and that the end if nigh.

"Some people caaaaaall me a baaaaaad apple..."

Being As Dumb As A Raccoon

If you ever have a problem with a raccoon, one of the worst animals ever, then here are some rough details for a raccoon trap.

1. Hollow out a log, like half way down so it is like a wooden cup, but a bit bigger than a cup you would drink out of (unless you're really thirsty)

2. Drive some nails into the log at an angle, so that the pointy ends are pointing down toward the bottom of the cup.

3. Put a really shiny coin at the bottom of the 'cup.' Make sure it's real shiny.

Bam, raccoon trap! The stupid, giant rodent will come along and be so attracted to the shiny coin that it will want to grab it. Thing is, the nails will let it slide it's dumb hand in there and grab onto the coin, but when it has the coin in it's fist, it's hand become too big to get past the nails and it becomes stuck. And you'd think it'd just let go of the coin, right? Wrong! Raccoons are so stupid, they want that coin more than anything and will never let go, leaving you free to come along a club them in the head. Christ, figure it out raccoon!

This last part is optional, you could just find a way to set it free. I mean, it's a dumb animal, maybe the stupidest thing in the world, but doesn't mean you can be mean to it. Actually, this trap is pretty inhumane, so don't, like take advantage of the Raccoon's stupidity. Just make fun of it on the internet.

Seriously though, I'd kill myself if I ever found myself stuck in a trap with the only thing standing in the way of my freedom is me not opening my fist and dropping the coin.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere...

Walking Through The Woods And Stepping On An Old, Long Forgotten Bear Trap, Or Some Such Similar Device

Keep your eyes peeled while walking through that forest, friends.

Whatever This Is

It's a Snake Fish!

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Dear Who ever was in charge of picking books for my elementary school's library,

Why?

Why make these books available to little boys?

No, really.

Sincerely,

Jake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scary_stories_to_tell_in_the_dark

Crapping My Pants In Public

Now, before I get into this, I would like to just make it clear that this has never happened to me before. Not once have I ever lost control of my bowels in public.

There are certain things that one can do in order to complete destroy any semblance of dignity that they have. These are the events in your life that destroy friendships and reputations beyond repair. I am not one to embarrass too easily, and I am very lucky that I have a group of friends that are both understanding and forgiving of any sort of lapse in character I may have, as I am with them. Sure we make fun of each other, like my one friend's disgusting maggot farm that is her bedroom, or the fact that another friend somehow managed to get poop on the toilet seat and didn't clean it up, or the various times various friends have gotten so drunk that they either fell in a lake pantsless or fell off a roof, but these are pretty forgivable lapses and are genuinely hilarious aspects of my groups of friends that I would not do without. Behaviour that many people would find reprehensible is accepted with glee among my crew. None of us has yet to do anything forgivable.

However, there are peripheral characters who pop up ev

ery once in a while to challenge what we find acceptable. Golden Boy is one such character. One night, six or so years ago, this guy came to a party hosted by my friends. He proceeded to chug a 26er of Canadian Club, and although he was a bigger guy, he quickly became unmanageably drunk. After accosting my friend's sister, he pissed himself and fell down in the middle of the room. Laying there face down, he puked quite a bit and passed out.

Obviously we should have tried to get him to a hospital to treat his alcohol poisoning, but we...uh...didn't. We just kind of left him there and continued to party around him. Someone cleaned him up a little and made sure he wasn't choking on his own vomit, but really, he just was there on the floor while we all continued on.

This would have been forgivable. Whatever, it happens. Sometimes young people drink too much.

However, later in the night he woke up. I don't know if you'd exactly call him conscious at this point, but he was standing and moving and stuff. Everyone was happy that he was not dead. that is, everyone was happy until he decided he needed to use the washroom but was too drunk to comprehend that he was, in fact, in a bedroom. He just whipped it out right there, in a room full of about 12 people, and peed all over my friend's desk and computer chair while everyone left the room as though it was on fire. He then sat down at the computer, and I'm not sure what happened next (I had seen enough) I always presumed he looked up some porn or something, as he was a skeezy perv. Some time later we checked in on him to find him rolled up in my friend's bed, still wearing his soiled clothing.

Again, this may have been forgivable. It would have taken a while for him to live it down, but, hey, he was drunk. Bad things happen.

My friend slept in my out of town roommate's bed in my dorm that night, his bed obvious being used in the worst way. In the morning, we decided to check to see if Golden Boy, as he was now affectionately known since he had such a golden night, had made it make to his room in the dorm. He came to the door when we knocked and he looked awful, understandably. My friend began grilling him about the previous night, being rather friendly about it, until he learned that the guy hadn't cleaned up anything and had no intention of doing so. Golden Boy then said with a sigh, "Real mature guys" and shut the door in our faces.

