Naturally, my fixation for funky fetishes started in childhood. Perhaps it can be traced back to certain not-so-significant-at-the-time moments such as the time I was three and disappeared into a dresser in the furniture department at JC Penney. My poor mother was frantic with worry and had every associate in the joint searching for me. They blasted my name umpteen times over the loudspeakers and the whole time I thought it was just the best game of hide and seek I’d ever played (either I was really good at it or they really sucked). I sat giggling to myself safely inside the bureau the whole time. The final straw was when the cops showed up and started canvassing the place. Officer Rat Out found me and my gig was up. Immediately, he got on his walkie talkie and shouted some code (probably cop code for crazy, bratty kid has been found) and snatched me from my awesome hideout (thank God Supernanny wasn't around back in my day). My mother was crying hysterically as she came running to me. After she gave me the biggest hug ever, she turned all dark side on me and beat my ass (apparently I shaved 5 years off of her life just from that episode alone, she says). I begged the cops to let me go with them but they didn’t want me, so I was stuck with a ranting, near-nervous-breakdown mom that had a screaming newborn strapped to her chest. Hence, my obsession with marshmallow peeps was born.
Another addiction-in-the-making moment was when I was about the same age and I found a book of matches. You may be asking, where the hell were my parents all these times? (better question is, who were my parents?) Now, tell me how does a three-year-old even know how to strike a match? Well, this one sure did, and it almost turned me into a well-done, charbroiled Rhonda roast. Who knew that hair was so damn flammable and that when you run it burns even faster? Sure as hell not this three-year-old (but I do now)! From that episode, I came away with my delirious Doritos fetish (I’m sensing a pattern here).
When I was six, I tried to walk the five miles home from school alone, across several busy intersections in a blizzard in the bad section of Detroit. This was all because I missed the bus and I refused to go into the school office and call my mom because I thought she might get angry (by that age, I knew better). Of course, I was supposed to be on the bus, so I didn’t have any gloves, hat, or scarf on. Not to mention, I had never walked home before, so I had no clue where the hell I was going. I just started wandering aimlessly (still doing it) foolishly thinking that sooner or later I would end up home. Let me tell you, when it got dark and I still wasn’t home (or didn’t even know where the hell I was) I knew I was up shit’s creek with no paddle in sight. At some point that evening, a police officer pulled up alongside me and put me in the car (they kind of knew me by then) and took me to the station. Once again, they released me to my raving mother (she really needed to relax) when all I really wanted was to stay there all night and have more cheetos, jelly donuts and Hawaiian punch. That police station is where my whole making-copies-of-body-parts-on-the-photocopier fetish all started (I think I still have those somewhere - though hoarder, I am not).
So, you see, most addictions are not born, they are created by a combination of life experiences, individual personalities and personal choices. It just so happens that I have had some fucked up, quirky, insane, unbelievable, laughable (looking back), and awesome experiences in my life. So, I guess that I’m entitled to some idiosyncratic obsessions/fetishes/addictions now aren’t I? They keep me just this side of complete crazy…;)
