Chew on that!

"Thanks for the pens. It's too bad they'll all be useless in about a week."

That, embarrassingly, is a sentence I uttered to a co-worker who was nice enough to give me a holiday gift basket brimming with ink-pens and Hershey's chocolates. A normal person would have salivated just looking at the candy. I, however, was eyeing the pens. You see -- and there's no easy way to say this -- I'm a compulsive chewer.

Office supplies, household items, it doesn't matter, I'll chew on 'em.

Around me a pen is lucky to last two days before I turn it into a gnarled, splintered mess. Toothpicks stand a better chance going through a woodchipper. And ice, forget about it. My teeth blast through ice cubes like a ship bound for the arctic.

My favorite item, though, has always been the towel. I don't know what it is, but I could happily gnaw on a fluffy towel for hours. Like a cow with cud, I'll sit there chewing with a glazed look in my eyes and not a thought in my head.

It's really a sickness.

Whenever I'm back home, my mom has little choice but to set aside some hand towels in the bathroom for me to destroy. I can still remember her horrified shrieks at discovering one of her nice Bed, Bath and Beyond towels deformed and violated.

"Could you at least leave the nice ones alone?" was the desperate plea from a desperate woman.

No, I couldn't. They tasted best.

I was once briefly deterred during my teenage years when a towel came out of the washer (somehow) still laced with a powerful dose of laundry detergent. I made it through about three chews before I went howling to a faucet.

My mom tells me this chewing pathology might stem from her taking away my pacifier before I was ready to part with it.

"Aha, I knew it. It's all your fault," I said triumphantly.

"Maybe," she answered, "But I just figured with you starting high school it might be the right time."

Touche.

Looking for answers on how to solve this problem, I turned to the place everyone goes when stumped: Google.

A quick search gave thousands of hits. But aside from several MySpace pages we'd better not discuss, the most authoritative Web sources on the subject were all aimed at dog owners. One particularly good page was written by a certified trainer of border collies. I clicked on the link and jotted down some notes.

"Chewing can become a compulsive behavior when your dog is lonely, bored, stressed or anxious," writes the author.

In order to divert his attention, "leave him with a couple of 'acceptable chewies'... nylabones, raw beef marrow, soup bones and large rawhide knots all become more interesting to the dog as he works on them."

Be careful, though, warns the expert, "old shoes, towels, scrap wood from kitchen cabinetry and phone books are not acceptable chew toys. Dogs cannot tell the difference."

Gotcha. Neither can I.

I was totally prepared to sign on to this self-help program until I read the next paragraph: "When you are ready to leave the house put the dog in his [steel wire kennel crate] and go. No long, sloppy goodbyes, no pleading or threatening gestures, just a cheery 'see you later.'"

Steel wire? Seems a little harsh, doesn't it?

Out of ideas and discouraged I absent-mindedly clicked on a couple more Web sites. Much to my surprise, the names of famous people kept popping up. Former college basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian compulsively chewed towels throughout his entire career. Actor Jon Voigt says he prefers pencils. There was even a nice character in a James Bond movie who could chew through metal.

Wow, I thought, if these great celebrities are compulsive chewers, too, it must be OK.

TJ Greaney is a staff reporter for the Southeast Missourian.