Foreigner – "Hot Blooded" (1978)

I’m hot-blooded, check it and see

I got a fever of a hundred and three

Technically, a fever of 103 degrees doesn’t constitute a medical emergency.  But it’s not something to be taken lightly.

I came down with the mumps shortly after my 12th birthday.  When my temperature hit 103, my mother didn’t take it lightly – she called the doctor toot sweet.

He told her the best way to cool me down was to put me in a bathtub filled with cold water.  (She added some ice cubes for good measure – better safe than sorry!)

Sir Francis Bacon described bloodletting as a remedy that is worse than the disease.  I felt the same way about that ice bath – the treatment was much worse than the ailment.

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I had the mumps in 1964 – several years before the first mumps vaccine became available.  

Mumps usually causes inflammation of the salivary glands, which can make it very painful to chew and swallow.  (I remember trying to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I had the mumps – one bite was enough to make me realize that was a very bad idea.)  

Mumps sometimes causes other inflammatory conditions, including meningitis and encephalitis.  It can also result in sterility in postpubescent males.

Make up your mind, Foreigner!

I think I was physically postpubescent when I came down with the mumps.  (I may not have ever reached mental postpubescence.). But I have at least four children, so obviously the mumps did nothing to reduce my procreative prowess.

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I had to spend the better part of a week in bed when I had the mumps.  There was no television in my bedroom, so I spent most of my time reading and listening to music.  

I remember playing “Rag Doll” by the Four Seasons about a thousand times that week.  I also listened to the B-side of that 45 – “Silence Is Golden,” which was covered by the Tremeloes a couple of years later – quite a few times.  

(I still own that record)

“Rag Doll” climbed all the way to #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart in 1964.   The record that preceded “Rag Doll” in the #1 spot was “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys.  “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, “Where Did Our Love Go” By the Supremes, and Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Women” were also #1 hits in 1964, which was a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good year for pop singles.  (All five of those aforementioned records are members of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.)

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A number of critics – including the great Robert Christgau – thought that “Hot Blooded” sounded a lot like a Bad Company record.  I agree.

One reviewer said it reminded him of the fabulous Crazy Elephant hit, “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’,” for two reasons.  First, both records begin with a “chug-chug” guitar riff.  Second, both songs “are about a fellow in search of fleshy fluff” [sic].

The song’s lyrics are anything but subtle.  For example:

You don’t have to read my mind

To know what I have in mind

(Shakespeare, it ain’t.)

Click here to listen to “Hot Blooded,” which peaked at #3 on the “Hot 100” in 1978.

Click here to buy “Hot Blooded” from Amazon.

Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

I have good news and bad news for you today.

2 or 3 lines has always been self-absorbed as all get out.  But last month, I produced a series of posts that represent a personal best when it comes to narcissistic navel-gazing.

But it’s a new month – “Narcissistic November” is over!  Today’s post will bring an end to what probably seemed like an endless series of posts discussing obsessive-compulsive personality disorder . . . and then we’ll be ready to move on.  

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I’m not going to do another audio advent calendar this year.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the decision is final.  (Doing 24 posts in 24 days last December left me plumb tuckered out, and a wise man learns from his mistakes.)

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – or “DSM-5” for short – an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder diagnosis requires the presence of four or more of the following behaviors:

1.  Preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists

2.  A striving to do something perfectly that interferes with completion of the task

3.  Excessive devotion to work and productivity (not due to financial necessity), resulting in neglect of leisure activities and friends

4.  Excessive conscientiousness, fastidiousness, and inflexibility regarding ethical and moral issues and values

5.  Unwillingness to throw out worn-out or worthless objects, even those with no sentimental value

6.  Reluctance to delegate or work with other people unless those people agree to do things exactly as you want

7.  A miserly approach to spending for themselves and others because they see money as something to be saved for future disasters

8. Rigidity and stubbornness

I plead guilty as charged to #1, #2, #3, #5, and #6.  And I wouldn’t deny that #4 and #8 probably apply to me as well.

That leaves #7.  I don’t think that I’m miserly, but I am frugal.  (I hate to spend more money on things than I have to – even when the amount in question is insignificant.)

But whether #7 applies or not, there’s little question that I exhibit more than enough of the behaviors listed in the DSM-5 to justify an OCPD diagnosis.

*     *     *     *     *

Just before I started writing this post, I stumbled across a Free Press article titled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore.”

“Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved,” according to the author, Freya India.  “Therapy-speak has taken over our language.”

She continues:

[W]e are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. . . . Now you are always late to things, not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you, not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does – nope, it’s autism.  

You are the way you are not because you have a soul, but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or a curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events.

Exactly!

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Here’s something else very interesting that I learned from that article.

Survey data on self-reported mental health diagnoses shows that liberals in general, and white liberal women in particular, are more likely than other groups to say that they suffered from a mental health condition (e.g., depression).

However, mental distress is more strongly linked to one’s generation than it is to one’s gender or political orientation.  

Each American generation since the baby boomers is progressively more depressed than the generation that came before.

