- Spelunking. Crawling around in caves, in the dark, with only a flashlight for support, with just barely enough room to squeeze through some jagged, smelly tunnel, if you hold your stomach in and wriggle along inch by inch with your shoulders and hips, hundreds of feet below the earth. As a hobby. Just the thought.
- Skydiving. Absolutely not. How does that work? How does anyone do it, get ten to thirteen thousand feet above the ground, look out the airplane window, then jump out of the plane? I mean, it looks fun in the movies, but what would compel me to jump out of a plane: to see what freefall feels like? Just to feel the butt-clenching, gut-sucking, heart-freezing terror of falling to my death, for just a moment? is that the attraction?
- Go to sleep with a snake in my house. Loose. Not in a padlocked cage. Slithering around at night, doing whatever snakes’ do in apartments when people are asleep or away. Or in a locked cage, to be honest. I live in tangible dread of waking up to find a snake of any kind, any size, curled up at my warm feet. Dead or alive. I can barely breathe, now. Where would I have to be in life to let someone bring a boa constrictor into my house? How many beers?
I was also afraid of looking foolish one upon a time, but that ship has sailed…
Mark Earnest Johnson 