Dear reader,

I know that this story needs a lot more work. I'm just looking for issues of concern right now, so please leave me with all the critiquing you can. You don't need to be specific with things. General opinions and observations are sincerely appreciated.

Regards,
Matthew


NEEDS WORK!!!



"I like to multiply the numbers on license plates when I'm sitting in traffic. It's fun for me and it passes the time. It's like a game. 4923HTD equals 216. 7315JKZ equals 105. 4087LPA equals 0 ' that sort of thing. You start at the left and just multiply the numbers sequentially. That's why 4087LPA equals 0. Once there's a zero on a license plate then you know, because of the rules of multiplication that the equation is going to sum up to zero"

The doctor is looking down at his white legal pad and scribbling. He circles what he's just written. Twice.

Today he's wearing his tweed jacket and it makes him look like a real old-timey psychiatrist. He's not wearing a bowtie and I feel ashamed for him. The jacket needs the tie like Sonny Bono needed Cher, despite his political successes. The doctor's bifocals, resting on the edge of his nose make some exception for the missing tie, but the look lacks genuineness to me. It looks like he is posing; trying to be the sort of man he isn't.

Had he a beard and white hair he would look like Sigmund Freud but he's younger and more virile. I see Freud in lots of faces that I know and pass along the street and I wonder if that in some way is a Freudian Complex itself. I imagine that there is, somewhere on Miami Beach, a men's only retirement community for folks who look like Sigmund Freud. I bet that would be a fun place ' like a sideshow attraction befitting the circus that is Miami Beach. It's not so far-fetched to imagine because the Keys, a couple of hours south of Miami is haven to a disproportionate number of men walking around playing Papa Hemingway. Why stop at literary weirdness when you can go for something more cerebral?

My doctor, despite the outward display has none of the mysterious characteristics that suited Freud. He has no detached air about him. He is an amiable man and his face, rather than looking sorrowful and predisposed, bears a grin. He often laughs outright when I disclose new information like I'm telling him a grand joke. He's not being mean or anything, I just happen to entertain him. I like being entertaining because it makes acceptance easier.

Thinking about the classic black and white photograph of Freud looking intently at a book causes me to, for some inexplicable reason start thinking about a photograph I saw a long time ago of Albert Einstein. In this picture he is sitting at his worktable writing in a notebook ' papers strewn about as disheveled as he looked. On his knee is his infant son looking straight towards the camera while he just sat there busily doing his work, distant ' a picture of indifference to his first-born child. I think about how I envy Freud, Einstein and a host of other lettered men, Frank Lloyd Wright, for their unwavering focus ' their ability to shun everyone and all things in pursuit of the truth of their vocational field. I wish that I had a similar ability to focus, but the doctor has already diagnosed me with Attention Deficit Disorder.

My doctor is scribbling away in his notebook. I wonder if there's a photograph in one of his albums at home showing a similar indifference as these men had to his children as he tries to unlock the secrets of the mind. He works, though, only four days a week and, try as I can I just find it difficult to imagine him shunning his family to discover new secrets about what makes people tick. Or tic.

"Any other things about numbers?" he asks.

"Well, this is weird, well not weird. Odd. Let's say odd. No, odd isn't the right word either. It's unusual. Yes unusual.'�

Ever since attending college and having been fed the point that there is always a better, more specific than the general, word for what you are trying to explain I've been this way. Confused and confusing.

'Specificity is requisite,'� a professor once said. 'if you are going to properly make your point understood. You must manage the correct word or phrase correctly.'�

And so each time I find myself having to explain something to people, my mind gets muddled. I feel drunk. Like I cannot pass a sobriety test that might involve diction. But against my sensibilities I push on, knowing that this point I am trying to make will end in disaster.

'Anyway,'� I say to my doctor, 'did you know that most of the license plates in Asheville very often have double numbers on them ' 8083, 1127, 5375. Like that. Isn't that odd? I mean unusual?"

