I’m not even sure why I think this is a thing that can happen. I’m sure it happened once in a movie I saw in my formative years (ages 1-29). Little things in movies always make their mark on me. I have a vague recollection of a movie in which a swarm of killer bees fight their way into the house and take down a person. It doesn’t make sense, but because I saw it in a movie, I no longer walk naked around the house covered in honey.

Back to the key in the lock. Have any of you ever had this happened? Here’s the average scenario that crosses my mind:

Picture me stumbling from my car to the back entrance to my building, my arms draped in grocery bags so that I don’t have to take two trips. It’s a good thing I’m very “strong” and “manly.”

I make it to the door. I don’t want to put down my groceries lest they get water and/or feces on them (feces is everywhere. And yes, that’s officially the new title of my autobiography: Feces Is Everywhere, by Jamey Robert Stegmaier [the "Robert" is there so strangers know I'm a man]), so I grapple for the right key and insert it into the lock. This is the danger zone.

Because my arm is weighed down by bags full of mango-orange juice, cat treats, and 2-for-1 Breyer’s ice cream, I am acutely aware that this is the moment when most keys break off in locks. So I am very careful, and I manage to open the door and make it inside before I am attacked by someone waiting in the parking lot for a resident like me to fumble with my keys.

If the key actually broke off in the lock, I’d envision two things happening:

1. I would immediately go into survival mode. This means that I’d eat as many of the groceries, starting with the cat food, to build up a thick layer of fat to protect me from the elements. I would, as is my way, create a crude loincloth out of my environmentally friendly canvas grocery bags. Then, using only my wits, charm, and lighter fluid, I would create a fire in the parking lot to attract the attention of my cat in the hopes that he would understand that I’m locked out and would either call the police or FedEx the spare key to me.
2. Because I would have not only prevented myself but also other people from entering the building, I would expect my fellow residents to quickly turn on me. Gentle reminders that I kindly invited them to my Festivus party would fall on deaf ears, and they would chase me from the property.

As you can imagine, I don’t want any of those things to happen. A simple solution would simply be to not carry more groceries than I can handle, but that’s preposterous, and I will not consider it.

Have you ever had a key break off in a lock? Did your worst nightmares come true immediately afterwards?

This is Claire. She's sideways because the photo won't rotate. Despite this, she's still adorable.

Over Christmas break, I went to see my good friend Bryce, his wife Jody, and their adorable baby Claire. At least, I think their baby is named Claire. At my age, everyone has a baby, and their names all run together. Let’s go with Claire, but it could just as easily be Felicity, Emily, or Rick.

Claire is pretty adorable. I mean, most babies are adorable. But Claire has one of those angelic faces that says, “I dare you to not adore me.” In fact, that was her first sentence.

So I was hanging out with Bryce, Jody, and Claire, and I remembered that holding babies is one of my favorite things. Seriously. Even though I don’t know if I want to have kids, there is no peace like that of holding a baby. I could guarantee you that I could achieve world peace if you gave me a billion babies to hand out to all of the bullies, dictators, and Community haters of the world (okay, maybe I’ll need 6.9 billion babies).

It’s even better than holding cats. There. I said it. Good thing Biddy doesn’t read this blog.

So I asked Bryce if I could hold Claire for a minute. I had just washed my hands, so I was free of all the toxins that curse us adults (did I mention on the blog that the vast majority of grocery store cart handles are awash with fecal matter? Yeah. Think about that the next time you shop). Bryce held the baby out to me…

[I want to pause here, because it is in this moment that my greatest fear happens. The fear that I am not going to receive the baby properly and that I'm going to drop this perfect little being and it's going to break and I'm going to be responsible for killing an angel. It is a terrible, terrible fear. It isn't helped by the fact that you can't grab a baby like a football. Babies are squishy and dainty. So you are faced with the impossible task of gently receiving this squirming, fragile bundle in a firm grip so you don't drop it.]

…and I successfully received Claire and brought her to my shoulder. Success. Touchdown. No dropped baby.

Mothers will confide in you, “Oh, I’ve dropped babies before. It’s fine.” But that doesn’t fly in my world. I mean, if you’re a mother, you’ve picked up or received babies thousands of times. One drop and you’re still essentially batting 1.000. Me? I’ve picked up/received maybe 20 babies. One drop and I’m out of the game.

Does anyone else share this fear? Does any father not share this fear at some point?