A 2024 survey of over 3,000 Americans found that 67% of Gen Z men and 72% of Gen Z women believe that  “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”   But only 27% of baby boomer men and 34% of baby boomer women said that mental health challenges represented an important part of their identity.

*     *     *     *     *

I’m a boomer male, so it should come as no surprise that I have chosen to reject an OCPD self-diagnosis.

I don’t care how many of the DSM-5’s criteria for OCPD apply to me.  I don’t have a personality disorder – I just have a personality!

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I’ve featured Little Big Town’s “Boondocks” before, and I’ll probably feature it again.  

I love “Boondocks” despite finding it somewhat lacking in authenticity.  (You might feel the same way about 2 or 3 lines.)

Click here to listen to “Boondocks,” which was a top ten country hit in 2005.

Click here to buy “Boondocks” from Amazon.

Gavin DeGraw – "I Don't Want to Be" (2004)

All I have to do is think of me

And I have peace of mind

(Ur funny!)

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – or “DSM-5” – one of the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is “excessive devotion to work and productivity.”

At first blush, that doesn’t seem to apply to me.  I retired from my job several years ago, and I was far from being a workaholic during my working years.  

But the word “work” doesn’t just refer to a job you’re paid to do.  It can also be used to describe any mental or physical effort that is performed to in order to achieve a goal – whether you’re paid a salary for that effort or not.

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Think about the leisure activities that I’ve talked about in the previous posts – e.g., watching TV and movies, reading, collecting coins and sports cards, and playing bar trivia.  

According to one source, those with OCPD “choose hobbies that are organized and structured, and they approach them as a serious task requiring work to perfect.”  

That description certainly applies to hobbies like coin and sports card collecting, which require considerable organization and sustained effort.  But does it apply to watching TV and movies?

It does when you watch TV the way I do.  Before I watch a new streaming series, I read reviews – and when I’m done, I add the series to my list of watched shows.

I also read reviews before choosing a movie, and keep a list of the movies I watch.  But I often follow up one movie with other films by the same director, or from the same historical era – my movie-watching choices are organized and structured.

For example, earlier this year I watched about a dozen examples of French “poetic realism” films from the 1930s and 1940s – movies like The Rules of the Game, Hôtel du Nord, and Children of Paradise.  And I watched them in chronological order.

*     *     *     *     *

My approach to reading is equally systematic.  

I currently have 34 library books in my apartment.  If you don’t believe me, check out this photo:

(Actually, that number is an understatement.  There’s a library book on my bedroom nightstand and another one on my coffee table that I forgot to include in that photo.  Plus I have half a dozen library books on my Kindle.  So the actual count is more like 42 books.)

Those library books were not chosen willy-nilly.  For example, I’m sitting on several collections of short stories by the late Nobel Prize-winning author, Alice Munro.

    

Earlier this year, I read a long New Yorker article about Munro, who chose to stay with her second husband even after she learned that he had sexually abused one of her daughters from her first marriage.  (The abuse began when the daughter was only nine, and continued for several years.)

That article cited a number of Munro’s short stories that featured women who were desperately in love with emotionally unavailable or abusive men.  Like some of her characters, Munro was apparently in thrall to her second husband – despite the extremely disturbing nature of his behavior, she chose to stay with him. 

I was fascinated by that New Yorker article, and decided that I needed to read not only the dozen or so stories it mentioned, but all 163 of Munro’s short stories.  Once I managed to obtain all 14 of her story collections from my library, I started reading them.

Why did I need to have all 14 of Munro’s books before sitting down to read the first one?  Surely you wouldn’t expect me to start reading her first book until I had all of them in my possession.  

What if I got through her first five books and wasn’t able to find her sixth one?  I needed to read them in chronological order – skipping from the fifth story collection to the seventh without reading the sixth one first was not have an option!

*     *     *     *     *

But when it comes to making the case that I have an “excessive devotion to work and productivity,” the most persuasive piece of evidence that I could offer is this wildly successful little blog itself.

I’ve published almost 2200 posts since I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines in November 2009.  (Maybe I should have named it 2 or 3 posts a week because that’s what I’ve averaged over the past 16 years.)

Those 2200 posts contain over two million words!  That’s the equivalent of 20 to 25 average-length books.

So if I had started writing books in 2009 instead of spending all my time on this stupid blog, I could have cranked out two dozen or so books by now?  

I’m not sure if I have OCPD.  But I’m pretty sure I have depression.

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Gavin DeGraw’s 2004 hit, “I Don’t Want to Be,” was used as the theme song for the WB’s teen drama series, One Tree Hill – a show I’ve never watched.

When I watched the official music video for “I Don’t Want to Be,” I was pretty sure that I recognized the actress who portrayed the angsty teenager.  After a little research, I figured out that actress was Shiri Appleby, who was one of the stars of UnREAL, a brilliant series about a Bachelor-type reality show that I watched on Hulu earlier this year.

Shiri Appleby in UnREAL

Click here to watch that official music video.

Click here to buy “I Don’t Want to Be” from Amazon.