So sitting on the couch goofing around on the iPhone I suddenly realized I had jelly on my hand. And my arm. Both arms. Both hands. Sticky strawberry jam. I’d had a couple crackers with jam for dessert and apparently some had slipped from the Akmak and dolloped onto my shirt.

Panic. I leaped to my feet, ran into the kitchen, removed the radioactive shirt, rolled it into a ball with the jelly inside and dropped it into the washer. Then I returned to the kitchen sink with the hot water on full blast and lathered soap all over my hands, scrubbing furiously, then up and down both arms, then my torso where the stickiness theoretically could’ve come into contact with my bare skin. Finally, scrubbed like a surgeon, I dried off and put on a clean shirt. I could still feel the tackiness, the hint if stickiness all over, on me, on everything. Hallucinating stickiness. Me, still this huge giant deep voiced dude at 62, completely losing it because of maybe a quarter of a tea spoon of strawberry preserves on my shirt.

Some things don’t change. To think I had believed I’d gotten beyond all of this. I’d made progress. I stay clear of maple syrup but I use honey. I wash the outside of the jar and thoroughly wash my hands afterward, and if–horror!–a drop of honey (or jelly) gets on my shirt it goes immediately into the washing machine, but I do use honey. Just not those hideous squeeze bottles. I won’t go near them. They shouldn’t even be legal.

It’s a phobia, yes. I guess everyone’s allowed one without necessarily being a nut and this is mine. And though it is as stupid as any phobia at least it’s sanitary, and easy to conceal. People think I just don’t like pancakes, though actually I love pancakes. I had some a couple years ago, feeling like a person with a fear of heights going skydiving. What a rush.

But as delicious as they were I just hate the stickiness of the syrup even more. Tactile trumps taste every time. Touch came before taste. I doubt critters in the Pre-Cambrian were savoring the flavors of the stromatolites they munching. They could feel them, though. My hypersensitivity to stickiness is evolutionary atavism, touch over taste, reeling from the icky like some vastly ancient invertebrate. It’s in my DNA. Or so I told myself in one night of overthinking. Though I don’t think I believed it. This is a fucked up Homo sapien sapien thing. Maybe one of Richard Dawkin’s memes. As our frontal lobes got bigger and bigger all sorts of ridiculous things get blown way out of proportion. Breast size. Religion. Cats. Stickiness. Though that’s still a rare one. Otherwise everyone would be as terrified of maple syrup as we are of spiders. Though I’m not scared of spiders, actually.

It does have a name, this stickyphobia, but it’s impossible to say and utterly unspellable and refers mainly to the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth, which is just stupid. How can anyone be scared of peanut butter? It’s like being scared of clowns. Get over it. And no, I don’t want to go to IHOP. Not until they steam clean the place. And stop selling pancakes.