there’s this period of time when we are younger where we seem to develop, embrace and nurture various and different tics, peculiarities and obsessive behaviours. I had a few, all in retrospect, disgusting.

Scab picking was probably one of the most intensely obsessive and compulsive of the bunch. The reward is nothing more than recurrent mild pain, perhaps some blood and quite possibly a life-long scar. And yet little seemed more satisfying. This pursuit of course, was always furtive, perhaps one of the first furtive pursuits of my entire career; there was an innate knowledge that being caught doing this would be met with at minimum a slap at the offending pick hand and almost certainly some sharp words designed to frighten you into stopping, you know something along the lines of “that will get infected and your arm will fall off.” Yet your stomach might whoop in guilty, semi-terrified pleasure at this possibility, the idea of such a dramatic end taunting and daring you.

Just as quickly, the picking stopped and the hair twirling started. For some reason, hair twirling seemed to make adults antsy and nervous and irritable, quickly being relegated to that same secret compartment as the picking in order to avoid detection. Except, the hair twirling seemed to happen without premeditation; often, you would be reprimanded before you could even realize and enjoy the activity. As a result, this one evolved into hair sucking. You could always sneak a little strand of hair right in the side of your mouth without anyone noticing if you were careful enough.

I probably deserved to have my head shaved for this one. I can easily understand now how this one would put off most adults. On the few occasions I was caught I would have heard something along the lines of “stop that right now, you’ve been playing outside all day, do you know how dirty your hair is?” or “You are going to get sick and you’re making me sick, stop it right now or you can spend the day in your room.” and finally “I WILL cut off all your hair if I catch you doing that again.”


I would later go on to keep pet crickets that I was convinced listened to me and could be taken for “walks”. I would give them terribly uninventive names like Crickie and Hoppy. I would hold funerals for them when they would inevitably die in the jars I kept them in. Once, on a cricket walk, one actually got run over. That was Crickie; I wept as though I’d lost my entire family. I stopped walking them after that, and stopped keeping them just a little later.