I used to obsess…

… about the strangest things.

One of the many things that I obsessed about as a child was based partially on stories from the news but also from my imagination.  To this day, I still question what parts of my memories were based on reality and which were based on my imagination.

I was 13 years old and we were watching “The Deliberate Stranger” about Ted Bundy.  It was a made for TV movie and I remember sitting on the stairs watching it (I would get to anxious and tense if I sat on the couch next to the rest of the family).  I would run and hide during parts I didn’t want to see but I was fascinated by this story and had to understand it.

My fifth grade teacher had  had a near miss with Ted Bundy, he’d lurked in her backyard.  He had attended school where I lived and he’d been a Sunday School teacher.  Yet he was absolutely criminally insane.

I was so incredibly scared of Ted Bundy.  I knew I was too young to ever have to fear for my life, but I feared for all of the young beautiful women that I knew.  Because I believed he could pop up at any moment and kill someone I cared about.

During this show was the first time I learned that what I had always believed and had gone over in my mind a hundred times was completely fiction.

As you may know, Ted Bundy escaped twice from jail.  This was obviously quite a turning point in the show.  After he had escaped I asked, “Why didn’t they tell the real way he escaped?” Everyone turned to look at me and asked me what I meant by that.

“Why didn’t they show that he chewed through the bars with his solid gold teeth?”

Laughter.  Lots of laughter. (LOL should mean “lots of laughter” not “laughing out loud”).

Anyway, they all laughed and asked me where on earth I had heard such a thing.  I honestly can’t say, but in my young and innocent mind that was the only way I could make sense of someone so scary being able to escape from jail.  And it didn’t bother me that he didn’t have gold teeth in any of the pictures I had seen plastered on the news because, of course he would have a second pair of dentures.

I had gone over it in my mind so many times that I didn’t see that it just didn’t make logical sense.

Odd thing to obsess about?  Um, you could say that.

What odd thing have you obsessed about?  Check out Mama Kat’s Losin It to see other stories of crazy people, mischievous little kids and so much more.