Too Many Mornings

Howie Mandel is America's most famous sufferer of OQD, or Obsessive Question Disorder, which is why he's always asking, "Deal or No Deal?"

Is it better to know, or not to know?

If you can’t—or won’t–answer that question until you know exactly why I’m asking, then I’m sorry to say that you, like me, may suffer from Obsessive Question Disorder, or OQD for short.

OQD is not a new disease. It dates to the dawn of recorded history, when God warned Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they bit into the apple anyway because they just couldn’t go on living in Eden—paradise on Earth, for God’s sake!–without knowing what was up with the tree and the fruit and the knowledge and the good and the evil. As a result of their transgression, which seems really stupid with hindsight, the book of Genesis says God cursed humankind by forcing us to get up every day and go to work, where we’re bombarded with lots of annoying questions, such as, “Did you finish that report yet?” and, “Just what do you do for us besides collect a paycheck?” and, “Are you asleep?”

But questions like those have more to do with corporate greed and the man holding me us down than they do with OQD. OQD is a disease similar to alcoholism, binge eating or watching American Idol. In other words, you don’t control OQD, it controls you, and it’s just as potentially devastating to the body, mind and soul as any addiction.

I’ve suffered from OQD all of my life. It was OQD that compelled me to disobey my parents and look at the sun with binoculars when I was about 5 years old, probably ruining my eyesight for life. It was OQD that inevitably steered me into a career in journalism, where publishers routinely get away with paying reporters less than the average Wal-Mart greeter. How? Because publishers know most reporters have OQD and that it will drive them beyond reason to find out why the good senator from the great state of Colorado took out a mortgage for his suburban home under one name and a separate mortgage for a condominium in the city under a completely different name. Or why two of the Road Runner Chemical Company’s delivery trucks don’t have corporate logos on their doors, and always make their trips after hours, driving into the deep woods 50 miles from the nearest city.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that OQD is childlike curiosity on Red Bull. Although there’s a link between normal inquisitiveness and OQD, most of its sufferers don’t particularly care why the sky is blue or where the sun goes after dark. These are obvious questions for ordinary people.

Who is Patrick Jane, and why did he ask you about Miles Thorsen? These are the types of questions that plague sufferers of OQD.

OQD is much more like the compulsive sort of curiosity that kills cats. It’s curiosity on crystal meth. Its sufferers desperately want to know information other people appear to be trying to keep secret: Where their neighbor goes when he leaves the house at 9 p.m. and returns at 2:30 a.m.; or why he’s buying 40 feet of chain and 20 ceiling hooks at Home Depot; or what he buried in that deep hole in his garden in the middle of the night. Questions like these tap on OQD sufferer’s brains like itches we can’t scratch, driving us mad at times.

This will make sense to anybody who has OQD, whether or not their disorder’s been formally diagnosed by a licensed OQD professional therapist, or LOQDT for short. But it’s damnably difficult to explain to the millions of ordinary, hard-working Americans who happily accept what happens around them without giving it much serious thought, like infants or Republicans.

Perhaps a realistic example would be helpful.

Let’s say you’re approached by a good-looking, somewhat glib stranger named Patrick Jane who asks if you know somebody named Miles Thorsen. If your brain’s normal and you’ve never heard of Thorsen, you say no and move on unfazed. But if you have OQD, you spend the rest of the day wondering who Thorsen is and why Jane was hiding an Australian accent.

The question vexes you, and before you know it, you can’t sleep. Now you spend 90 minutes on Google trying to find out more about these Jane and Thorsen fellows. Maybe you even log onto Intelius.com and pay $30 to do a background check on Jane and Thorsen, to see if—or more likely, how–they’re linked and what possible connection they might have to your life. Maybe you call a friend in the Denver Police Department the next morning and ask him to run Jane’s license plate and give you his home or business address. And perhaps you even drive by his office a few times, or call and talk to his secretary to collect more information.

Explorer Percy Fawcett's unhealthy fascination with The Lost City of Z could be explained by OQD.

But OQD isn’t always creepy and stalker-like.

It takes many other forms.

Sometimes it’s merely annoying, like when Howie Mandel, who famously suffers from OQD, repeatedly asks “Deal or No Deal?” Other times it’s funny, like when your college OQD roommate asks you for the phone number of the cute girl you met at the party, and you keep refusing to give it to him until his face turns red and he chokes on his own spit until he passes out. That’s hilarious!

OQD can be dangerous, though.

Victorian explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, for example, and was so obsessed with finding the Lost City of Z that he dragged his teenage son and another boy deep into the hostile Amazon jungle, where they soon vanished without a trace. Although OQD hadn’t been identified as a disease at the time because the straight-laced Victorians practically made an art form out of being secretive, as anybody who’s familiar with Victoria’s Secret lingerie now knows, Fawcett almost certainly suffered from it. Why else would a grown man take two young boys into the jungle alone?

I can’t answer that question anymore than I can tell you whether it’s better to know certain things, or not to know certain things. But I’ll bet some of you know, and I won’t rest until I figure it out.

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