For the last time, I am NOT stealing that dog.

A few nights ago, while in the midst of a conversation with somebody who I did not know nearly well enough to bring this up, I made an attempt to explain what's recently been going wrong with my brain.

It went something like this.
“So it's like this,” I said, waving my beer around the way people do when they're really making sense. “Sometimes I think about hijacking people in wheelchairs.”

I know exactly the face you are making right now, readers, because the person I was talking to made the exact same one. Okay, lesson learned! Clearly, the wheelchairs were a bad place to start. But let me try this again:

One of the side effects of hanging out with myself all day is that the inside of my head has turned into a sort of echo chamber for weird, wacky, un-say-able things that (I assume) would normally be drowned out by daily interaction with other human beings. It seems like other people – coworkers, fellow commuters, the coffee cart guy – serve as a reset button for my obnoxious, intrusive brainchatter. A reset button that I don't have anymore; instead, I have a bored brain which now likes to entertain itself by a) identifying the single most horrible thing I could do in any given situation, and then b) reminding me about said horrible thing relentlessly, at increasing volume, until I really just want to find the nearest shovel and smack myself in the face with it.

As far as I can tell, this is how it works.

1. I am standing around, minding my own business.
2. My brain, independently and of its own accord, notices that there's something I could do in this situation to get myself killed, arrested, or ostracized from society.
3. “HEY!” says Brain. “What if you did this horrible thing I just thought of!”
4. “What?! That's horrible!” I reply. “I would never do that!”
5. But Brain is relentless. “But you COULD!” it shouts. “Just think about it! Just think about it until you're so freaked out that you have no choice but to run into the streets naked, wearing a clown mask, and steal the nearest dog!”
6. “I WOULD NEVER DO THAT EITHER!” I scream (sometimes out loud), and then go find a bottle of bourbon, which I drink until I pass out.

So, if I am standing on a rooftop, a mountain, or the side of the Grand Canyon, my brain will start gleefully shouting, “HEY! What if you JUMPED?!” The fact that I don't want to die is immaterial. Brain doesn't care. Brain is all, “But you COULD! Just sayin!”, as I see myself pitching forward into space, screaming through a brief and terrifying free fall, and then splatting (or, in the case of the Grand Canyon, exploding into very small bits) on the pavement.

If I'm hanging out with my mother-in-law, my brain will occasionally pipe up with, “Hey, what if you called her a whore?!”
“What?” I say. “Shut up! She's not a whore, she's lovely! I would never say anything like that to my mother-in-law!”
“I know, right?!” says Brain. “Everyone would get soooooo mad at you! Can you imagine! Can you imagine?!”

And occasionally, yes, my brain will note the presence of a gentleman in a wheelchair and suddenly fill my head with the image of me, grabbing ahold of the handles, and pushing it away down the street at high speed shouting, “Wheeeeee! Isn't this fun!”, while the hapless veteran I've just hijacked shouts, “Oh my God, somebody call the police!”

Me: I'm not doing that.
Brain: Hey, whatever, dude! I'm just sayin'!

Fortunately, I have the internet – where the wikipedia entry for “Intrusive Thoughts” describes all this to a tee and mentions that it's a universal human experience (although it doesn't specifically mention wheelchair hijacking or clown suits, so I can't be completely sure.) But Christ, universal or not, it is getting really annoying. And Brain, if you're reading this...

SHUT UP.