The Joy of the Knife

Back in January I got a new pocket knife. It arrived in the mail, and not five minutes later I accidentally sliced the ball of my thumb open on its razor sharp blade. Serves me right for fooling around! Quite a severe cut, way down into the flesh. But it healed cleanly, and barely left a scar.

Though one lingering aftereffect is mildly annoying. I seem to have contracted a compulsive-obsessive hang-up with sharp objects. In my mind it's as if knives, blades, arrows, all manner of sharp objects, are superimposed on my environment, shooting toward me. I know damn well it's my imagination, but I have to halt the projectiles before they hit me. You know, sort of like Neo stopping the bullets in mid air toward the end of The Matrix.

I have fairly effective inward rituals to keep the same species of sharp object from attacking me more than once. Still, it's a nuisance, and no less of a nuisance for being a psychological hang-up of known etiology and origin.

Moreover this is the first compulsive-obsessive bout I've had in over forty years. Used to have some difficulties with it back in grade school, though I managed at that time to banish my compulsions permanently by means of inward rituals which you probably wouldn't believe if I described them. Eh, like I say, a nuisance.