Today, the history of obsessions.
Obsessions
Ever since I
was a child I’ve always been obsessed with one thing or another. Always some
person, some show or activity that I become consumed with and can’t shut up
talking about. I’ve never been obsessively tidy or orderly, never wrote lists
or spent hours pouring sweat over the best films of all time, best albums, etc.
No, my obsession has always been with the things that my overactive imagination
could feast upon. Physicality or simple intellectual pursuit simply aren’t good
enough.
I probably
started like most children of my generation, fascinated by toys, action men and
the like, and the adventures upon which they took me in my fevered imagination.
I collected Star Wars toys, with my parents assistance, but only the bad guys,
the Empire and Jabba the Hut’s palace and the like and became obsessed with finding
figures of even the most obscure characters.
The first
thing I seem to remember being seriously obsessed with was the TV series, Fame.
I must have been 9. As a 41 year old, I’m consumed with shame by my childhood
self. It’s like being into Glee in the 21st century. I was probably
more into the music, I remember having a couple of tapes and rarely being able
or allowed to watch the show. These days I hate musicals and the idea of
watching people spontaneously break into song or perform complicated dance
routines leaves me feeling embarrassed for everyone concerned. A good friend
used to think that this kind of thing happened in real life, that people
spontaneously broke into song on the streets. My only excuse is that being at a
school of performing arts seemed grown up and something I would like to have
done. That and I was 9 and like all 9 year olds I didn’t have any taste.
Mind you,
two or three years later and things weren’t any better. When all my friends
were into punk and post punk and listening to The Jam and The Specials and
dressing up as Mods with the two-tone gangster spats, I was obsessed with
Michael Jackson and Motown. Mainly Michael Jackson . I was becoming a
precocious obsessive, able to turn any conversation around to my chosen specialist
subject in a heartbeat. I had the albums, the videos, the books and magazines.
Looking
back, my interests were probably more contemporary than most of my school
friends. It was the early 80s and yet most of them were obsessed with breaking
the music listening population down into Mods and Rockers, like it was 1964 or
something. My obsessions may have been mainstream and shit, but at least they
were current. Unlike today, where I’m obsessed with aged rock stars and long
dead writers.
I guess I’m
lucky to have been born when I was. We were the first generation to have home
computers and the first to have mass produced home entertainment. The
introduction of VHS recording meant I could get a lot of training in towards
becoming a poly-obsessive or ubernerd. As soon as Star Wars was broadcast on
network television, it was recorded and played and replayed over and over
again. I must have seen Star Wars over a hundred times before I reached my
teenage years. I was that annoying kid who knew every word and would correct
any one who quoted it wrong, never mind how minor the mistake. I saw Raiders of
the Lost Ark for the first time on VHS and then Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom at the cinema and became obsessed with Harrison Ford, covering my walls
with movies posters and pages ripped out of magazines, consumed by the need to
see everything he had been in, no matter how brief his appearance. I first saw
Apocalypse Now because Harrison Ford had a minor part, though came to love the
film for entirely different reasons. Blade Runner remains my favourite movies
of all time, but again for reasons that transcend the original obsession with
Harrison Ford. It’s the sci-fi/film noir/detective mix that most appeals to me now.
Eventually
Michael Jackson and Harrison Ford gave way to two far more expansive obsessions:
American Football and Fighting Fantasy novels. American Football first started
to be shown on Channel Four in the early 80s. For a year or two at our primary
school the gravel football pitch was used less for proper football and more and
more for kids forming offensive and defensive lines across a line of scrimmage.
I started watching in 1984, I know this because I randomly picked the Chicago
Bears to support and the following season they won the Superbowl (and have done
very little since). After that I was obsessed with American Football for years.
I read countless books on the rules, the history of the Bears, even Jim
McMahon’s autobiography, the Bears quarter back at the time. There was a time
when I was rarely to be found without a Bears football shirt or polo shirt or even
baseball shirt.