This was the unforgivable part. That guy was a dick, and we made sure that his dickery was well known (perhaps too much so, but that's another story.)

This is just a round about way of saying that crapping yourself in public is one of those things that you cannot expect to be forgiven for. It is the lowest of the low. If it ever happened to me, especially if it happened around my wonderful friends, I can say with confidence that I would no longer have those wonderful friends. It is the most embarrassing thing an adult can do.

Obviously there are certain situations where it is acceptable. You're super sick and in need of hospitalization (like, sick with a disease, not with alcohol...you should know not to drink that much by now.) You're giving birth in public by accident. You...actually, I think those are the only two. Crazy old person who is losing control of their body, I guess. For the most part, it should never, ever happen. And if it does happen for any reason not in the above, you deserve scorn.

Now, why would I be worried about this? I'm a reasonably healthy adult who has never had this problem before. Well, I'll tell you why.

One, I have digestive issues. Without going into too much detail, they get kind of weird sometimes. The only real effect this has on my public life is that I'm crazy gassy sometimes. But this is why it makes me worry. How far away from farting a lot is pooping a lot? Not very far.

Two, I don't ever want it to happen. I can be kind of paranoid sometimes, and when this gets the better of me I really start to think that only bad things can happen. Since this is the baddest thing, it's probably going to happen. that's how the world works when I'm paranoid.

Three, It's not like you just poop yourself at, say, work and then that's the end of the story. No. There is like, a whole other chapter that happens afterwards where you have to somehow deal with your poopy pants in public. You would have to walk from work to the subway with poopy pants, be on the subway with poppy pants, walk from the subway to your home with poopy pants. Walk through your building with poopy pants and then find a new job because you'd never be able to show your face in that place again. Oh, and kiss that reference good bye, because you crapped yourself in the presence of your boss. If you crap yourself in public, at the very least you are going to have to walk by 500 people and sever any and all relationships that you have with those that witness. Some people search for life changing experiences, forgetting that one is waiting for them in there bowels. And that's the worst part, that's the part that scares me.

Public pants pooping is akin to, like, hitting a girl or verbally abusing a child. You can't live it down because it changes forever the way people look at you. The other part that scares me is that it could just happen. It's improbable, but possible. I could just randomly loose control one day and BOOM, life is over and there is nothing I could do about it. I know I'll never hit a girl or berate a child because that stuff would happen in my brain first and my reasoning ability would never allow me to go through with it because I'm not a crazy person. But my ability to reason has no control over the mysterious inner workings of the body, and just like that twitch I get in my left knee that sometimes last for hours, or whenever I get hiccups, my bowels could decide to do something unpredictable and uncontrollable and there isn't a damn thing my powerful brain could do to stop it.

Curse this body, curse all it's disgusting features.

Spiders Laying Eggs In My Tummy, Their Babies Hatching And Crawling Out Of My Mouth

Mother once told me this story about my cousin Jason.

Jason, who is 16 years my senior, was out playing catch with my Uncle Gord in their backyard when he started having terrible stomach cramps. They kept getting worse, so Uncle Gord took Jason to the hospital where they performed an x-ray and found a small pocket of something in his stomach. This pocket, originally thought to be a growth of sorts, turned out to be spider eggs. A spider had crawled into his stomach and laid it's eggs. He was to have his body cut open so that the eggs could be removed. However, while they were operating the spider eggs hatched and started crawling all through the place. Obviously that's where I stopped listening.

Now, clearly this story is not true. I've heard many variations of this story over my short years on this earth and the fact that my cousin didn't kill himself after he had spiders crawling out of an open wound in his stomach, the only reasonable reaction to such a thing, pretty much confirms that my mother was simply trying to scare me. I only wish I could remember to what end.

As it stands, Mother told me this story at an impressionable age. Often when I'm out playing in a park with my friends I will get a flash in my head of myself keeling over in tummy pain until spiders start flooding out of my mouth or burst a hole in my stomach and start pouring out there.

I think this somewhat overlaps with the marsupial frog thing. Living things coming out of other living things is down right terrifying. I also just right now made the connection between this and my lack of comfort around human babies. I thought I just didn't like babies because they cry and poop a lot. Maybe it is because they are a living thing that not that long ago came out of another living thing. And also that they poop and cry a lot.

