Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

My, my, my

I’m once bitten, twice shy, baby

The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – “DSM-5” for short – defines obsessive-compulsive personality disorder as “a persistent pattern of preoccupation with order; perfectionism; and control of self, others, and situations.”

One of the specific indications for OCPD that’s listed in the DSM-5 is “reluctance to delegate or work with other people unless those people agree to do things exactly as the patient wants.”

Before retiring a few years ago, I was a partner at a large law firm in Washington, DC.  I was never entirely comfortable delegating tasks to other lawyers at my firm – whenever possible, I preferred to do the job personally.

I remember one particular instance when I assigned one part of a large project to a younger lawyer.  I wasn’t happy about doing that, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get the work done on time if I tried to do everything by myself.

The young associate came to me a few days before the deadline and said that wasn’t going to be able to finish his assignment on a timely basis because of other work commitments.  (Needless to say, I never used that associate again.)

My reluctance to delegate tasks is partly explained by experiences like that one.  When you put someone else in charge of doing something, you take a risk.  If they drop the ball, you can get burned – or bitten (in the words of today’s featured song).

Of course, even if that young lawyer had completed his part of the assignment on time, I probably would have felt the need to rewrite his part of the document we were preparing – not necessarily because what he had written was wrong, but because it wouldn’t have been written in the same way that I would have written it. 

In other words, my reluctance to delegate work to other lawyers resulted not only from my fear of not having control over whether a deadline would be met, but also from my perfectionism – the only person I really trusted to do the job right was me. 

*     *     *     *     *

My need to control “self, others, and situations” wasn’t limited to my work life – it sometimes reared its ugly head during my leisure-time activities . . . like my weekly trivia competitions.

When I started playing trivia, my teammates were the three bartenders at the brewery where the game took place.  Because they were kept pretty busy pouring beer and running credit cards, it made sense for me to write down the answers and take them up to the host.  I always asked for my teammates’ input before deciding how to respond to a question, but it usually fell to me to make the final decision concerning what our answer would be. 

I’ve played on a number of different teams since then.  Most of the time, I’m the guy on the team who writes down the answers and turns them in to the host.  But that doesn’t mean I have control over how we answer – the process of deciding on an answer is a democratic one.  

Not being in control takes a lot of pressure off me.  If an answer turns out to be wrong, it’s not my fault – it’s the team’s mistake.  

And who would want to be on a team with a control freak who insists on making all the decisions?  Even if that person is the smartest player in the room, everyone on the team wants to feel like they are contributing.

The bottom line is that you can’t win at trivia by yourself – you need a diverse group of teammates with complementary expertise.  I have teammates who know a lot more about certain subjects than I do.  If I’m not willing to trust their answers when we have questions concerning those subjects, the team is not going to be successful.

   

One person I used to play with didn’t get that.  He was a very good player, and knew a lot that I didn’t – so we complemented each other well.  But whenever our team members had a difference of opinion concerning what our answer should be, he would get upset if I didn’t turn in the answer he preferred – he took that as a lack of respect for his knowledge.  

I found myself going with his answer more often than not when the team was split on how to respond – not because I necessarily trusted him to know an answer, but because I knew he would get all pissy if we didn’t use his answer and it turned out he was right.  In other words, I was letting my judgment be influenced by the desire to avoid having to deal with his bullsh*t.

He blew up a couple of times when we didn’t go with his answer, and that was that.  I really enjoyed that team, which consisted of an eclectic group of individuals who had come together more or less accidentally.  But he was toxic – he took the fun out of playing.  

*     *     *     *     *

It took a while, but I finally cured myself of the need to be in control at trivia – not only because having one person make all the decisions isn’t the best winning strategy, but also because being part of a successful team is much more enjoyable than being a lone wolf.

But there is one aspect of trivia that I think is best handled by an enlightened despot – at least if that enlightened despot is me.

I’ll explain in the next 2 or 3 lines. 

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to read my 2015 post featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of Ian Hunter’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.”  (You’ll give thanks if you do!)

Click here to watch the official music video for “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” – which richly deserves its place on the New York Times “15 Essential Hair Metal Videos” list.

Click here to buy “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” from Amazon.

Cult – "Fire Woman" (1989)

My heart’s a ball of burnin’ flame

Prancing like a cat on a hot tin shack

I have a real problem with procrastination, and it’s gotten worse since I retired.  

I’ve always thought that the reason I have a myriad of unfinished jobs hanging over my head – like dealing with the thousands of family photos that my late parents took over the years – was due to a lack of willpower.  

But I’ve recently learned that many of those who have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder – or “OCPD” – procrastinate because they are perfectionists.  Their perfectionism may be so extreme that it interferes with their ability to complete tasks. 