Today I
wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a sports shirt of any kind, I’m too fiercely
individual to submit to anything so tribal. When Blackburn Rovers won the
Premier League a few years after I moved to the town and half the population
started wearing Rovers shorts, I jokingly referred to them as the Borg, slowly
assimilating the population and destroying individuality. To be honest, I
probably thought the same back then and wearing the uniform of a team from a
city 3,000 miles from where I lived made me feel unique in a sea of football
strips and rugby jerseys. I still watch the occasional game if I’m up late
enough, but the obsession has long since faded away.
Fighting
Fantasy novels tweaked the same part of my brain as American Football. I wanted
to be an American Footballer, I wanted to run away to America and live out the
dream, but I had no athletic talent to speak of and so I lived out the fantasy
in my head. Likewise the land of goblins and elves.
Fighting
Fantasy was a series of chose-your-own-adventure books where you fought
monsters and ghouls using dice. Sort of like Dungeons and Dragons, but for kids
even too nerdy to have friends to play Dungeons and Dragons with. Fighting
Fantasy are still around today, but in a post-ironic world where everyone is
allowed to remain a child forever, you can find several of the old titles as
phone apps, where you shake your device to roll the die.
I was
obsessed with collecting every last Fighting Fantasy title, a much harder job
in those pre-internet days. There were also guide books and a short lived
magazine and titles like The Riddling Reaver, which pushed more into
multi-player roleplaying territory. Fighting Fantasy books were usually
traditional fantasy scenarios, with the occasional sci-fi or modern setting. I
was obsessed with role playing and chose your own adventure books for years,
adding the Lone Wolf series to my collection, which followed a narrative arc,
unlike the standard alone titles of Fighting Fantasy.
There was
also a three book sequence in which you were Theseus of Ancient Greece, sent to
fight the Minotaur. I had all the books in a special bookcase with glass doors
so I could just there in my room and admire my collection, longing for the days
when the gaps in the collection would be filled, but I never quote got there. It
was an escape. I’d go to school and hate being there. I’d come home and imagine
a portal through my bedroom wall into another reality. To step through, all I
had to do was reach for a book and start reading.
The boy I
was then would be gobsmacked by World of Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed and the dozens
of other modern games. I was never much of a gamer, my obsessions have always
been about transporting me away from reality, whether to a performing arts
academy or an American Football stadium or Deathtrap Dungeon. Video games are
like films, they’re entertaining but like wheelchairs for the imagination. No
match for books, where a symbiotic relationship is formed between author and
reader to create an entirely unique experience. Reading is democratic. Video
entertainment is more authoritarian.
That said, the
Legend of Zelda series on the various Nintendo systems managed to convince to
buy their latest consoles throughout my 20s. Ocarina of Time on the N64 was the
best thing I ever played, it encapsulated everything I loved about the Fighting
Fantasy novels. I’ve never had the hand to eye coordination for games though
and I never did get through the final level. Like Fighting Fantasy. There’s
still my copy of Fighting Fantasy No.
10: House of Hell sitting on a bookshelf, waiting for the day when I actually
finish the bloody thing. These days it’s an Android app.
In my
mid-teens I started to listen to heavy metal, which I’ve written about on a
number of occasions. Again I was obsessive. I read Kerrang magazine religiously
every week, Metal Hammer and Raw less frequently, to the point where I knew
what was happening to most heavy metal groups, whether I liked them or not. My
fellow nebs called me Ceefax, after BBC’s teletext news service (the ITV
version was called Oracle, but they chose to call me Ceefax ‘cause they were
clever cunts). As well as obsessively collecting information, I went after the
back catalogues of each of my favourite bands, Metallica, AC/DC, Anthrax, Iron
Maiden, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Slayer, Alice in Chains, Queensryche,
Trouble, Wolfsbane etc. Again, in the days of vinyl and CDs, that was a lot harder,
especially in our tiny backwater of the north west of England.
My mate
would record Headbanger’s Ball on MTV every Sunday night and I would take the
tape home and record my own copy by linking two VCRs together. I even
re-re-recorded everything in alphabetical order, ‘cause that’s how much of a
nerd I am. The quality was abysmal by the time I’d finished. Today, when we are
used to HD quality, it would be unwatchable. Even amongst my fellow metallers,
my tastes were as broad as they were eclectic.
