Home Improvement

I've got a little bit of that OCD thing flowing through my veins. If there is a voicemail message on my phone I must hear and delete the message ASAP so the voicemail envelope icon will go away. I check to see if the doors are locked at night at least three times a piece. Sometimes I get out of bed twenty minutes later just to check again. Everything in the house has a place that it should be and it makes me unsettled if things loiter about, contributing nothing to the order of the home. Since these random and insignificant events affect me it should be perfectly obvious that the universe frequently conspires against me.

Scenario One:
Part 1. Car breaks down. This induces mild panic, as this car is the one that will transport baby and has the baby car seat and Samantha hates the other car. No sweat, it finally started running and we'll jet over to the mechanic and have them fix it.
Part 2. As we leave the house, garage door will not close. Mild panic has moved on to medium panic, since I know that when I backed out of the garage and hit the lawn mower into the garage door sensor and bent the frame, this is all my fault. Thinking my "expert" repairs on the door a week earlier solved the problem before, I can fix the problem again. I disconnect the automatic part of the opener and begin to manually yank on the door as hard as I can. Which of course leads to this:



Step 3. Extreme panic as now I have ruined everything. Everything in the whole world is broken and I am to blame. This turn of events leads me to believe the following: My neighbors are ashamed of living next to such a poor homeowner, Samantha should have remained single and not joined my cursed life, the garage door will cost over $1000 to be repaired, because the garage door costs so much to be repaired the car will now be beyond repair and we will have to buy a new car, the Homeowners Association will send me a letter reprimanding me for being the worst neighbor ever, someone will crawl under the open space of the broken door in the middle of the night and rob us blind.

Scenario Two:
Part 1. Extremely old can of paint lives in the garage with no lid. Paint is frozen solid and of no use to us so I throw it in the trash can.
Part 2. Garbage man picks up trash on Thursday and somehow frozen paint can has morphed into can of globbity goo paint and spills out of the can all over the street. When I arrive home later that evening I discover an enormous lake of goo paint and then roughly forty yards of tire tracks that the garbage truck drove through, leaving a telltale trail that ends right in front of our driveway.
Part 3. Extreme panic as now I have ruined everything. Our entire street is ruined and I am to blame. This turn of events leads me to believe the following: My neighbors are ashamed of living next to such a poor homeowner, Samantha should have remained single and not joined my cursed life, having only a few moments ago learned from Samantha that you are not supposed to throw paint in the trash I fully expect the police to show up any minute and arrest me, the garbage men will report me and I will have to pay an exorbitant fine, every neighbor on the street will have their entire families visit them this weekend and they will all see how I have ruined the street and they will vow never to visit their relatives in Texas again.

I dashed out into the street and tried to scrub away the goo.



My efforts were noble but the results were poor. When friends have come over they say they didn't even notice it until I tell them it's there but I know better. As time slowly marches on, all of my shortcomings and failures will be magnified to the nth degree until my anxiety and fear of failure causes my head to explode. In the meantime prescription medicine delays the inevitable. Thanks to pharmaceutical advancements things have gotten a little better. Garage doors and paint spills pale in comparison to the time I thought a dinner guest was tracking mud on the carpet with his cast. I whipped Samantha and Teague into a murderous frenzy and turned them loose onto that poor slob.