Ishmael Gradsdovic gives us a peek under his skull in part fourteen of the papers...
You've heard of people who have what has been termed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or perhaps you know somebody who exhibits the symptoms, or perhaps you yourself compulsively wash your hands or check a dozen times to see if the oven was turned off or have a thought that you can't stop running through over and over in your head.
When I read about OCD in one of Oliver Sacks' books, I tried to expand whatever insight into the condition I gleaned from what I read by scanning my own mind for evidence of behavior which was on the furthest outposts of the continuum between non-OCD and OCD behavior.
I remembered scattered and brief episodes in my childhood -- a week in which I became a semi-compulsive hand washer, elaborate rituals to keep the monsters under the bed at bay (and subsequent worry over whether I had really performed the rituals in the correct order), lining up things in straight lines and endlessly correcting small errors in the line-up, etc. All of these things were done as a child and I grew out of them rapidly. However, the memories of my state of mind are strong enough to summon forth some empathy.
It was months later when I discovered my own OCDemon. Mine is no nuisance at all -- it doesn't interfere with my life in the slightest, and it even hides away from notice. If I didn't have a habit of examining the workings of my mind at all times, I could easily have gone through life from beginning to end without even taking notice of it.
But it's peculiar enough and a frequent enough companion that now I recognize it every time I see it. There's no big punchline coming up here, just another human oddity. Every time I'm in the passenger seat of a car traveling on the freeway and I start to daydream, my mind will idle on the image of me holding a scythe out the window and mowing down the weeds on the side of the road. Every time. Without fail. I'll wonder in a casual way what will happen when the scythe blade hits a road sign (will it slice right through? will it yank the scythe out of my hands?). I will continue to daydream down this straight and narrow path until I'm either distracted by something else that takes me out of daydreaming mode, or (lately) until I recognize that I'm in my demon state and get amused by the situation. Often in the course of a ride, I'll revisit the sickle-cycle dozens of times.
For me the odd thing is that I've been doing this for as long as I can remember, but it never occurred to me until fairly recently that this was the case. I never thought it odd, before, when I would go down this thought path that it was a path I'd traveled before, again and again, every time I was a passenger in a car. Of course, now I wonder how many unexamined thought processes remain in my brain, lurking, ready to surprise me with their unexplored familiarity.
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