A Most Heinous Display of OCD

So I’m driving home this evening and the traffic ahead begins to slow…the car in front of me is a Saab convertible with its top down.

Nothing strange about that, it’s a nice day. But then a repetitive motion catches my eye. The guy in the Saab is touching his head with his left arm and then arcing the arm out to the side.

At first I think he is picking some sort of debris out of his hair. But as the traffic slows to a stop, I see that he is pulling hair out of his head. He is actually TWEEZING his hair in the middle of traffic in a convertible! With actual TWEEZERS! And with each extraction he is tossing the apparently offending strand out of his car.

I don’t know that there is a word for this type of behavior (except maybe “EW!”) but the collection of words I would apply is “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

Now, I may be a teeny, tiny, tad of a psychotically-obsessed person. And perhaps I also might over-groom on occasion. And I used to drive a convertible. But never in my wildest mania did I ever consider combining the activities.

So I found myself simultaneously grossed out, curious about the motivation behind the behavior, and fighting the urge to yell out of my open sunroof “DUDE! Do you realize you’re in a freakin’ convertible and we all can see you?”

Instead I turned up my stereo, hoping the power of the pop would break through his nit-picking reverie long enough to make him realize he was actually out in public. No luck.

I suppose what he was doing was not littering in the technical sense of the word (being bio-degradable and all) so I had no grounds to call the cops or anything. But I wanted to do something – anything -- to make him stop. Because at this point we’re going on a solid ten minutes of defoliation.

Then I began to wonder if the faded magnet-ribbon on the back of his vehicle might hold a clue…like maybe it was for some sort of follicle-oriented society. Upon closer inspection, I saw it was just some patriotic thingie and had nothing to do with his coiffure. Damn.

There had to be an explanation…what if there was actually a midget in the passenger seat (that I couldn’t see) holding a knife on the convertible driver (pressed against his kneecap?) and the driver was leaving a trail of hair DNA, like crumbs in a forest to mark his trail? Well, it seemed just as plausible as anything else at the time.

It just didn’t make sense. He was checking himself out in the rear view mirror and going after specific hairs scattered throughout his head. But his hair was salt and pepper…so if his aim was removing all the white ones, this behavior could only lead to semi-baldness.

Didn’t the guy ever hear of Grecian Formula?

Perhaps it is something to do with the Saab convertible itself. I once dated a guy who drove one and he had this weird aversion to anyone who wore pastels. He did not see the pretty in the pink.

Anyway, back to the present day. Eventually speeds picked up (and he kept picking) but I was stuck behind him until Mr. Tweezers turned into a driveway. (Well, he made a right into a driveway, he didn't actually transform into a driveway.)

And so my saga ends...but now I have an irresistible urge to reshape my eyebrows. See ya!