I did it again. Dammit. I miss-stepped the appropriate word. What's worse is that I told him about the double digits. I'm embarrassed because as soon as I said it I knew that he would put it down in his notebook as additional fodder. Like I said, it's hard for me to articulate what I want to say properly when asked questions. Something inside of me seizes up like brakes on a semi coming to a sudden stop down the side of a mountain. Press too hard, the brakes lock up and you crash. Press too softly and you crash into the guardrail or smashing into those water-filled buckets that are designed specifically to stop runaway trucks. The trick is to brake just right so that you stop in time without jackknifing or unsettling the load in the back of your truck. This is how I feel. Seized up and fearful that I've somehow made an error in judgment in telling this man about the numbers thing.
My doctor says nothing and his hand is still. Thankfully I think that he thought it was a rhetorical question, but it wasn't. As soon as I said what I did and made it public I wanted to know if he thought that the double-digit thing was odd. He's writing in his notebook again.

"Go on," he says. 'Is there anything else about numbers that has held your attention before you moved to Asheville?'�

I can't help myself and before I know it I'm blurting out more. Silence in the doctor's office is more uncomfortable than the silence of any first dates I've ever had, so I talk. I blather. And I'm blathering now because he's not saying anything. He's not writing anything, either. He's just sitting there looking at me. Waiting.

I need to say something. He knows that there's more. What he doesn't know is how much more. There's the fascination for expiration dates on jars of mayonnaise that keep me in the grocery store for much longer than necessary. There's the multiple counting of decks of cards to make sure that each card is accounted for, including Jokers. There's the counting of the number of Subaru Outback wagons I see on the road going to and from my daughter's school. And then there's the never-ending counting and re-counting of the books on my shelves and the shelving of those books not by title but by ISBN number.

Suspect of letting him know too much I choose a more distant fascination and offer that up for his scrutiny.

"Well, when I was a kid growing up I used to add the numbers on the bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower.'�

Damn!

'I liked when there were patents because the numbers get to be pretty big."

This was not the right choice and I realize that as the words leave my mouth.

'You added up these large numbers while you were in the shower?'� he asked, looking confused. He's tightening his grip on his pencil, ready to pounce lead against paper like a cheetah bagging a lame gazelle.

'Oh, yeah. I added them up while I was bathing.'�

Nope. I didn't want to tell him that, either. I have just royally screwed myself.

My doctor chuckles at me. He's not laughing outright, but his chuckle seems to establish that he's not heard of anything like this before.

'So how did you do this in the shower? How were you able to do the math if you were in the shower?'�

He's fidgeting in his chair, moving to rest his right arm on the arm of his burgundy leather chair like he's being told a great story. Moby Dick is a great story. At least that's the rumor. I've never read it so I wouldn't really know.

He continues his line of questioning. 'Where did you write them, the solutions, if you were in the shower? Did you take a pad of paper in with you?" He's being sarcastic now, but in a friendly way. I'm okay with it and it suddenly relaxes me and I briefly imagine that I'm not the screwed up person that I thought that I was. But he's writing again.

"Oh, god no - nothing like that.'�

I can't stop the truck.

'I'd break the numbers down into single digits and add them up sequentially ' like the numbers on the license plates.'

I can't find the brakes and I'm out of control.

'It's easy because you're just using numbers zero through nine."

I look at him hoping that he would 'get it' but he just looked at me flatly.

"I just add them up in my head."

"Okay."

"What? It was a way to pass time while the conditioner set."

I looked around the office as he kept writing, uncomfortable now at the thought of disclosing anything else. If this benign numbers thing was, as it appeared, an issue, then I didn't want to push further with the actual weird stuff like my penchant for midget films and notes I find sometimes tucked inside the books I buy used at Goodwill. Once I found what appeared to be a journal entry from a woman from Old Fort, North Carolina in which she detailed a night of terrible constipation, diarrhea, and stomach cramps. I make sure that I never mark my place in books with personal items. I'd hate for what goes on in my mind to be made public.

"Any other fixations with numbers?"

"No. Not that I'm aware of.'�

I found the question peculiar. Fixations seem like things that stunt your ability to be human. You fixate on people and it ruins your marriage. You fixate on having a certain car and it beats your credit score down to a nub.

I do have other numbers issues. One in particular brings my wife to a rolling boil with laughter, not at me but at the ridiculous nature of the issue.

