I like to be in control.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

I have a petulant OCD Godzilla tromping around in my gut making demands that must be met. The best way to keep him satisfied is to be utterly in charge of every situation. Things have to be just so. Otherwise, he starts breathing radioactive fire on my gall bladder.

Thus, the utter trainwreck of the past week of my life has me off-balance. OCD Godzilla is not pleased.

It all started when not one, but two of my external hard drives died within a day of each other. Kaput. The end. No chance of data recovery outside of a clean room, a magical place that exists entirely out of my budget to deal with this sort of disaster.

I’m a triple-redundant data keeper, which was the entire point of the extra HDs, so I haven’t lost anything critical. But the time I put in to organizing data, and the cost of the drives … I could have produced an entire new album and then taken a brief, very relaxing vacation.

Next, Gina’s trusty, unbelievably loud Fender amp up and died in the middle of rehearsal last night. Gina’s theory is that it simply could not deal with the power of our rock. That’s flattering, but we only rock at about 3 on the volume knob, so I don’t think that’s the cause. It’s always had a little extraneous buzz, probably indicative of a larger speaker problem.

Lest this rebellion be limited to electronic devices, my body is also rebelling against me. This is OCD Godzilla stomping on my soul, creating havoc from whence there was healthy. He went rogue over the weekend, and then I got super-sick on Monday night as I drove around the wilds of Chadd’s Ford PA, idling in ditches at the side of the road to try to get my bearings.

I typically live such a semi-charmed life that I don’t know what to do with myself in these situations. I can’t carry my data around, which has slowed down my blogging (long story – just trust me). The amp is working intermittently, which is inhibiting rehearsal. I feel like crap, which is putting a damper on all of life in general, and going to the gym in specific.

I don’t know what I’m more afraid of – how many more things can go wrong in a single week, or the state of my insides once my internal control-freak monster is through with his tantrum.