You can see my other greatest fears here.

If you’re like me, you guard that ticket with your life.

I’ve played through the scenario in which I show up to pick up my dry cleaning without the ticket, and it looks something like this:

Me: Hi, I’m here to pick up my pants.

Dry Cleaning Lady (looks up from her mass-market copy of Twilight: Adapted from the Motion Picture Twilight): Sure, can I have your ticket?

Me (fidgeting): Um, that’s the thing…I lost the ticket.

DCL: You lost the ticket.

Me: Yes. I’m so sorry. Can I just show you my ID?

DCL (rolls her eyes): Your ID is useless here. The only way we can know that they’re your pants is if you have your ticket.

Me: Do you have other “Stegmaiers” in your database?

DCL: I can’t tell you that without your ticket.

Me (starting to sweat profusely): What if I describe the pants to you in perfect detail before you show them to me? That way you’d know that they’re mine.

DCL: How do I know this isn’t a setup? You could have the real Stegmaier bound and gagged in your car.

Me: What if I try them on? You’ll know they’re mine if they fit me. Like Cinderella.

DCL: You could have had plastic surgery to match the real Stegmaier’s waistline and leg length.

Me (starting to doubt if I’m the real Jamey Stegmaier): I will pay you a thousand dollars for my pants.

DCL: No.

Me: I will lay you across this oddly sticky counter and make sweet, sweet love to you until the sun rises tomorrow in exchange for pants.

DCL (sizes me up skeptically): Not going to happen.

Me (producing a spot-on Photoshopped duplication of the ticket from my pocket): Oh! Silly me! What was I thinking? Here’s the ticket!

DCL (runs the ticket through a hologram scanner and one of those machines that blows puffs of air on you at the airport): This is a fake.

Me: I give up. Have a good day.

I’m sure it’s something like that. I just don’t want to chance it.

Inevitably, your arm starts to tingle and it wakes up as circulation resumes. But what if it doesn’t wake up? What if it’s been without circulation for too long and it has died?

These are the questions that go through my head.

What I don’t quite understand is why our arms don’t die every time circulation is cut off. If there’s not blood going through a part of your body, doesn’t that part die?

I’m thankful that’s not the case. But I still worry that someday I’m going to wake up from a pleasant Sunday afternoon nap to discover that my arm has fallen off.

You might be drinking shards of ice.

True story. You see, when you send a waiter to fetch you a glass of water (especially if you say it as I do: “Waiter, fetch me a water!”), what he should do is use the stainless steel ice scooper to place ice in your glass.

But what he actually does is uses your fresh glass as a scoop. Which isn’t a problem 99% of the time. But every once in a while, a glass will get chipped as it clashed against the ice. That little bit of glass gets scooped up by another waiter, and before you know it, you have a patron who is bleeding internally due to their diet coke.

Like I said, this rarely happens. It’s much more of a concern when a glass shatters in the ice, but a good restaurant will flush out the ice bin when that happens.

However, knowing what I know about scooping ice–after all, I was one such waiter who used the glass as a scoop–every once in a while I take a sip of my drink, and a little sliver of something shoots down my throat. It’s probably just a shard of ice. But you never know…

Also, never eat potato skins at restaurants. The outside of a potato is fair game for handling in the kitchen. Any given potato has probably passed through at least a dozen hands (many of them longshoremen) by the time it gets to your plate.

This accompanies the story about the hawk in the comments section.

When I bought my Camry four years ago, I was delighted to find that it had a moonroof. “Perfect,” I thought. “Now I can drive through the country on summer nights with friends, admiring the star-filled sky through my moonroof.” That’s the dream, right?

However, very rarely have I actually used the moonroof, much less even opened the protective cover on the ceiling of my car. Why?

I’m afraid that something will fall through the moonroof onto my head.

This has to happen every now and then, right? Maybe something falls off a truck or a rock falls off an overpass. Things fall all the time.

A quick search on Google for “fell through moonroof” reveals thousands of hits, including some guy in California who wants a moonroof added to his car and an anonymous posting on a discussion board about a deal for a car with a moonroof falling through. So obviously this is a common fear.

Also, related, I roll down all the windows of my car except for my driver’s side window, lest something fly through the window and under my sunglasses to blind me. It could happen.

You’re naked. It’s slippery. You can’t hear or see what’s going on in the rest of your house. You’re confined to a very small space with one exit. Your only defensive weapon on hand is your loofah.

