Urges are a funny thing.

Late Tuesday night, for instance, I ran into the grocery store just to buy some milk because I was out of my favorite 2 percent and I'm useless without my morning bowl of raisin bran-type cereal.

By the time I reached the cash register, though, both of my arms were full with all the impulse buys I couldn't resist, such as the tuna, cheese and orange juice that were on sale and a freshly-baked loaf of sourdough bread. Having grown up just five doors from a little family owned bakery, breads and pastries have always been near the top of my favorite foods list.

Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler, who happened to be shopping at the same time, laughed at my arms-full plight and rightly suggested I should have grabbed a buggy.

No matter your shopping intent, we all know, something else will always grab your attention and the urge will take over.

It's human nature, I guess.

Some urges are buried in the subconscious and you're likely not fully aware of them.

Then there are the urges that are completely out in the open.

While I would be afraid to learn what Dr. Sigmund Freud would've had to say about it, there's one urge I've had for as long as I can remember. Maybe it's a guy thing, or maybe it's just a sign of a demented mind, but sometimes I just can't resist it and I have to satisfy that urge no matter the consequences.

Yes, I'm afraid to admit, I've always been burdened by the urge to take mechanical things apart to see what makes them tick.

It was Christmas morning likely 30 years or so ago, for instance, I remember Santa Claus dropping off the neatest remote-controlled car I ever saw. Pull the trigger on the little gun-shaped controller and the car would speed away. Turn the knob and the car would turn just like you wanted it to turn. It was fun for the whole family and great for scaring pets.

The neatest remote-controlled car you ever saw, if I recall correctly, didn't even make it to New Year's Day.

My urge to take it apart to see how it operated took over and, within about an hour's work with a screw driver, the neatest remote-controlled car you ever saw was reduced to about 500 pieces.

While I was cursed with this urge, I also was blessed at the same time with an amazing ability to disassemble mechanical things down to the smallest of bits and pieces, practically to the molecular level.

Unfortunately, as you can guess, I was never blessed with any ability whatsoever to put those bits and pieces back together.

I tried my best but the neatest remote-controlled car you ever saw never worked again. The parts would never fit right and there always were parts left over whenever I thought I was close.

I can't remember how my dad reacted, but I'm sure he tried the best he could to fix my handiwork, but to no avail. And the fate of the neatest remote-controlled car you ever saw was just the start of my lifelong urge.

There was the BMX bike that was stripped down to nothing. Luckily, dad was able to put that one back together because he was a master of all things bike-related.

Then there was the urge to pull apart my first "boom box." Do they still call them that? The tape player never really worked right again but at least the radio still played when I got it back together.

The list goes on and on and I noticed that the targets of my lifelong urge to disassemble somehow kept increasing in value.

I still struggle with those urges today. And unfortunately, as I write this, my urge recently has been fixated on my laptop computer.

I've tinkered with the innards of computers since my college days and, quite frankly, there's not a whole lot that you can do wrong when you're pulling apart a desk top computer. All the cards and chip sets tend to have very specific slots and desktop computers have been designed for years to make internal access and upgrades easy.

Need to swap out a hard drive? No problem. Need to upgrade a video card? No problem.

Laptops are a decidedly different matter. All the things in them tend to be stuffed into a very confined space and getting at one part generally requires the disassembly of many others.

I have since found some consolation, though, in the fact there are others who share my same urges.

And in some ways I may have found a cure.

While searching the internet for information about my laptop I came across a step-by-step disassembly guide, not from the manufacturer, but from an apparently bored U.S. Army soldier who used his lunch time to photograph every step of the process and all of the dozens of screws and pins that held the dozens of parts together.

Like me, he just wanted to see how to do it.

And thanks to the comprehensive set of photographs in the guide, the step-by-step process could be reversed so everything could be put back in its rightful place with no parts left over during re-assembly.

Amazingly, after reading this other man's work, I noticed that my urge to tear apart my laptop subsided. I now know how everything works in there, and how all those parts fit together.

At the end of those G.I. Joe cartoons I used to watch in my youth, there always used to be an educational message that ended with the catch phrase "Knowing is half the battle."

It's taken three decades, but I think I finally know what that means.

Whenever I get the urge to disassemble something in the future, I'll just look for a disassembly guide because somebody with the same affliction has probably beaten me to the punch and there's no need to re-invent the wheel.

Now, all I have to do is get the grocery store to force me to take a buggie as soon as I enter. It won't stop me from impulse buys, or from the freshly-baked sourdough, but at least it will spare me from having to carry too much.