It is necessary for me to be inside my car, watching the odometer when the car reaches mileage milestones. I need be there when the car reaches mileage numbers like 22,222. Not to know when the 60,000-mile check-up is due so that I'll be at the service station spot on to get my tires rotated, radiator flush, and oil changed would simply burden me with guilt for weeks. To miss being present to witness the odometer on the car reaches 99,999 miles is worse to me than missing my daughter's dance recital. To not be in the car and focused and miss the odometer reading 100,000 miles would be worse than death to me. Were I to be car-jacked on the cusp of the car reaching 100,000 miles I would beg the criminal to let me drive until the odometer turned over. If I find myself close to these numbers and I'm on my way to the hospital holding my knee in my lap I would need to continue driving just to make sure that I'm in the car to bear witness to this. We're coming close to this with our Nissan Sentra and I am getting very nervous. I'm terrified that I'll miss it and that it will be gone forever.

I return to the conversation by asking a leading question that I already know the answer to. 'How are they fixations?"

"You focus on them."

"I'm just aware."

Semantics.

"How often do you multiply the numbers on license plates? In a given week."

"Not so often any more."

"Oh, good." My doctor looks impressed and I share a moment of joy with him before I talk again, slipping down the mountain.

"Just when I'm by myself."

"How often is that?"

"Most of the time."

"So you are still fixated."

"I'm not fixated. I already told you: I'm aware."

What I'm fixated on most of all is his writing down of every detail of our conversation likes it means something. I move my eyes from him because I can't take it anymore and don't want to say anything else. I looked around, noticing the subtle details of his office. The dresser drawers where he keeps his prescription samples aren't shut the whole way. The top of the dresser is a tangled mess of photographs, empty prescription boxes, and cellophane wrappers. There is plant on the dresser, too, that looks more dead than alive and I'm concerned that this man might not be the nurturing individual that I have grown to believe. The shades on both the floor lamp and the desk lamp are skewed; the pictures hanging on the walls, crooked. Every one of them crooked; like an earthquake had risen up in his office just moments before I arrived. How could I fail to notice the papers that look like a haystack, dripping over the edges of his large, prestigious looking desk. The man is picking me apart because I'm interested in numbers and he can't even keep a clean desk. It's no wonder he fails to understand where I'm coming from. How can a person stand working like this? Worse yet is how can a person be okay with presenting this mess as their best professional foot forward. I'm stunned.

My head starts spinning. At this point my attention settles on his bookcase. It's one of those lawyer-type bookcases that have the glass fronts that you pull upwards and push into the case itself to get at the books inside. It's a beautiful piece of furniture meant to present a picture of prominence unbefitting this space. God how I love these bookcases. What I wouldn't give to have such a thing in my home. It grabs and holds my attention. Like a Magic Eye drawing however it reveals itself to me in a fashion not unlike the desk. The bookcase is crammed with books, knick-knacks, and clocks advertising pharmaceutical products like Zolpanine, Lunesta, and, my personal favorites, Paxil and Wellbutrin. It's so shoved full with crap that it looks like the kind of bookcase you might find, despite its regal outward appearance, in the room of a five-year-old.

I don't know why it was now that I had finally noticed these little things in his office, but now I saw this place for what it was ' a set up for people with mental disorders.

"Something wrong?"

He looks up from his legal pad and catches me grimacing at his bookcase.

"No."

"Good."

"Why is your bookshelf such a wreck?" I ask.

He looks up again from the legal pad.

"What do you mean, a wreck?"

"How often do you look at the books on your shelf?"

I am perplexed by this chaos and his disregard for such a fine piece of furniture.

"Not often. Why?"

"Well if you don't look at them very often then why are the books just tossed about in there? It wouldn't take much I think to spend 10 minutes straightening the books up so that they're tidy. It sure would look better."

I would have offered to do it myself but he interrupted me.

"I like my books like that. How would you have me keep them?"

"Neatly,'� I said.

'What do you mean? How would you care for the books on my shelves?'�

Well to start with I would TAKE CARE of the books, I wanted to say. It's not in my nature to be confrontational so I decided not to say something more diplomatic and hurl my truck full speed down the mountain, through the guardrail and into the craggy rock outcrop 125 feet below.

