Classical OCD… or, Hating Mozart in Chronological Order…

I can’t explain it. It’s not like I wash my hands three times in a row with fresh soap and, upon leaving the bathroom, have to turn the doorknob a certain amount of times… really. But I figure it’s about time I come clean.

I can’t tell you exactly when it started but I’m sure others could. If Rosa were around, I’m sure she’d have stories. For instance, I remember a couple of years before our divorce when I put my thousands of comic books in chronological order and proceeded to read through them… all of them…

For most of my life, I’ve had a thing about order, putting things in order. One of my favorite jobs was when I worked at a book store and I had to shelve new arrivals. Most employees hated it, but finding orderly ways of putting all the books on display… it wasn’t better than sex, necessarily. It was good, though. Since then, I’ve watched my DVDs in chronological order and there’s the comic book incident.

Recently, I decided to reduce our CD space in the house. We had two racks holding our hundreds of CDs. I decided we would reduce down to one rack. How to do this? I bought a book that holds 256 CDs and that should hold… a few… But I couldn’t just take the extra CDs and put them in the book – oh no! That would be too easy!

Instead, I took all of our CDs and put them in chronological order, removing from those stacks Vicky’s more hardcore metal and country and that Dion woman… and Cher – ewwwwww…. The rest went into stacks. Then, I took the disks in chronological order and boxed them in said order so they would take up less room, be less intrusive. Now, I am listening to them in – yes, you guessed it – chronological order.

It’s a disease.

So, last night, we were watching Desperate Housewives and Bree (for those in the know) had some music on in the house. “That’s Mozart,” I told Vicky. “I’ve got that in the car.” Yes, that puts me in the 18th century, which should tell you how long it’ll be before I’m listening to Grandaddy again!

Vicky’s aware I’m not really a Mozart fan but wildly misinterpreted that. Judging the music, she said, “That’s nice. I don’t see why you hate Mozart.”

The words “I don’t see why you hate Mozart” seemed, for me, to be filled with irony. Of course, I don’t hate Mozart. I’m just not a fan. Anyway, he’s dead. It’s not like I’m hurting his feelings. More than that, though, those words “I don’t see why you hate Mozart” sounded a whole lot like something else I often hear. People who don’t understand why I’m an atheist (no offense taken, of course, as I can’t fathom why most people believe in imaginary creatures) will sometimes ask, “Why are you so angry with God?” As it’s simply not possible to be angry with an imaginary being, there’s no way for me to respond without being insulting… which is why I always try to respond.

Anyway, Shubert’s next, followed by Tchaikovsky. I like Tchaikovsky but, somewhere along the line, we’ve acquired about four disks of ballet music. I can’t wait to see what that does to my driving…