I wanted to choke the guy on the riding mower.
There he was, zigzagging across his lawn, creating asymmetric rows, oblivious to the chaos he was sowing in the universe.
He looked about sixty. Recently retired.
The yard he was mowing sat across the street from my office’s parking lot in a somewhat affluent area.
The yard surrounded an otherwise well-kept, two-story house.
I’d walked out to the parking lot to retrieve something from my car.
It was just after one o’clock on a perfect, late-summer afternoon.
The sun was shining. It was warm, but not excessively so.
Sitting as I do in an over-air-conditioned office most of the day, I’d decided to take a few minutes to linger in the parking lot to soak it in.
I don’t spend nearly enough time outside.
The sound of the riding mower had caught my attention.
I’d walked, for no particular reason, to the far side of the parking lot to check it out.
It’s part of the male condition.
We’re instinctively drawn to the sound of heavy equipment, power tools, and mowers.
Plus, lawn-mowing has always been my thing.
It was the one household chore I consistently owned while growing up.
My dad had started me mowing in about the fifth or sixth grade.
Once I got over the noise and bulk of the mower, I came to appreciate the transformative effect it produced not only on the lawn, but also the whole house.
It made the entire property look better.
If done correctly.
And by that, I mean straight, even rows; sharp edges; and a clean-swept sidewalk and driveway.
A well-cut lawn can elevate an entire neighborhood, no matter how modest.
While a poorly mowed one can drag down even the swankiest.
Like this guy was doing with his thoughtless, half-assed, minimal effort.
Yes, I’m sensitive to these things.
I used to yell at my siblings for walking on the grass.
My grass.
And it drove me crazy that our dog would shit all over the back yard.
Even though that was exactly what the dog was supposed to do.
The yard was my canvas.
And the precise, uniform rows I mowed into it was my art.
The dogshit was a blight.
Plus, it required that I take a shovel and a little bucket around the yard to pick it up before I mowed.
And, of course, I’d always miss a pile, which I’d discover only after I’d run over it with the mower.
And then I’d have dogshit all mashed into the treads of the mower wheels.
And I’d have to find a stick and try to scrape it out.
And I’d never get all of it, which made the whole garage smell like dogshit for a week after I put the mower away.
But anyway.
I continued watching from the parking lot as the savage on the riding mower finished his lawn.
He completed his last, swerving row and then drove the mower straight into a little shed in his backyard.
A moment later, he was backing out of his driveway in a silver Lexus.
He gave me a quick wave as he drove past.
I waved back, grudgingly, assuming he was off to sabotage a power grid or commit some other act that would further tip the world into a state of entropy.
I mean, just look at that lawn, for chrissakes!
As I walked back to my office, thoroughly disgusted, I caught myself.
It’s been suggested that I’m a little uptight.
Maybe I care too much about straight rows.
Or that books on a shelf be arranged in descending order of height from left to right.
Or that belts and shoes match in precisely the same shade and color.
Or that the bottom edges of a towel hang in perfect alignment on the rack.
I keep small, handheld levels in both my upstairs desk drawer and in the cupboard at my downstairs bar.
Why? Because in both places there are pictures hanging on the wall that inexplicably tip themselves crooked about once a week.
I can feel it when it happens.
And it drives me freaking berserk.
None of this happens by choice. I’m just wired this way.
Which poses an interesting question: Is my need for order a superpower or a curse?
If, in fact, I choked the guy on the riding mower into submission, forcing him to mow only straight rows from now on, would I be doing the world a service?
Or, would I be presenting the world with evidence of my own mania?
I turned to the National Institutes of Health—the NIH—for insights.
Probably the most fitting descriptor of this condition is obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD.
According to the NIH, OCD, as the name implies, combines an obsession and a corresponding compulsion in a manner that produces undesirable thoughts or behaviors in the person who possesses them.
Among the common obsessions giving rise to the disorder is a “desire to have things symmetrical or in perfect order.”
Okay.
And one of the typical, associated compulsions is a predisposition for “ordering or arranging items in a particular, precise way.”
Uh-oh.
That sounds a little too familiar.
Clearly, I have strong obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
But nothing, I think, that rises to the level of disorder.
Yes, my maniacal insistence on straightly hung towels, precisely level pictures, and a thousand other things annoy the shit out of the people with whom I live.
But I’m able to get out of bed in the morning, leave the house, and be a generally productive human being.
Maybe even an exceptional one.
See, the flipside to having a strong need for order and symmetry—when you’re not busy annoying people, at least—is that you get put in charge of stuff.
Like, all the time.
At seventeen, I was the youngest recruit in my Navy bootcamp company.
There were ninety of us.
And the drill instructors were required to designate a Recruit Chief Petty Officer.
That was the recruit who’d nominally be in charge whenever they weren’t around.
My Grandfather, a thirty-year Navy veteran, had advised me the best thing I could do to make it through basic training with the least amount of pain was to keep my head down and mouth shut.
Fly under the radar, he’d said. Do not draw attention to yourself.
Do exactly what you’re told and nothing else.
Made sense. And that’s exactly what I set out to do.
The problem was, given my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I was a little too good at doing what I was told.
For starters, you had to make your bed with a ruler every morning.
Every fold, crease, and corner had to meet a precise standard.
Most guys found it infuriating. I found it liberating.
It all made perfect sense to me.
The same was true of putting on a uniform.
From skivvies to boots, there was a prescribed, correct way of doing everything.
And when those procedures were properly followed, the result was a clean, crisp, orderly appearance.
Brilliant!
Even with my shaved head, I looked fantastic.
Which, of course, resulted in my being selected as the Recruit Chief Petty Officer.
And it put in motion a series of events that continues to present day.
I’ve been tapped to lead everything from a Naval Academy regiment to a maintenance department; from reserve units of varying size to manufacturing businesses, juries, classrooms, and myriad other organizations and entities in between.
You name it, and someone’s probably tried to put me in charge of it.
Debatable was whether I was actually qualified to lead any of them, but that was beside the point.
I always looked the part.
Which is a wonderful—and dangerous—thing.
If you think about it.
So, superpower or curse?
I suppose that all depends
On whether you’re the guy on the riding mower
Or the guy standing across the street
Wanting to choke him
Just to make the neighborhood
And the world
A better place.