Obsessions

Robert Hruzek tagged me almost two months ago (approaching eternity in blog-time) on the Obsessions meme.  Robert elected to transmute that to a discussion of his passions, on the basis that ”obsession” connotes an unhealthy preoccupation.

Personally, I find more pleasure in examining my sick and twisted traits than my ostensibly normal ones.  However, perhaps one of my sicknesses is that I can’t perceive my own obsessions as such until I recover from them.  So here I’ll list a few of the things that have dominated my attention over the years:

Age 5: the solar system.  Pluto is a planet, dammit.

Age 5-6: dinosaurs.  I learned as much as I could about the various then-known species and when they lived relative to each other.  I learned to spell “Brontosaurus” before I learned “the” and “could”.  Unfortunately, “Brontosaurus” as a dinosaur name has since gone the way of Pluto as a planet.

Age 6-7: flags of the world.  Starting from a full-color spread in the 1960 Grolier Encyclopedia, I copied in 8-1/2 x 11 crayon every flag of every nation in the world, and then added the states of the Union and as many other flags as I could find.

Age 8: airplanes.  Collecting plastic airplane models and memorizing their manufacturer, model, and dates of service.  I collected a total of 108 different models, which I still have.

Age 10-13: automotive design.  I read a book on the topic, which fascinated me.  By 1972 I could name the make, model and year of every automobile I encountered on the road.  I awaited the unveiling of the 1973 models in rapt suspense, but I was largely disappointed.  I spent hour and hour designing my own models for the future (on paper), and “invented” a number of alternatives to internal combustion engines (none of which turned out to be workable).

Age 13-15: my own religion.  A bizarre interpretation of Biblical and other sacred texts combined with an alternative model of space-time, with me as Messiah — complete with visions.

Age 16-20: Christianity and the Bible.  Beginning with a “born again” moment in which my previous errors were revealed, I joined the Charismatic movement, went to ORU to study Biblical Literature, obsessively read as many as 30 chapters a day of the Bible in various translations, learned Hebrew and Greek, and finally concluded that my whole perpective was wrong.

Age 17-?: music.  At 17, I became so fascinated by Bach that I had to listen  to his music all day, every day.  I taught myself how to play the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, without ever having had lessons (later I took organ lessons, which completely ruined my ability to play Bach).  I composed music in (poor) imitation of Bach.  I hoped and fervently attempted to collect all 1127 works in the Bachwerkeverzeichnis on tape.  At one time I even thought that all music post-Bach was just wrong.  Now that’s an obsession.

When I was 20, I began to really love Beethoven.  I’m probably one of the few people living today who can truly appreciate the revulsion that many 18th century listeners must have experienced at first hearing the dissonance in Beethoven’s works, because I had so circumscribed my music appreciation to those who predated him.

My senior paper in Biblical Literature was largely an indictment of the underlying view of the Bible that supports fundamentalism.  It was titled “The Origin and Character of the Nature of God in the Religion of Early Israel”.  While working on this Promethean theme, I listend to Beethoven’s symphonies one after another alll day long for nearly a month.  It just fit.

Later musical obsessions included the Beatles, Mahler, Bruckner, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.  Nowadays I listen mostly to jazz.  I love it, but I’m not obsessed.  Obsessed is when you need to collect them all and listen to them all the time.

Age 17-?: classic literature.  I read the King James translation of the Bible through in one year when I was 15-16, and then I was introduced to Milton in Mrs. DelCampo’s English class.  For me, Milton became for literature what Bach was for music.  I read all of his works.  Saddened by finishing them, I proceeded to Dante, then Homer.  I’m still journeying through the classics, with long periods of inactivity followed by bursts of deep immersion.  Some of my favorites include Tolstoy, Gibbon, Shakespeare, and Joyce.

Age 20-21: poetry.  I had written several sonnets in my Milton/Bach/Christian phase, but with the death of my beliefs my real muse awakened.  I would sit up all night writing poems in a completely non-traditional style lamenting and celebrating the destruction of my old world view and looking forward to an unknown future.  When I finally left that phase of my life behind, I lost the drive to compose so feverishly.  I still write poems from time to time — I think they are actually much better constructed now and more nuanced — but they lack the passion of those early poems.

Ages 18-?: programming.  This one has been very much up and down.  My initial fascination was augmented by learning Algol and Assembler, and then quenched in COBOL and DIBOL.  Then came C, which made me feel alive again.  Then various releases of DBL (now Synergy/DE) got me truly excited about business programming.  Sometimes I would work 80-90 hours a week.  Then I’d get burnt out and think of giving it up.  Recently, Ruby and Lisp have preoccupied my thinking about language design, but I have yet to use either of them commercially.  I’d love to, though.  Most recently, Synergy/DE version 9 has me excited about that platform again.

Age fortysomething-?: blogging.  Or more properly, writing — but I love the conversational style that suits blogging so well.  I like writing about my life and experiences instead of abstract or fictional topics.  I love getting almost immediate feedback from my readers.  On the other hand, I’m not so taken with it that I can’t sometimes see it as a huge waste of time — so I don’t know if it qualifies as an obsession.  What do you think?

I’m tired of tagging people with memes.  If you want to jump on this one, please send me a pingback or leave a URL in the comments and I’ll link back to you.

There’s an obsession:  link-love!