___________________

haha, in searching for pictures of this post, the first google result that came up was this, this kind of goes in hand with the mouse thing a few posts down: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Do_spiders_crawl_in_your_mouth_at_night

Marsupial Frogs and to a lesser extent Marsupials In General.

Watch this and try not to throw up.

There is nothing natural about putting a baby back inside you once it

has hatched/been born.

Why you gotta be so freaky, Marsupial Frogs?

Hey Kangaroo, don't be disgusting!

Robots Becoming Self Aware

I'm not sure if this is truly a fear of mine, but I certainly believe that nothing good could come of it.

Finding That The Brakes Suddenly Are Not Working

This is probably in the top ten if I had to make a list of the ways I think I'll probably die. If it were to happened while I was driving a car, I'd panic and try to crash into the curb, but knowing me I'd end up driving off a cliff in a fiery wreck like in a movie or mowing down every possible pedestrian.

In the more likely event it happened while I was riding my bike, I really wouldn't know what to do. My bike is configured (rightly so) so that I physically could not drag my heels on the ground to stop myself. It'd happen on Bloor St. I'd probably try to stop myself by any means necessary but just skid into the intersection or wobble into traffic and get run over.

Shit. I should really figure this out.

Food Tampering

THE END OF INNOCENCE

When I was a child I found a Mars Bar in my mailbox. It was somewhere around the end of June, probably just after school had ended. I was all like, "yeah! Free chocolate bar! I'm 7 years old! This is the best day of my life!" But, being a kid, I was an idiot. Finding a chocolate bar without having done anything to deserve it triggered whatever semblance of Christian guilt I still had at this point. I had to run it by my Mother.

She snatched the chocolate from my hand and proceeded to kill my innocence. No longer was the world a gloriously large playground full of wonder, mountains of amazement around every corner...not after the tale Mother weaved. She informed me of the evil that lurks in this life. She said that there are people in the world that only want to see you harm. They want to hurt you at any chance they get, and they will use the things you love to get at you. You'll never see it coming until it is too late, because they look, if you even see them at all, just like regular people. The monsters of my childhood were no longer giant, green one-eyed brutes but people. People, just like me that sometimes put poison in candy to get kids to eat it.

Shocked, destroyed even, I sought comfort in the closest thing that could provide, which unfortunately was still that same chocolate bar. I had yet to fully comprehend what Mother was telling me. "It doesn't look like anyone opened it. Why can't I just eat it?"

"Someone could have put poison in a needle like at the hospital and injected it through the wrapper and you'd never know!" She placed the chocolate bar on top of the fridge, knowing that if she were to simply throw it out, I would pick it out of the garbage and tempt this new invisible enemy. Mother poured me a glass of milk and I chugged it down. "Now go outside and play."

I couldn't make it past the end of the drive way. Twenty minutes ago I was just a kid, the summer had just started and the world was mine. But this new information had changed that. People are evil, and this world belonged to them. I was being hunted, my new life boiled down to being prey simply trying to evade capture. I stayed close to home that day, climbing the tree in my front yard like a watch tower. This new shade of grey tinted the rest of the neighborhood. The world beyond that, where people became even more faceless, was too frightening to imagine.

I AM A GUARDIAN

I'm cautious about what I eat. To me, it is common sense: do not eat found food. Recently, however, this fear has come under scrutiny from friends. Me and two friends were on the TTC after spending a night watching movies at another friend's apartment. My friends had both been smoking pot, but I had not been. We get on at Union Station and sit down on a relatively empty car. To my left I spot a box of Lindt Dark Chocolate, those 70% cocoa bars. Like, I'm talking a

box. One of those special gift packs, probably a value of 25 dollars (those things ain't cheap!) One of my friends on the TTC with me is vegan and therefore is limited in her consumption of chocolate bars. These, she can eat. So the excitement of finding chocolate mixed with being kind of stoned, obviously, she wanted to crack them open right there and eat them.

But I stopped her, imparting the wisdom Mother imparted to me.

She's not buying it. The box clearly has not been opened and it would be a safe bet that someone simply dropped the box as they were leaving the train. But I know how much evil lurks in this world and that is not a bet I am willing to take. I toss the box back down to the end of the train, and my other friend (who was also stoned, and I'm not convinced he would have resisted the temptation had I not been there) convinces her that I am right. She's upset, but I just chock it up to her being stoned, and that sober minds will prevail.

WRONG!

Fastforward a few days and the rest of our friends know this story and they're all calling me the idiot for passing up an opportunity to consume such valuable chocolate! Turns out that I have lost this debate by like 8-1. All I can say to that is: YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE!

