Posts Tagged by Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Tuesday C and I participated in our first caucus. It was a festive event — we walked the five minutes from our house to our polling location with a collapsible cooler and made friends in the line by talking about the various candidates. There were Obamaphiles everywhere and for some reason not a Clintonite to be seen. Something like 200 people filed in and out of the bed and breakfast, filling the back yard and front and hanging out by the swimming pool, which gave the entire affair the air of a block party. There were so many people they stopped asking for registration cards. While other polling locations were on the brink of devolving into riots ours was a happy hearty place which I think can be attributed to the diversity and personality of our still-thriving gay-borhood (a subject I have more to say about later).

I’ve been obscenely excited to participate in the political process this year. More excited than one should be. I can’t decide if it’s because my candidate of choice has filled me with the most hope and optimism than I’ve felt for this country in a very long time, or if I’m just glad to be back in Western Civilization and all the trappings that go along with it. Nonetheless, I’m relieved the election is over here, for the next eight months at least, because I can no longer bear to witness conversations like the one I eavesdropped during lunch on Monday, in which a seven-year-old overly-precocious boy and his septuagenarian Eastern-European grandmother hotly debated what Obama could do for the country. The grandmother (and the parents, who for some annoying reason encouraged this argument) believed that Obama was a Socialist who, once elected to office, would steal from her family all their collected wealth. I might add that this conversation came right on the coattails of another dialogue in which the three adults at the table discussed what to do with their uninhabited second home, located in River Oaks.

Now, I understand this Bloc-raised woman may have had some Ayn Rand-ian aversion to socialism and an unnatural love for capitalistic culture, fine, but the entire conversation was ridiculous and crazy-making (who argues with a seven-year-old over politics? What seven-year-old knows that much about politics?) not to mention the fact that I was annoyed anyway because these people were totally abusing their waiter to begin with, and then the entire event was brought full-circle yesterday when I spotted the kid, mother and grandmother on my turf, at the museum. AND! AND! The whole time this conversation was happening another couple was arguing politics to my right and the restaurant’s televisions were tuned to network news and so I was trapped in some kind of a Homer-esque hell of stereo political gobbledy-gook.

Then, after we voted in the caucus Tuesday evening we went to eat sushi with neighbor friends and were yelled at by an overweight female Clinton supporter with a horrible ’80s man’s haircut who was eating alone. Not to say she’s indicative of ALL Clinton supporters. It was just an observation.

I have a city council meeting tonight that I have to attend for work. I’m really dreading it, because, you know, the last thing I want to do until 9 p.m. after a long day at work is attend a small-town city council meeting and hear Area Man complain to Rep. Socialladderclimber about how the streets need fixin’.

I have to attend this meeting every month, and last month I had the pleasure of sitting in front of Mr. New Volunteer Fire Department Chief. When I interviewed Mr. NVFDC at the beginning of the year for a story about how, well, he was the new volunteer fire department chief, he was very rude and acted all exasperated with each question. So you could say I was already not a big fan of his.

Anyway, I sat in front of Chief at the meeting last month, and the next morning, right as the newspaper I work for was breaking a story about how the old fire chief HAD STOLEN MORE THAN $50,000 FROM THE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT, FOR GOD’S SAKE, New Chief called my editor to complain that I was — get this — doodling during the city council meeting the night before. DOODLING! Instead of taking notes!

Now you could say that I really really don’t like this man. I pretty much think he was feeling threatened by all the negative coverage Volunteer Fire Department was getting and wanted to lash out at someone. But me? For doodling? And besides, what kind of sick freak looks over someone’s shoulder during a city council meeting to see what she’s writing down?

I think tonight I’ll sit in front of him again, and in the biggest letters I can muster I’m going to write: I HATE ALL FIRE CHIEFS. Then I’m going to lean way, way back, just to make sure my notebook is completely visible.

Then, under that I’m going to write: WHAT STARTS WITH ‘F’ AND ENDS IN ‘U-C-K’?

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!”

Using other people’s pictures to post to your completely unoriginal Web site without even taking the time to ask for their consent.

It’s also not okay to create several “anonymous” comments on your own Web site, which are really just posts obviously written by you, stroking your own ego and trying to make it look like anyone even looks at your site to begin with.

And while I may be out of line a little bit in saying this, I might also add that it’s also so not cool to talk trash about other people on your Web site.