Clock, Clock, Goose!
March 1, 2005 | 9:18 pm | Blog | Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? | 3
My parents are both borderline obsessive compulsives. So is C, and so am I.
Actually, my mom is a neat freak, but when I say neat freak, I mean she is psychotically freaky about wanting her home to be both spic and span.
My dad is the repetitive type of OCD. Life for him is really just a continuous string of rituals and habits, but things can go wrong in a Hitchcock-like way if you try to mess with his chi.
I guess C isn’t so much OCD as he is really just an only child who has lived as a bachelor for the past decade, giving him ample time to perfect HIS WAY of doing things, and by God, if you aren’t doing it HIS WAY then you’re the crazy one, because his system has been PERFECTED OVER A SERIES OF DECADES WOMAN!
I’d like to think that I’m not obsessive compulsive, but like any true OCD, I’ve self-diagnosed… my… self.
At work, I can’t function to full productivity if my workspace is all disorganized. It’s not like everything has its own space or anything, but everything has to at least be in some order.
I also get weird compulsions, urges that I know are beyond the ordinary, and so I try to suppress them. The problem is that suppressing them usually only makes them stronger, and it makes me feel nervous and hyper and crazy until I finally give in and submit to the urge already.
I once dated a guy whose house was just a few miles from mine. To get there, I always drove through one of the older neighborhoods in Oklahoma City — houses that were built in the late 1940s, and thus were just cheap enough for people my age to own and just charmingly retro enough to be hip for people my age to own.
One house had no curtains, and in their living room, clearly visible from the street, was a clock trimmed with a bright blue neon light.
I usually drove past this house at night, when the neon clock was beckoning me with all its gaseous glory. And for some reason, I’m not sure why, I had the compulsion to shout out “Clock!” even though I was alone in the car.
Giving in to this desire created a monster I could not control. From then on, every time I drove past that house, I couldn’t help but yell “Clock!” no matter who was in the car with me.
It went beyond habitual. It began to torture me. Several times I tried to avoid outing the clock, announcing its presence to the radio or any passengers I might have or oncoming traffic. But the longer I held in the primal scream, the louder I had to yell it, two or three clocks later.
I tried taking another route, but passing the clock house was the quickest route, and it had become such a routine that not going that way messed up the rest of my immaculately-organized schedule.
Finally, in order to get away from the Clock! I decided I had to move to Texas.
After I moved, the bar I started working at was located off a one-way street. I had to go another block down in order to head north to go back home each morning, and I quickly noticed that along my route there was a house with a plastic lit-up goose lamp looking down on me from a second-story window.
Each time I passed, I always looked to see if the goose was on, and infallibly, it was. When I got home, I had dreams about breaking into the house, kidnapping the goose and stowing it away with me on a trans-Atlantic trip, taking pictures of it in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Peeing Boy statue in Brussels, and sending the proofs back to the goose’s original owner in Houston.
Then one day, as some scooterist friends and I were passing the house, I pointed to the second story window and yelled “Goose!”
Since I met you I have had this nagging feeling that you would look fantastic in a canvas sportcoat with fashionable sleeves that buckle in the back, now I know it to be fact.
Did I ever mention how funny you are? HILARIOUS.
No, you have not, but I crack me up.