Honestly, it seems like a fundamental piece of common sense that one does not eat food found on the floor. Especially if that floor is the floor of a TTC subway. I mean, I saw a dude taking a shit on the subway before. It seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion that I do not want to eat food from that same place, even if just from a hygienic standpoint. Add that to the fact that you have no idea what the packages origins are, and that right there, friend, is you entering the danger zone. I'm honestly a little concerned about my friends and their willingness to eat tampered, poisoned food.

But I guess that's just me. I guess I'm the only one who cares that some stranger has probably stuck a poison needle through the box of those chocolates. Does no one remember the Tylenol Tampering case in Chicago, 1982? Or that baby food tampering deal in Southern California in like, 1990, or something? Or more recently and closer to home, that crazy guy who soaked bread in antifreeze and then scattered pieces of it around the dog park in High Park in the summer of 2009? Seriously, what if that guy had decided to do the same with Lindt 70% Cocoa Chocolate bars?

CONCLUSION

Think of it mathematically. Food you prepare yourself has an almost 0% chance of being tampered with (you could have a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on, with one trying to murder the other, but unlikely.) This risk increases with the amount of packaged foods you introduce into your daily consumption, but grocery stores are generally a safe zone in that they have security and cycle through product enough and have tracking measures that packaged food in and of itself is probably safe if bought from the grocery store. This security is at once removed once it leaves the grocery store and is placed on the floor of the TTC (or a comparable location) because it had to get there by some means outside of the grocery industry (probably some evil dickhead) and the chances of it being tampered with becoming infinitely higher. INFINITELY!

Make fun, if you must. Call me paranoid, call me insane, call me whatever you will. I'm not eating any goddamn floor food, and I'm checking every package I buy for needle marks. This is a completely legitimate and reasonable fear, and one that will probably save my life at least twice.

Just sayin'.

A Mouse Falling Into My Mouth While I Sleep

I know this sounds ridiculous, and this is the most serious of my fears that people make fun of me for, but I assure you I am 100% serious when I say this has caused me many sleepless nights when ever I hear the pitter-patter of disgusting little feet around the apartment.

BACKGROUND
I am afraid of a mouse falling into my mouth while I sleep and curling up and falling asleep itself. Now, I say falling because the origins of this fear stem back to a basement apartment I shared with two close friends from September 2006 to September 2007. This was our fourth year of university and for me personally, not a great year. I was nervous about graduating and not knowing what to do next (there will be a post at some point about my fear of the future) and I was compensating by drinking. A lot. One of my roommates, for whatever his reasons was also drinking quite a bit. The third was simply flat out the dirtiest fucker I've ever known. A good friend, but the single worst roommate I've ever had. One of the more notable features of the apartment was the four foot long, two foot deep hole in my bedroom wall. It was meant for storage, according the landlord, but was quite literally a former window that had plywood placed around it with a piece of insulation on top that, if removed, would have been an open hole out to the backyard.*

Anyway, the place was a mess. I did my best to keep it clean, but failed due to all the drinking. There were cases upon cases of empties everywhere, and the messy roommate had a weird habit of stuffing his used napkins/tissues in between the couch cushions.** The place wasn't the cleanest place in the world, and while we were not overrun by mice, we certainly had some. Much to the chagrin of my roommate's girlfriend, we managed to kill most of them. Every once in a while though, they would come back and run around the place, avoiding our death traps like trained special ops.

Sometimes, while I was never certain, I thought I heard them running around in that hole. It'd be perfectly reasonable for them to be in there, just squeeze through from the backyard. Mice search out the warmest place possible, especially when they're looking to sleep, which is why you see so many in the streets in the summer and so many in your apartment when it starts getting cold.

I'm an idiot, and I placed my bed directly under this hole. One night when I was half drunk I heard a mouse and the thought popped into my head that if I was like, pass-out drunk (which was fairly frequent) a mouse could jump out of that hole, crawl around my bed and crawl into my mouth, which we all know is on average a toasty 98.6 F and logically even more desirable than room temperature for a mouse, and fall asleep and I would never know. I would wake up in the

morning in a hungover stupor and this mouse would jump out of my mouth and I would have no idea what to do.

WHY IT IS A SCARY THING

By this point the numerous diseases the mouse carries would have made their way down my throat via my saliva and would have already been well on their way to killing me. Plus, I would have no way of knowing if the mouse was pregnant and decided to crawl down my throat to birth its babies in my warm tummy. Keep in mind that mice are freaks and they can shift the bones in their skull in order to crawl through a space the size of a dime, making them pretty much able to go any where they want.

