what does it make you want to do?

Get out of bed in the morning.

I don't usually have urges to push people into fountains or punch them in the face. Instead, my imp encourages me to ignore "No Trespassing" signs. To open doors that are slightly ajar and peer inside. To wander down hallways and around corners where the public is clearly not supposed to be, just to check out what's back there. Whenever I do that stuff a delicious feeling of potential magic descends on me.

This imp also causes me to get down to barefoot when near any body of water, and wade. It tells me to wink and make faces at kids when their parents aren't looking. It makes me touch everything -- I can't walk through a store without trailing my hands over the merchandise. I may end up like Violet Beauregarde.

My crazy sparkle (my "dersins," if you will) once made me wonder the following:

Hey, what do you suppose Mr. Larsen would do if I (1) jumped up in the middle of translating Camus's "The Stranger," (2) shouted "I can't take it any more," (3) ran across the room and (4) smashed my head through the window?

The answer, fyi, is "Mr. Larsen would scream like a little girl."

I think I had poor impulse control 15 years ago...

Er, was this window glass? 'Cuz yikes.

I find myself regularly wondering what it would be like to have a car accident. I have, so I actually know what it'd be like, but I still find myself wondering.

My wise aunt once told me, “Secrets between two are only safe so long as the third one of the two confessed the secret to stays sober.”

My imp excels at triangulating the position of said third and plying him or her with umbrella stuck and potent girl drinks.

I feel kind of sad because I don't think I've ever had that feeling. Except for video game related stuff. For example: I'd been playing GTA:SA for a few weeks. Now, in the game you can hijack a really big truck and use it to ram through traffic and run over people. Occasionally, I'd be out in real life traffic and see a big truck and just for a second think "I could totally hijack that thing". Or I'd look for make-shift ramps to go flying over. Does that count?

Er, was this window glass?

It was the window in the door to the classroom. The stuff with the chicken wire embedded into it.

It was a pretty fucking stupid thing to do either way, though.

Sometimes when a kid who's old enough to know better is running down an aisle or whatever, I have the urge to put my foot out.

Mine makes me kiss girls, with tongue, when I'm not supposed to be kissing them. My Crazy Sparkle is mostly aided by his trusty sidekick Mr. Beam or Paddy O'Jamesons.

I would love a depiction of Crazy Sparkle (but I pictured her as female, or at least in drag). Artistes?

Yeah, I don't really do anything of this sort, except for kissing people I probably shouldn't be kissing. But I regret nothing.

But I regret nothing.

Better to regret the things you've done than the things you haven't.

Spoken like someone without a criminal record.


I kind of liked the "imp of the perverse" epithet. I wonder if I could get a job where I could weasel that into my job description.

My imp is similar to one Poe wrote about in his story: the urge to leap from high places. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach any time I approach the edge of a high cliff or balcony railing, not from vertigo, but because I am imagining myself leaping out into the void, plummeting like a shot to the ground far below, and the physical sensation of falling is all too real. Fortunately I've always been able to keep my imp in check, the little dickens!

I liked the explanation given in the askme thread that in cases like AtomEyes', what's happening is that the reptile brain generates a scary vision of the present danger, a response with obvious evolutionary reward. Then the rational brain kicks in and says "No! Bad idea."

I used to get the urge to open moving car doors and throw myself out.

I have that (although Crazy Sparkle sounds too much like Sparkle Motion to me, so I don't know what to call it) quite often. I call the moments "below threshold" to myself. I have all these wonderful, awful, crazy impulses that bubble up but don't cross the threshold into actual behavior. Because if they did, they would be the actions of a madwoman. I'm ok with it, I embrace the moments, because thankfully, at least for the time being, I have a sensible gatekeeper at the threshold. Even though the gatekeeper has gone missing once or twice over the last twenty years, I still trust her.

I call mine consciousness. I think I might have an imp of the sensible, though.