No Energy Shortages

There's an old Chralie Brown cartoon which is a single panel with a wall of snowmen. They stretch the width of the entire scene. Linus has a puzzled look on his face, and as Charlie Brown builds the final snowman he says, "I have a lot of nervous energy."

While I would never wish, even upon my worst enemy, to be compared to Charlie Brown, by far the biggest loser in cartoonery, I must admit that I too have a lot of nervous energy.

People today would call building 15 snowmen in perfectly aligned row a severe case of it ADD or obsessive compulsive disorder (or similar psychiatric ailment). For Charlie Brown it's "nervous energy." Others may give it harsher names.

I've got a lot of it. Anyone who knows me knows that it's a problem. I fiddle constantly. It doesn't matter what it is whether it's a straw, a button, an elastic, a Kinder surprise toy, nail file, pencil, paper clip, gummi bear, or whatever; if it's lying around and looks even moderately interesting, there's a good chance I'll have it in my hands in 3.4 seconds. There is also a good chance that that object, whatever it is, will be destroyed.

I am a tobacco companies wet dream. I am what every cigarette manufacturer thinks about when they spend millions fighting government legislation that stifles the selling and marketing of their product. I think that people with nervous energy, if not diagnosed with ADD, are concealing it by filling their hands with Cancer sticks.

Yesterday, I played poker with some friends. I played badly, and it seems that everyone I play with has caught on to my game and the jig is up. Anyway, after an early knockout, I was left sitting there to wait for the tournament to finish. What to do? What to do? Ahh, I'll shuffle chips. I proceeded to reach into the case and haul out chips to mindlessly play with.

Most of the time, I don't even realize that I'm doing it. I grab a red straw and a blue straw and I think, briefly oh so briefly, "I wonder if I can make purple if I put the red straw inside the blue straw?" I then spend the next 45 minutes struggling to fit two exactly the same size pieces into one another.

People can either ignore my actions, see them as funny, or find them downright annoying. I must tell all who read this, that it really isn't my fault. I will say numerous times during the course of the fiddling, "Take this away from me." Invariably, I push the item(s) away and within three minutes they are back in my hands and I'm at it again. I don't consciously do it, but I can't consciously stop either.

So last night I was shuffling chips. Four whites and four blues. I thought that they might look nice together. I shuffle chips badly and I could tell that people were trying to ignore it, but that it was bothering them. I tried to stop.

Next thing I knew, the chips were gone. I wasn't sure where they went, but I knew that they weren't where I'd left them; someone had taken them. "I don't mean to alarm anyone, but I may have added some chips to the table," I squeaked.

This yielded many confused looks from those who didn't know me well. I could see them thinking, "Who is this idiot?" The people who know me well thought, "That's about right. I knew something like that was gonna happen. Stupid Nugget, it could only happen to you."

I knew that the white chips were 25 cents, so no harm done by adding a dollar, but I had forgotten that the blue chips were 2 dollars. So I added 9 bucks to someone's stack. Considering that our buy in was $20, nine bucks is significant.

I apologized profusely, but it seemed to no avail. It's hard to tell someone you've met briefly, "Oh by the way, I may look normal, but I have some severe nervous energy problems."

So that's that. I present this not so much as a resolution for change, but as something that comes with the package. I y'am who I y'am, and this is meant really as fair warning to those people who know me vaguely.

It's endearing, right?