In a situation like this I would have no idea what to do. What do you do if you wake up with a mouse in your mouth? You fucking panic! There is nothing else that could be done. One, the mouse is probably going to evade capture, so you therefore can't seek out revenge for the way it wronged you. Two, I don't think there is a shot that you can get from the doctor to just cure you of mouse diseases. Now, I could be wrong and mice could be less diseased than I think they are, but I don't think so. So really, the only thing you can do is die a slow and painful death from the inside out as the mouse diseases/babies tear away at your insides like that scene in the Itchy and Scratchy Fantasia parody. And even if you survive this...I don't think it's worth surviving. I would kill myself. I would never be able to put another thing in my mouth again, because that'd basically be the same as eating off a plate made of rats.

Another possibility is that the mouse could crawl into the confines of my stomach in search of further warmth and comfort and then die due to the inhabitable nature of the human stomach. Just imagine a week later when I poop out a mouse skull! Being a vegetarian, pooping out a skull would be generally confusing, but seeing an identifiable skull in my stool would send me into a panic about what the remaining bones could possibly be doing to the rest of my insides. How did it get there? What have I been doing either in my sleep or in my black out drunkenness? What have the dark recesses of mind mind decided what was appropriate when I lacked consciousness? Again, I wouldn't know what to do.

I think this is why it really scares me. In most situations, I'm confident I would be able to eventually figure out what to do, or at least what to expect if there is no action that can be taken. But not here, man. Not here. I'd be lost in a diseased panic.

Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that the mouse sleeping in my mouth doesn't choke me while I sleep and I do actually wake up from it. That'd be a pretty embarrassing way to go, choking on a mouse in your sleep. Mother would be devastated and confused.

PREVENTION

The only way to prevent this is to either start breathing through my nose when I sleep (impossible) or sleep with my face buried in my pillow and risk suffocating every night. I risk suffocating every night because the alternative scares the shit out of me.

CONCLUSION

This is a completely reasonable fear. It seems logically possible that it could happen, and the consequences of it happening range from mind-blowing, life-changing confusion to actual death and it is reasonable to be afraid of anything that causes death.

It is true that I haven't lived in that apartment for a long time, so this shouldn't really be an issue. But honestly, a quick Google search of “the powers of mice” shows that mice can get to any where they want. Just cause I don't have a hole above me anymore does not mean that they can't crawl up my bed posts or chew a hole in the ceiling of my current bedroom and jump down like a kamikaze pilot in search of the sweet sweet warmth of a human mouth.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but just ask yourself this question: What would you do if you woke up with a mouse in your mouth? You don't have an answer.

NOTES

* We were desperate for a place, and we kind of had to take this one. Surprisingly, the hole in the wall was one of the better things about this apartment. That year and that building provided some of the better/weirder stories I can tell. If you are in Toronto, you can take a walk down Ulster St near Bathurst and find the building that looks not unlike a spaceship to get a sense of how insane and poorly skilled at handy work the landlord was.

** He still does this. He's, like, 26 years old.

Dudes Who Also Have The Same Name As Me

Because how do I know they're not the real Jake Keating and I'm the impostor?

Things I Am Afraid Of

SO MANY THINGS!

I'm Jake Keating. I'm a pretty fearful guy. I get unreasonably afraid of a lot of things and I've decided that it is time to face these fears. This blog will hopefully allow me to reason through my fears and conquer them.

These fears run a pretty wide gauntlet. Some are ridiculous, like mice falling into my mouth while I sleep. Some are pretty improbable, like the coming Zombie Apocalypse. Others are pretty mundane, like girls and failure (those two often overlap.) And some are just down right terrifying, like waking up in a pool of blood with a dog's head in my hand and someone screaming from the other side of the door in a bathroom I've never been in before.

I will also discuss some of the things I should be afraid of but, for whatever dumb reason, am not.

Lastly, I firmly believe that some of my fears are completely justifiable. Mice like to sleep in warm places, and I sleep with my mouth open. Why wouldn't it want to sleep in my mouth? This particular situation will be discussed at length in the post entitled 'Mice Falling In My Mouth While I Sleep,' I am just using it as an example of the preparations I sometimes take in order to avoid having to be afraid. (In this case, I sleep with my face in my pillow like a reverse smothering.) These preparations will also be discussed in this blogs.

By writing about my fears, I hope to show myself how ridiculous and unfounded they truly are. I do, however, fear that this blog will just reinforce the fears instead. But hey, a guy's gots to try, right?