Too True Tues(day) #15 Secret Compulsions

It is time for Too True Tues(day)! Your day to tell it like it is. Take a load off. Speak your mind! This week SanitySrchr at The Short Bus (love that name) had a suggestion. Her idea is to let out your secret compulsions. Your obsessions. The private little things you do not because you want to but because something bad, possibly involving VooDoo and world decimation, could happen if you don't. Yes indeed, those little maneuvers you participate in to save yourself from a horror beyond the imagination of Steven King.

At first I thought, well that is a great idea but I don't really have any compulsive things that I haven't already blasted across the world. I am not really an obsessive person. But that is only because my compulsive behaviors are rational. Yours probably aren't. For our purposes here today, we'll use "obsessive" to refer to an unwelcome pattern of thought and "compulsive" to refer to an unwelcome pattern of action. Just to clarify. I will use both. Ahem.

I hereby do confess to being a "checker". Not of the stove, because it is so rarely used. Not of the door locks because I know for a fact if any burglar came in here they would leave and put $20 bucks in the mailbox for us. Not of buttons adjusted, zippers up. Not of lightbulbs on--- or is it off? I scan. I scan every room I enter and I scan again several minutes after entering a room. I scan the ceilings and high corners of every room every day all day for bugs.

Especially spiders.

ICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had a couple of severely traumatizing experiences as a child that have led to this perfectly rational fear of spiders and the corresponding logical compulsive need to search for them rather constantly in order to save the world from something really bad. It is considerate of me, really.

See when I was a kid my parents had a cabin in the woods of The South of Wisconsin. There were farms and stuff around and lots and lots of nature. Even though it had been invented, my parents refused to get a phone installed. Even though I loved it dearly, my mean  parents also refused to have a TV set. Yes, the squalid deprivation is something I still work to overcome thank you. You better believe I hated it there. What were we supposed to be doing, talking to each other??? It's not like we did. My parents read books and my sister and I fought and read books.

Anyway, one Friday we went up and upon entering the house was a nightmare that the movie Arachnophobia failed to even consider. Wolf Spiders. Brown, the color of faux wood paneling, and hairy, with a body the size of a small fist. Pointed bony legs of 3 inches or more. And thick. And fast. Dropping from the ceiling and hanging from the walls. Everywhere. It was an infestation and it was horror.

I'd like to say we did the sensible thing. We doused gasoline around the exterior and using my Dad's lighter from his hidden stash of smokes, burned down the stupid cabin and raced back to Chicago where all the civilization and concrete is, and the city sprays pesticides from airplanes and trucks the way nature intended. And spiders only live in your basement which explains my fear of basements and that I now live in a home without one. Not what happened. Instead my parents did a crummy job of smashing most of the vicious gun- toting leather jacket-wearing spiders. However they missed a few. And don't you know what I woke up to the next morning. IN. MY. BED.

My er, need to check things or, well, it goes, oh, ummmm, a bit ummmmm, further than that.

I sort of also check the toilet seat. I never, even in my own home sit on a toilet seat without checking it for spiders. The sink. The shower--- especially the shower. It's not obsessive either because the spiders are there, I just may not be seeing them. So it makes perfect sense to check consistently and often. One would not want to be surprised. But be certain, they ARE there. And one last thing.

Although I give all glassware a visual inspection first, I also do a fist inspection. Wherein I shove my hand into the glass really fast and jam it upside down roughly shaking it, so that if anything thinks it is going to hide from me or blend in, it is not. I do need you all to know that it is not a compulsive thing though. It is a service to society. My special way of protecting all of the world. My contribution. Yes I do it every time even if it is a clear glass. Yes it makes perfect sense and no, it is neither obsessive or compulsive. See my definition above.

Here is the Mr. Linky thing. Go home and tell your story of compulsiveness or obsession. Link to my blog and explain that you are playing Too True Tues(day). Then come back over here and fill in the spots for Mr. Linky. It is helpful if you pull up the actual address of your post and paste it in. Also if you are busy but still want to play you can tell your true tale on Wednesday or even Thursday. Heck I have seen people enter themselves a month later! (but try to stay within a few days really, this is not an excuse to procrastinate).