When people break into your home, usually the last thing they want to run into is you. But that doesn’t stop my mind from wandering when I’m in the shower. It wanders to the slim possibility that someone has broken into my home with the intent of harming me, and I’m in the shower when it happens.

As improbable as this fear sounds, I think there’s probably something in all (or many) of us that relates to this fear. Hitchcock featured it in Psycho, so I’m definitely not alone here.

And the thing is–the thing that I tell myself when I pry to open my eyes through shampoo lather to see if there’s an intruder in the bathroom–is, what am I really going to do in that situation? It’s not quite helpless, but it’s pretty close. If someone is motivated and able to break into your house at the exact time that you are most vulnerable, you probably don’t stand a chance against them. I’m not saying I wouldn’t try to fight my way out with that loofah, but I understand that my chances are slim.

It’s like the common fear that your plane is going to crash. I get it, but what are you really going to do if your plane starts to go down? You’re not in control of that situation. Just strap on that oxygen mask, get a little high, and enjoy the ride.

So why not just relax and enjoy the shower? That’s what I’m working on.

Every week, thousands of college football fans paint their faces with their teams’ colors. NFL fans do the same. And in a few days, men and women around the country will smear on face and body paint. They’ll walk around looking creepy when they smile from the contrast with that sticky, slimy substance lacquered on their faces.

Fall is a time for face paint–just not on my face.

I’ve always been finicky about any foreign substance on my skin. I was not one of those kids who wrote reminders in pen on their arms. I will never get a tattoo. I don’t like the idea of makeup and equally dislike when women wear makeup (because it might get on me).

And face paint…face paint is the worst. Not only is it a foreign substance, but it’s so synthetic. I don’t want that type of a substance seeping into my skin.

I know it’s weird, but even just looking at someone wearing face paint gives me the heebie-jeebies. I can’t ever look at the band K.I.S.S. because of that. A paranoid part of me thinks that the face paint is going to jump over to my face. Even when I watch Braveheart, I think, “This movie is awesome–but couldn’t they have left out the face paint?”

I’m pretty sure this is a fear that no one else shares–am I right?

Daily Quickie: While I was urinating in my bathroom today, I filled a glass of water with my free hand and drank it while I peed. There was something oddly gratifying about drinking the water and immediately seeing it come out the other end.

I did not expect to find a photo of this. And yet here it is.

My Greatest Fear #15: Accidentally putting something on my toothbrush that is not toothpaste. And then trying to brush my teeth with it.

Has this ever happened? No. Not once. Not to me, at least.

But like any American, I have a number of random tubes of gels and ointments in my bathroom. There may come a day when I’m going through my routine and I absentmindedly grab one of the wrong tubes, and suddenly I have Bengay in my mouth and my mouth is going numb and it smells weird and I can’t feel my tongue and did they know when they named it “Bengay” that they were setting themselves up to be the butt of many a high school boy’s jokes and now I can’t feel my throat either and I swallowed my toothbrush and I can’t remember the number for 911 and Biddy is already eyeing me as easy prey.

Hey, it could happen.

Daily Quickie: Many women use Halloween as an excuse to dress in scandalous fantasy outfits, which is awesome, but it’s just one day of year. Shouldn’t other holidays start to use this strategy. I mean, what if Arbor Day organizers could get women to dress as Eve (of Adam and Eve fame)? Heck, men too, for that matter. Imagine how many trees would be planted! The environment would be saved almost immediately.

However, I only roll down the two windows in the back of my Camry and the passenger window. The reason? It’s not about the hair.

I’m afraid that something will sail into my window and slice my eye.

Really.

Now, I understand that the chances of happening are slim to none, especially if I’m wearing sunglasses. But this is how irrational fears work. If there’s the slightest chance for something to happen and you have the ability to reduce that possibility, you will. At least, I will.

I've always wanted to wear one of these suits.

There’s a line in Dumb and Dumber that illustrates this point (this is somewhat paraphrased).

Lloyd: What do you think the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me… ending up together?

Mary: Not good. I’d say like… one out of a million.

Lloyd: So you’re telling me there’s a chance!

Also, in my defense, I have actually had my eye sliced by an unseen object. It happened while walking down a blustery London street a few years ago. I don’t know what it was, but it hurt quite a bit, and I could barely see out of that eye for a day or two.

Am I alone in this fear or can anyone relate?