Some people who come into possession of boxes full of old photographs as a result of the death of their parents might simply toss them.  “What do I need with a bunch of photos taken at our family Christmas celebrations and birthday parties when I have plenty of my own photos from those occasions?” they might ask themselves.  

That’s not me.  My ultimate goal for those photos is to organize them in chronological order and assemble them into comprehensive albums for each of my four children.    

I know that going through those thousands of photos and putting together albums that will satisfy my high standards will take an enormous amount of time and effort.  When I think about what will be required for me to do that job – and to do it right – I feel overwhelmed. 

Which is why those photos are sitting untouched in the boxes that I transported from my parents’ home to my home after my father died in 2016.

*     *     *     *     *

Occasionally, I do manage to finish a project.  For example, a few years ago I made a list of all my LPs and circulated it to several used record dealers in the area.  I ending up holding on to a few of those records purely  for sentimental reasons – I no longer own a turntable – but sold the rest to the highest bidder.

But that’s the exception, not the rule – most of my post-retirement projects remain unfinished.  

In addition to all the family photos, I have thousands of pre-1964 silver coins that my mother and I collected when I was a child.  Those coins are worth something like 35 times their face value as “junk” silver – so each $10 roll of quarters is worth roughly $350.

A lot of people would have already sold those coins to a dealer or pawnbroker a long time ago.  But before I do that, I want to select the coins from each year that are in the best condition and put them in albums to pass on to my grandchildren someday.  

I also need to go through all those dimes, quarters, and half dollars to make sure that there are no coins with scarce dates that are worth more as collectible items than for their silver content.  

For example, I came across a 1932-S quarter when I was a teenager and have held on to it ever since.  It’s worth maybe eight bucks for its silver content, but its value as a scarce collectible coin is more like $100.  I need to be sure there aren’t more such rare quarters lurking in those dozens of rolls of pre-1964 coins before I unload them.

*     *     *     *     *

Another symptom of OCPD is an unwillingness to throw out worn-out or worthless objects, even those with no sentimental value.

My old coins are clearly not worthless, but I’m holding on to a lot of stuff that has no real value to me.

For example, my storage unit contains several large plastic bins full of shirts, sweaters, and pants that I haven’t touched since I rented that unit a couple of years ago.

Before I moved them to that storage unit, most of those clothes hung in closets in my former home for God knows how long.  (I would have preferred to leave them in those closets rather than spending money to rent a storage unit, but the other resident of that house had other ideas.  “You moved out,” she said, “so MOVE OUT!”  

Quite a few of those clothing items still fit me fine, and are in good condition – and when it comes to style, they’re not all that different than the clothes I do wear.  So I’m having a hard time getting rid of them, even though I know deep down inside that I will never wear them again.

*     *     *     *     * 

My baseball card collection falls somewhere between my coin collection (which is quite valuable) and the clothes in my storage unit (which are essentially worthless to me).

I have gone through the 75,000-odd baseball cards from the seventies, eighties, and nineties that I’ve accumulated over the years, selling perhaps a third of them but unable to find a buyer for the rest.  (I have a feeling that a lot of you with boxes of old baseball cards sitting in your garage or attic are going to be solely disappointed when you try to sell them.  Unless those cards are at least 50 years old, you’ll find that there are a lot more sellers than buyers out there.)    

I always planned to hold on to the complete sets that I assembled back in the day, and at some point I’ll buy the cards necessarily to fill in the gaps in a few near sets as well.  I have eight grandsons, and eventually I’ll pass down those sets to them.  

But that will still leave me with thousands of relatively common cards that no dealer is interested in buying them.  I don’t know what I’ll eventually do with them, but I can tell you that I won’t just throw them away.

While those cards might have little or no monetary value, keeping them isn’t symptomatic of OCPD if they have sentimental value.  

Does it make sense to say that something that you haven’t looked at in years and rarely think about has sentimental value?

It seems like a real stretch to argue that my baseball cards have sentimental value simply because I’ve held on to them all these years.

*     *     *     *     *

I may have only recently realized that the Cult and the Cure weren’t the same band.  

They’re both terrible, but that’s no excuse for my confusing them – because they’re terrible in very different ways.

(Sometimes a picture really is
worth a thousand words)

“Fire Woman,” which was released in 1989, was featured in the Severance episode titled “Sweet Vitriol.”  (Based on the lines quoted at the beginning of this post, I assume that whoever wrote the song’s lyrics was a Tennessee Williams fan.)

Sweet oil of vitriol was the original name of what came to be called ether.  I knew that ether was once a popular surgical anesthetic.  But I didn’t know until I saw the Severance episode that it could be used as a recreational drug.

