Meet the Compulsion

Recently I’ve developed a compulsion to walk outside my house, get in my minivan, drive to the house of every single person daring to read one of my essays online, and murder them. Helpfully, The Compulsion tells me not just to kill people, but how to go about it.
Imagine, if you will, a reader sitting at a table or desk in front of a computer or laptop reading one of my essays. I burst in through the front door, grab them from behind by their hair, pull their head back and gouge out their eyes, and drag them, screaming and bleeding to my mini van.
In the van, I put on “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” by Mike Posner (the Seeb Remix) at 100 decibels – roughly the level of a Dave Mathews concert – and drive my minivan and passenger to a specific public access parking lot in Virginia Beach, where I lived when I was a teenager. Once parked, I slide open the van’s door, yank the reader out, and frog march them across the parking lot to the ocean’s edge.
Accompanied by the sound of the surf, I violently push them to their knees, sideways-kick them between their shoulder blades onto their face, climb on top, and using both hands, full of violent strength at their intrusion and audacity, grind their faces into the cold, wet sand until they die.
This is pretty horrifying, right? I don’t recognize myself at. Who does This Compulsion think I am?
For one thing, I’m not getting in my minivan and going anywhere — it hasn’t worked in years. It’s been parked next to my house so long it feels like the seed car for a yard-full of dead vehicles. The air conditioner died for the second time three years ago, then something else car-ish happened, and I wasn’t going to pay the $3,000 repair estimate, certainly more money than the Blue Book value of a 2006 Toyota Sienna with 280,000 miles and no air conditioning, that looks like it was rode hard and put up wet.
And, no, I don’t have alternative transportation for the field trip(s). I replaced the Sienna with a 2017 Lexus RX 350 SUV, blue with tan leather seats. It’s the newest car I’ve ever owned. It has a backup camera, perfect temperature control, and it can both warm up and cool down the seats. I’m not shoving a bleeding person into my pearl-blue perfection; I can’t imagine how hard it is to get blood out of perforated leather. The whole idea is absurd.
Look, I’m happy to kill people, but I’m not happy to look like an idiot. This plan is guaranteed to find me on You Tube in a police interrogation room trying to explain a decibel reader on my dash, twenty witnesses who saw dragging someone across the beach-access parking lot where, Coincidentally! I swear, that same person is found dead by the water’s edge, and watching a video on some cop’s phone from a neighbor’s Ring camera of my tattered minivan that includes my license plate (IMISMOM, for Christ’s sake), and I Took a Pill in Ibiza is playing so loudly an impromptu rave has sprung up in the street next to it. Imagine the shit I’d have to take in prison for this bullshit.
I can’t prove it, but I would lay money down that my Compulsion was behind the genius plan for the murder of Mindi Kassotis by her husband Nicolas. I just watched his trial. Spoiler alert – he did it. Mr. Kassotis killed his wife at home and then disposed of her dismembered body in five different places, at five different times, on the 13,000 acre property of the Portal Country Club, forty five minutes from his home.
Endless videos of his car driving to and from the club were shown in court. He drives into the range of camera after camera on his way(s) in and way(s) out. The pièce(s) de résistance for the prosecution was, one, a receipt from his personal credit card where he bought a deer processing kit (!), a hunting knife, and a shovel at Pro Bass Shop. The day after the murder.
The other pièce was video of him inside Home Depot, the day after his trip to Bass Pro Shop, buying a knife, a plastic storage tote, folding razors and Clorox wipes. I’m guessing he used his loyalty card. The first tote was found in the woods by deer hunters, which is so ironic you actually could put it in an Alanis Morissette song and hall monitors would not prissily tell us its not irony but “a bummer” (one of them actually said that).
Other issues abound. How do I know who is reading what when? What if other people are in the house who try to stop me? Won’t my readers be screaming thorough the rave on their way to the van? I’m pretty sure they won’t all be within driving distance. Am I going to fly to Kansas to kill someone? There isn’t even a beach there and I don’t have a Real ID, which I’m sure the Compulsion would tell me to use to get there.
I appreciate the sentiment, I want to kill them, too, but the plan is garbage.