Rock-tober 03, 2017

Earlier this year, Andrea and I were tooling around town and Ozzy's "Crazy Train" comes on the radio. She listens for a few bars and asked if Ozzy ever made an appearance in Rock-tober.

"Nope."

"Really? Are you sure?" I give her one of my "You're kidding, right?" looks.

"Yeah, pretty sure. Dude kinda stands out." Right about then, the chorus kicked in.

"Here's an idea. Add this song to this year's list! You can spend the rest of the year watching people to see who's crazy enough to write about them and this song." I chuckled and the conversation meandered on. Somehow we started talking about the latest incident that grossed me out.

Yes, I'm a bit of a germaphobe. How bad? Long ago, my buddy, Mike, observed, doubtless when I was doing something irrationally fastidious for a teenager, "You don't like being dirty, do you?" Well, no, of course not. Some of my wiseguy friends saddled me with the nickname, "Monk", after Tony Shalhoub's obsessive compulsive TV character. I'm pretty sure I'm not that bad, but there's certain things I just don't do - like use the seat area in grocery carts for my groceries. Why? Because those seats are used by toddlers. Toddlers wear diapers. Diapers leak. I won't be exposing my carefully chosen mangoes to fecal contamination, thank you very much.

We have some friends who posted pictures of their toddler daughter playing on their living room floor. The little munchkin was garnering all the requisite "Awwww!" and "She's adorable!" comments. Leave it to me to notice in the background was a little kid's porta potty with a green cup sitting in the bowl. To this day, I won't touch green cups in their household.

More recently, Andrea and I were in a restaurant when she saw my "that is some kind of nasty" face take hold mid sentence. "What just happened?" she asked. A kid a couple of booths back grabbed hold of the catsup dispenser, upended it, and started sucking on it like it was his bottle. I've not used any of those dispensers since.

Those candy dishes you see on the way out of restaurants? Pass. Some folks say, "Hey! Free candy!" I'm more like, "Hey! Free candy that's been manhandled by everyone who failed to wash their hands in the bathroom!"

Hot tubs? Don't get me started. Where people tend to see a hot, muscle-relaxing soak, I see an oversized petri dish. Blech.

Back in the car, Ozzy was screaming his last refrain, and I was ending the latest germaphobe diatribe. The song ends, and Andrea gets a mischievous glint in her eye and says, "Hmm. Hon, maybe you should write the "Crazy Train" post about you."

Pfft. Yeah. Right. Whatever.