Of all my
early obsessions, heavy metal is the one that has stayed with me. I listen to
many more genres these days and the t-shirts I wear are of clever film or
literary references rather than AC/DC or The Almighty, but I still listen to a
healthy dose of hard rock and metal (I have written this article to the tune of
Tool’s Lateralus and Mastodon’s Crack the Skye). I’m sure that for most people
the things they obsessed over when they were 15 or 16 are the ones that are
most likely to stay with them. That’s the time in our lives when we are still
young enough to feel immortal, but old enough to be first stepping out into the
world on our own. Anything which illuminates that period remains sacred for all
time.
I’ve always
been a nerd, always into science fiction, always bright but lazy and, being
dragged around from one part of the country to another for most of my formative
years, I hated going to new schools and having to start over with a new set of
friends and enemies all the time. I didn’t apply myself until many years after
school, but in my early 20s I went to night school, did a foundation year in
Physics and Maths and wangled my way on to an Astrophysics degree. I became so
obsessed with studying during that foundation year that I’d wake up at 6am
needing to differentiate something. I’d roll over, pick up a pad and pen, write
down a algebraic equation and perform the calculation before rolling back over
and sleeping through till 9.
I’m
obsessive, but my obsessions don’t always last. Getting to university was as
far ahead as I thought things through and once there I didn’t really have an
idea what I wanted to do next. I did very little work in a degree that requires
a lot of study and assessment, managed to scrape through, usually on a single
night’s revision, but by the time I got to 2nd year, I was even less
interested in studying physics and instead smoking pot, playing Ocarina of Time
and reading Ulysses.
Ulysses blew
my mind. I doubt I understood more than 20%, especially through the cannabinoid
haze, but reading Joyce for the first time was, for me at least, a mind
altering experience that no mere narcotic could ever match. I dropped out and
read more than I’d ever read before, knowing that writing was what I wanted to
do with my life. Well I’ve got that far at least, so now I’m trying to make it
my profession too. I’ve learnt one lesson at least. Always be thinking a couple
of obsessions ahead.
I’m still
obsessive. I have shelves full of books on James Joyce and Shakespeare and Bob
Dylan. I own seven different versions of Moby Dick (a book about obsession told
by an obsessed author via an obsessively descriptive narrator). I collect and
hoard books the way some people hoard shoes. The completest who once longed for
a complete set of Fighting Fantasy novels, the complete set of Slayer’s back-catalogue,
now scours second-hand bookshops seeking out additions to Emile Zola’s
Rougon-Macquart series, which runs to 20 volumes (and one short story). I’m
still about 12 short (plus one short story).
Obsession is
a lot easier than it used to be. A couple of years ago I became obsessed with
completing my father’s Time-Life Seafarers series. Ten volumes had been lying
around my mum’s house for fifteen years since he died. The series ran to 22
volumes. Without much effort, I completed and read the entire set in less than
a year, picking up second hand copies from Abe Books and eBay, usually for a
few pence. There’ no challenge if it’s too easy, so the Zola and Moby Dick
versions I buy only if I find them under my own steam. It’s a sad life, but it’s
one I enjoy.
My main
obsessions are writing and trying to make sense of that impossible James Joyce
novel, Finnegans Wake. Actually, the Wake isn’t a novel, it’s 20 year intensive
Masters Degree in language, semiotics and mythology. It’s a challenge and I
like a challenge. Finally I’ve found something worthy of my obsessive
tendencies.
As for writing,
I’m slowly getting to the point where I want to be. Like differentiation, I
often find myself waking up in the early hours needing to write something down,
an idea, a snatch of poetry or clever phrase. Trying to post something new to
my blog every day for a year is certainly obsessive behaviour, but I’ve treated
writing with less respect than it deserves over the years, going weeks or months
without writing a word. I’m getting to the point of writing from start to
finish two or three pieces a day and
working on drafts of more complicated writing. It might sometimes be rushed,
not to the highest standard, but that’s part of the learning process. Part of
the obsession. Obsession is how you become an expert at something. Otherwise you
would have no hope.
I’d rather
be all consuming than all consumed. Obsession is life. I would feel lifeless
without it.
Get it done.
See also (click links)
(as well as everything else on this blog, for which I do an obsessive amount of research)
