jimcofer.com

My pal Scott recently posted a note on Facebook where he talked about “five odd things” he does when no one else is around. He tagged several people in the note, and if you were tagged, you were supposed to make your own list of five odd things that you do when no one is around. I was tagged, but unfortunately I just can’t think of anything truly odd that I do when no one is around, save for the usual stuff like singing at the top of my lungs when I’m home alone listening to the iPod. Instead, I decided to do a list of “Five Odd Things About Me In General”. Some might make you laugh; some might make you cringe. And so… without further ado… the list!

1) “Get this voice outta my head!” – As you can tell from this blog, I like to write. What you might not know is that I’m writing all the time. Seriously: all… the… time. If I’m not actually engaged in something – like talking to the missus or watching something on TV –  I’m writing an article in my head, over and over again. In fact, by the time you read something I’ve posted on this blog, I’ve probably written it in my head dozens of times. So if I’m outside smoking a cigarette, or doing a mundane household task like making the bed or washing dishes, I have this voice in my head, and it’s writing articles… 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! What’s really sad about all this is that “the voice” is apparently only able to write short, non-fiction pieces; despite writing enough articles on this site over the years to fill the Encyclopedia Britannica, I just can’t do long form non-fiction, or fiction in any format. In fact, over the past 20 years, I’ve only had a couple of ideas for stories, and they were half-baked crap that wouldn’t fill one of those little books in the checkout line at the grocery store, much less 300 pages of a “real” novel.

2) “There’s asphalt in Room 101” – When you were a kid, did you ever walk barefoot across asphalt and accidentally “roll” your toes underneath your foot and scrape the tops of them? I did that a few times, and it’s led to one of my only phobias: scraping the tops of my toes on asphalt. It sounds silly, I know. And, as an adult, there are few instances where I actually go outside without shoes. But it happens sometimes. Maybe I need to go out and get the mail, and my shoes are “all the way” upstairs. Maybe I just got out of the shower and Lisa has just come home with a bunch of stuff from Harris Teeter that needs to be unloaded from the car. Whatever the case may be, I’ll walk slowly and carefully across the pavement, and the entire time I’ll think about the sensation of the skin on the tops of my toes being ripped away by the asphalt. And it’ll freak me out. I’ll get a queasy feeling in my stomach, and my brain moves at 1000 miles an hour, thinking alternately about how it would feel and then ordering my muscles not to do it. I don’t think I’d call it a paranoia – I’m not nearly as bad about this as Lisa is about spiders – but still… if I walk across asphalt barefoot, scraping my toes will be the only thing I think about.

Continue reading “In Response to Scott G.”