OVER EASY

I was always a very intense guy.

I was never nonchalant. I was chalant.

I was more intense than Kirk Douglas. Even in the movie Detective Story, when Kirk tells Eleanor Parker that he wishes he could cut off the top of his skull and hold his brain under the faucet so that he could wash away the dirty pictures she put there.

I was raised by intense parents. Dad was a former marine drill sergeant. So was Mom. We lived in an intense city in an intense state. Technically, it was a commonwealth, not a state, which only seemed to add to the intensity, somehow.

As a child, I had an intense Shetland pony named Satan. Satan and I would ride like the wind, or at least like an intense breeze.

As a teen-ager, I ran with an intense crowd. We drank caffeinated soda and played Scrabble with a timer. The timer was set to seven seconds per turn, one second for each letter in one's rack.

My high school career counselor told me I should become a political assassin for the CIA. I told him I wanted to do something more intense. Or, if that wasn't an option, then something more creative. I asked him if it was possible to earn a decent living bending spoons with my mind. He asked me if I was able to do that. I couldn't (yet), so I just gave him an intense look.

We haggled for a while and eventually came up with professional dog grooming as a career path. It seemed like a sensible compromise at the time, though I can't trace the logic step by step in my mind now.

At some point in adulthood my intensity began to affect my work. The dogs were afraid of me, especially the skittish Labradoodles. They could smell my intensity a mile away, and I began losing clients.

It also started affecting my love life. I would grind my teeth during sleep, and if I had company, it would keep them awake. My dentist gave me a dental guard to prevent grinding, but I just ended up eating it.

So I decided to buy a hot tub. I hoped that the soothing, undulating, hot water would mellow me out.

I never had the patience for instruction manuals, so when the tub arrived I just filled it with water, jumped in and set the temperature way up near the very top, somewhere between "poach" and "sautee."

They say that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will jump out, but if you put him into a pot of cool water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will stay in the pot until he boils to death.

What am I, a frog? No, of course not. I leaped out of the tub somewhere around "tea cozy."

But after I toweled off I felt different somehow. A strange new calm began to wash over me, like tranquil ants swarming over the carcass of an angry wildebeest.

Over the following weeks and months I began to lose a lot of my intensity. I stopped giving my dogs mohawks, and they began to warm to me. I stopped listening to Metallica and started listening to Jewel. I stopped reading Charles Bukowski and switched to Rod McCuen. I sold my black Hummer and bought a loden Prius. I had my tattoos and piercings removed and developed a fondness for cardigan sweaters. Filtered water replaced unfiltered Camels, and Cuervo Gold gave way to Selestial Seasonings.

Then one day I met Amy, a massage therapist, and we fell in love. We took long walks on the sand and held hands in the moonlight. The sex was loving and gentle, and involved no props, devices or wardrobe changes of any kind.

Within a year I had gone from Jack Palance to Perry Como; from G. Gordon Liddy to Mr. Rogers.

On the one hand, I was glad about these changes, but on the other hand, I missed the old me. I wanted at least some of my old edge back.

I consulted the medical comminity, but they were stumped.

Then over a cup of Sanka one Christmas Eve I was listening to a Mel Torme CD, and thanks to a song lyric, I think I figured out what had triggered my transformation that day in the hot tub: "chestnuts roasting on an open fire."

Yes, I believe the "roasting" of my "chestnuts" had for some reason caused my intensity level to plummet.

I tried to publish my theory in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but they rejected it for some reason. (Okay: the reason was jealousy).

So I put my theory on my blog, and the reaction in the Comments section has been, well, intense. You'd be surprised how many intense people are out there leaving creepy comments on blogs in the middle of the night.

Anyway, I'm still a little more laid back than I'd like to be, but I'm better off than I was before.

If Amy's happy and the dogs are happy, I'm happy.

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This story originally appeared in Narrative magazine.