At 19th century “ether frolics,” people would inhale ether for recreational purposes.  Ether drinking was once popular among Polish peasants, and is still practiced by the Lemkos (an ethnic group whose members live in the region where Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine meet).

One of the characters in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas says that “there is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”    

Click here to listen to watch the official music video for “Fire Woman.”  I’m sure there are more insufferable music videos out there, but I can’t think of one right now.

Click here to buy “Fire Woman” from Amazon.  

Ella Fitzgerald – "Sunshine of Your Love" (1969)

I’ve been waiting so long

To be where I’m going

One of the particular behaviors that experts say may be symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder – or “OCPD” – is list-making.

It just so happens that I am a list-maker par excellence.  For example, I started recording all the books I read shortly after I took my last law school exam in May 1977.   

Me too!

It took me 20 years to fill up my first notebook, which lists about 1200 books.

The second notebook covers the next 25 years, and it lists some 1500-odd books.  That means that I averaged reading about five books per month from 1977 until 2022:

I’ve slowed down since moving into my 16th-floor apartment in the 2 or 3 Lines World Headquarters Building not quite three years ago.  I managed only 21 books in 2023 and 24 books in 2024 – that’s about two a month instead of five.

I’m doing a little better so far this year – but that’s not the point.  The point is that I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read – plus the name of its author, and how many pages it had – for over 48 years!

Do you wonder why I’ve maintained that list?  Well, SO DO I!

*     *     *     *     *

My ostensible reason for keeping a list of all the books I’ve read is that I don’t always remember whether I’ve already read a particular book I see at the public library.

That’s a real problem with certain authors.  For example, John Sandford’s Prey series consists of 34 books with very similar titles – Shadow Prey, Silent Prey, Sudden Prey, Secret Prey . . . you get the picture.  Having my list enabled me to avoid starting a Prey book that I’ve already read.  

But because my list is handwritten, finding a particular title required me to flip through my notebooks and scan the twenty or so books listed on each page – a time-consuming and not entirely reliable process when you’re as easily distracted as I am.  

That’s why I’m creating a searchable computer list of the books written by some of my favorite authors so I won’t waste so much time doing manual searches in the future.  

That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do, but there’s something more going on here.  

*     *     *     *     *

In addition to my list of all the books I’ve read, I also have a list of every streaming TV series I’ve watched.  I recently expanded that list to include movies.

I also keep track of all my bike rides in a weekly appointment book.  I got in the habit of buying one of those books each year to keep track of my legal work for billing purposes, but now all I use them for is to note where I ride and how long each ride is.  (I’ve never added those distances to see how many miles I logged in a certain month or year – I just stick each book in a drawer at year end and order a new one.)

When I began to play competitive trivia a few years, I created a spreadsheet so I could keep track of my team’s weekly results – how many points we scored in each round, our final score, where we placed, and so on.

*     *     *     *     *

List-making helps those with OCPD to satisfy their need for structure and control.  Such people may focus more on the process of list-making than the practical reasons for making the list.  

For example, rather than creating a simple shopping list that helps him remember what items he needs to buy, a list-maker with OCPD may spend excessive time working on an overly-elaborate list that fulfills his need to achieve perfection in every aspect of his life. 

(That’s a really good idea!)

I don’t think that’s what causes me to keep so many lists.  My theory is that my somewhat obsessive list-making is related to a deep-seated fear that I’m wasting my life – that I’m not going to do anything of significance before I die.  

My lists record some of my accomplishments – books read, movies watched, miles ridden on my bike, trivia victories.  

I know those accomplishments are of no great importance.  But at least they’re tangible, and quantifiable.  They’re better than nothing.

*     *     *     *     *

Before we move on, here’s something I read on the website of a group of Los Angeles psychologists:

Did you know that autism and the love of lists often go hand in hand?  Many autistic people create lists of their favorite songs, shows they want to watch, or recipes they want to try, among many others.  This affinity for lists is common enough that many people wonder whether making lists is a sign of autism.

However, that website goes on to say that “there are many allistic (non-autistic) people obsessed with lists.”  

Based on my research to date, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder seems like a much better fit for my particular brand of weirdness than autism.  So I’m going to continue my trip down the OCPD rabbit hole, eschewing any further exploration of autism for the being.

*     *     *     *     *

Speaking of weirdness, I’m currently watching the Apple TV series Severance – which is about as weird as TV gets.  Today’s featured recording accompanied the closing credits of the Severance episode I watched today.

In 1969, a German jazz label released an album featuring Ella Fitzgerald performing with Ernie Hecksher’s big band at the legendary Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco: 

The first track on that album is . . . “Hey Jude”?   

AllMusic’s review accurately described Ella’s performance of that song as “border[ing] on the embarrassing.”  But her take on Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” isn’t too bad.

Click here to listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “Sunshine of Your Love.”