'I shelve my books so that they form a straight parallel line with the edge of the bookshelf. You put your books together by size and then stock them onto the shelf along the shelf's edge. Then you take a cassette or CD case - whatever's convenient and wide enough, and you start pushing the books inward toward the back of the bookshelf. The trick is to use the thickest book as the benchmark for how far all of your books will be pushed into the shelf."

"I'm not sure I follow you."

I asked the doctor for a sheet of paper and a pen and began illustrating the appropriate procedure for shelving books on a bookshelf. I wonder if he's going to give me a discount on this session for this valuable information and start drawing.

"Okay, so you have all of these books hugging the edge of the shelf, right? And then you take, let's say the cassette holder and you lie that face down. Then you just push in until the other end, the end facing you, meets up with the edge of the bookshelf. You keep doing this until all of the books have been pushed inward and then, voila, all of your books are straight and tidy. Trust me, it looks good especially when you've got two or three bookshelves lined up next to one another."

"So you're fixated on other things, too. Not just numbers."

"I'm not fixated. I just like things to be neat, that's all."


MORE!!!!


The doctor looks at me for a moment that stretches out into an eternity as he taps the end of his pen against his forehead. He pulls out his prescription pad from the drawer in the table separating us, and starts writing and tearing off slips of paper. Scribble, tear. Scribble, tear. He does this five times. When he finishes prescription number five he puts the prescription pad back into the table's drawer, clears his throat and proceeds to push these towards me one at a time.

"Ritalin for ADD; Ambien to help you sleep; Clozipinel is an antipsychotic; Effexor to help alleviate your anxiety, and Prozac to help you deal with your depression. And this is Zoloft for your OCD."

"OCD? What's that?"

"Obsessive-compulsive disorder,'� he says. 'Have you heard of this? Do you know what that means?'

'I'm familiar with the term but no, I'm not familiar with its meaning.'�

'It means that you hyper-focus on irrelevant things - you fixate.'�

'But I told you, I don't fixate. I just like things certain ways. And I enjoy simple things to entertain myself when I'm performing mundane tasks like washing my hair and driving to doctor appointments,'� I said. 'How can these be problematic?'�


MORE!!!!



'Our time is up for now. Let's pick up on this at our next session, okay? I need to see you back in two weeks"

"All right,'� I said, feeling dejected. 'But I still don't think I'm fixated."

I pick up the prescriptions and tap the edge of the stack to straighten them on their long end so that the prescriptions read like a small recipe book. I fold them in half vertically, then horizontally and shove them into the second slot in my wallet on the far right side. I place my wallet in my pocket and tap it twice to make sure it's in my pocket securely.
When we walk out of his office I pull the door shut even though he tells me to leave it open, turning the knob three times. After paying my co-pay using the third check in the book I shove the checkbook back into my right-hand back pocket and tap it twice to ensure its safety. I open the door leading into the waiting room, pull it shut, and turn the knob three times. Then I push on the door twice to make sure it has closed all the way and turn the knob once more for good measure.

Walking through the waiting room I stop at the table of magazines in front of the receptionist's desk. After alphabetizing them and fanning them like any good doctor's office should, I make my way to the exit. I leave the office and repeat the routine with the doorknob.

I walk the 24 steps back to my parking space - the one I have parked at every time I've visited this man's office and unlock the car, locking and unlocking the door four times because my car has four doors.

I climb in the driver's side door and jiggle the stick shift, moving it into the reverse position three times. I grab a wipey from the sun visor on the passenger's side and wash my hands. I then fold the wipey in half vertically, wipe the shifter boot, fold it again horizontally, wipe the shifter knob and then throw it away in the garbage bag. I put my phone in the cup holder next to me and my Palm Zire inside its spot in the dashboard cubby hole.

I adjust the rearview mirror so that my rear window is centered in my view and readjust the side view mirrors so that they give me a precisely balanced view down the sides of my car.

I lick the engine key and insert it into the keyhole and turn the car off and on three times.

I start the car on the fourth turn, depress the clutch and shift into reverse. Twice.

I check my mirrors again and turn my head for the best view of oncoming traffic. I do this also three times.

What a god damn waste of time, I say to myself, feeling frustrated by the utter uselessness of the past hour.

I pull the car from my spot at the psychiatrist's office. The license plate on the car next to me reads: 6944TYX. 864, I note to myself and drive off.

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