I wasn’t in a hurry to leave the womb. I liked it there.

I didn’t have to waste time with things like chewing. My bed was always made for me, and I never had to clean my room because there was a tube leading out of my navel that acted as a wet/dry shop vac with Insert and Remove settings. It was just peaceful bliss against a background of outside conversations that rippled through the amniotic fluid like a soothing whale song.

The womb was like a day spa and a bed and breakfast joined together and stuffed inside an RV.

Perfect.

Nothing lasts forever though, and some things only last about nine months. There eventually comes the day when, to your surprise, that world of peace turns into a midnight bodyquake that winds up with you and about forty gallons of strange bodily fluids and excretions strewn all over a hospital bed (unless you were delivered by hippies in a country house, in which case the fluids wound up all over the midwife and, if it was a particularly exciting birth, the walls).

The first thing you might recall having noticed upon being ejected from your mother’s body was that life didn’t seem like it was about to take a turn for the better. All signs actually pointed to the contrary. You had to deal with vision for the first time, which means you had to deal with ugly for the first time, and it’s entirely possible that the first thing you ever saw was a bed sheet soaked in birth stuff. Hardly a way to begin.

But that’s not the worst of it.

The next thing you would have noticed was that the convenient cord, mentioned a few paragraphs back, which had been delivering food to your tummy and pulling waste from your body, was gone. Just gone. Poof. Buh-bye.

That cord did a lot for you. You didn’t have to eat, throw up, pee, or poop. The cord did it all.

It did something else, too: it made you codependent.

As long as you were tied to your mother through the Tube of Awesomeness, you didn’t have to do anything for yourself. That cord made you a slave to Easy. It was the master, and you were the willing servant.

Although emancipation from the cord took several years, it was eventually worth it. Being able to eat, drink, and go to the bathroom all by yourself is truly one of the Great Gifts in Life. Independence. Pride. Courage. Other stuff. And so on.

I remember the day I finally went through the entire process of peeing all by myself. My mother was trying to get me to go to the bathroom, lift the toilet lid, pee, and then flush. Up until that point, I had been requesting that somebody else flush for me since the toilet handle was something I feared (and rightly so).

The bathroom, which was by no means large, was packed to the gills with family and neighbors. They were all there, cheering me on, offering prizes that would be transferred to my person upon successful completion of the pee-pee experiment. They waved gold, frankincense, myrrh, and bubble gum in my face. They really wanted me to do it.

And I did it. Not for them, but because I really wanted everybody to get the hell out. Even at that ripe young age, I had a very well defined sense of propriety, and I didn’t want twenty people standing around and watching while I whipped “it” out and did my thing.

That was many years ago. A memory hidden under a stone better left unturned, but it came back to me last night when I had another experience of emancipation from the Shackles of Habitual Behavior.

It’s no secret that I have some OCD tendencies. I won’t shake your hand for any reason. I don’t care if you’re Bill Gates or the Pope - you can airshake just like everybody else. Rich and Powerful cooties aren’t any better than Working Class cooties.

Cooties is cooties.

But, as I was saying, I had an experience last night that went against everything in my antiseptic nature.

I was in my third straight hour of playing Star Wars: BattleFront II, which is a thoroughly stupid game, when I unwrapped my last peppermint taffy. Peppermint is my favorite flavor of taffy, and I think taffy is good, so it was obviously a pretty important thing to me, that candy.

I put the taffy in my mouth, shot a couple stormtroopers, cursed at the buggy controls, and then paused the game to inspect with my tongue what I believed to have been a small piece of paper still stuck to the soft cube of minty sweetness that was beginning to melt in the hardcore Taste Machine that is my chomper.

Not wanting to have a bad experience with the last peppermint taffy of the bunch, I pulled it out of my mouth with the intention of removing the paper I thought was attached to it. Unfortunately, three hours of playing video games can do funny things to your sense of Space and Time, and I wasn’t able to hold on to the taffy. It fell and landed on my sock (note that the sock was still wrapped around my foot in the traditional fashion of the garment).

My whole world froze. I could see individual motes of dust suspended in the air, like God had hit Pause while watching the Ballet of Life on DVD. I knew that Everything had changed forever. The last peppermint taffy was stuck to my sock, and my OCD tendencies wouldn’t let me do anything about it.

And that’s when I took control.

Like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis after its long metamorphosis, my soul was born again among the phantasmic birthing fluids of my imagination. They spilled out of my mind, over the X-Box controller, and there stained the carpet.

I knew that it was All Right – that I had nothing to Fear. I reached down, peeled the partially digested block of sugar from my sock, popped it right back into my mouth, and returned to my video game.

Today I am proud because I was able to overcome my OCD tendencies to enjoy one of life’s little pleasures.

I am a free man.

(If it so pleases you, feel free to take a five minute break from whatever you’re doing so that you can envy me and my glory.)