The Complulsive

The Compulsive

I’ve always had these odd and compulsive habits. From as young as four I can remember doing weird shit around the house; I had this starving hunger for dog biscuits around that time. I’d chew my way through six or seven of those chalky tasting dog bones in a day. What they were actually for though (as you may have guessed) was my dog Flea, the only dog I was ever actually able to teach to sit or roll over or anything like that. Part of the reason’s probably because 24/7 (I didn’t have no where to go when I was 4) he’d sit around with me and watch me eat his favourite treat, poor guy. He died of Lupus.

This trend has continued throughout my life with a radical fluctuation. From the ages of 8-10 I was almost placed somewhere dark and soft because of my habit of counting everything. The number of rocks on a rock road, the amount of nerds in a box of nerds, the number of times my father hit my mother, all this, not necessarily crazy, maybe irrational counting got on everyone’s nerves. Well thanks to the end of my self imposed alienation, and the very effective use of negative reinforcement from my father and teachers, I grew out of this old habit around middle school.

But now, as an adult, I find my self-slipping back into these obsessive habits that interfere with my life to point that some people may call too much. This is why I’m writing to you. I think maybe if I get some of these thoughts on paper, I can use my super logic against my own compulsive habits, my own compulsive self.

The story I’m going to tell you starts off normal enough: I wanted to recycle. It’s the green thing to do. I think it’s wonderful. I drive a Prius and all that shit. I got it free cause of a grant from my research department in EPA, studying the long-term effects of Global Warming. Once I got myself this shiny new hybrid, I got all smuggy and decided to take my green machine a little farther out of my way. So I started collecting the cans ad plastic bottles I used around my house. And when I got it all filled up, I decided to take it to that scrap metal place to cash in, but I didn’t know where that was. Search it on Google and it turned up the nearest one’s up in KC, which it just a little more than 75 miles from my house. Now maybe it was the length of the trip, that definitely was a factor, but I also did a little rationalization and decided that my long drive up there in my big truck (which was the only thing that could carry all the fucking cans and bottles I had piled up) would be spewing out more toxic fumes, doing more harm to the environment than these non-compostable bottles could do in a few thousand years. So good, you see my dilemma.

I thought on this for a few days until one day I was making my afternoon commute back home when I realized that every other Thursday the prisoners from the Ness County prison are brought out to clear up the roadsides beside the prison yard. Now it’s a small prison, and the big disposable bins can be seen from the road, and, probably in order to earn a few tax ride-offs, they sort their waste by metals, plastics, and compostables. Awesome. My plan was just to load up one or two of those big garbage sacks every Tuesday morning and throw it out the window for them to clean up. I calculated, and this rate was actually twice as fast as I produced my waste.

It started out good. One Tuesday I dropped off my bag in the morning in a nice little sack (I didn’t want the prisoners doing any extra work on my behalf) for them to get picked up. This went on for about six months before I finally depleted that big pile of garbage sack behind my house, and only had to drop off my little Mother Nature care packages every four weeks. That’s what I had to do, but habit had me doing it every two weeks. At this point things get a little weird. Monday night came along, and I had no idea what to do. I felt physically ill knowing I had no garbage to throw out tomorrow alongside the road. So I came up with a solution. I figured maybe my insane libido would be cured if I just threw something out.

And so I did.

I packed a little brown box with cigarettes, a knife, and pocket sized liquor bottles: anything I thought the average prisoner would appreciate. After all the goodies were packed in, I sealed off the top, wrapped it in gift paper, an even topped all of it off with a neat little bow. That morning I dropped it off and went on my way.

I succeeded in doing this three more times. It wasn’t until the forth time I did it, threw that cute little gift out the window as I was coming around the curve, when I was stopped by a police car. He told me to get out and put my hands behind my back and I did. Then they brought me down to the station, did finger prints and a mug shot, the whole deal, and locked me in an interrogation room for the rest of that morning.

Just when I was getting bored, in came this stressed looking, little higher than rookie detective, practically smoking two cigarettes at once, looked over my file, looked at me and said “Why?”

Well I told him and he laughed in my face. I would have been angry, but I didn’t think that guy had had a good laugh like that in too long a time, so I let him have it. After he had caught his breath, dragged his cigarette, and sipped his coffee, he told me one of the knives I had left to an inmate on the side of the road made it’s way into a shower stabbing, and two people were dead because of me. I told him “Don’t prisoners make pokey, stabbing things out of toothbrushes and shit? All the time? Probably would’ve happened with or without my knife.”

Unfortunately he took my rebuttal as a confession and then gave me the chance to see a lawyer and told me not to worry, cause, “with a story like that, you’ll sure to go to the psych ward.”

And so I did.

I spent maybe three days sobbing in a cell before my lawyer successfully appealed for a psych evaluation and I was sent here. Now it’s been 113 days since I showed up here, and, they won’t tell me directly, but I think I failed. These pills they give me make each day fade into the next, and they say I talk to myself, but that’s just Darren I tell them and they don’t listen and give me more of the shots. I’ve written letters to you before. Are you getting them?

They still have me work on that government project, which is odd, because it’s very stressful. And they don’t let me see or speak to anyone but Darren, who I met in here. Please write me back, Elaine, I keep thinking and thinking about why I’m in here, but every time I ask I’m given this shot and the slate goes blank again. The only thing they will tell me is that I’m too important to be let out, to be ‘tainted’. Yea, this is the third or so letter I’ve sent. I’m almost positive your not getting them, but I’ll keep writing, makes my head clear, makes me think.