I’m the type of person to really embrace something when I like it. When I discovered that you can make a pretty decent meal out of an over-easy egg, toasted rye and some hot sauce, this was my grocery list:
- Rye Loaf x3
- Tobasco sauce 32 oz x1
- Egg, 18 count x2
That was for the week. I thought this was such a fantastic personal discovery that I fully intended to eat egg toast for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and as a midnight snack. Never mind the fact most days I find it an uphill struggle to turn the stovetop burner on. Or the fact it’s not terribly healthy to eat three loaves of any type of bread in one week.
When it comes to obsessing over things that can’t lead to early-onset diabetes and high cholesterol, it’s harder to tell where the line between ‘really into thing’ and ‘wow, come up for air man’ is. My favorite video game franchise by far is Devil May Cry. It doesn’t have the best story by far, and while it has excellent combat, it may not be able to lay claim to ‘best combat.’ The characters are cliché (one is the embodiment of ‘nothing personal, kid’) but there’s something about that franchise that for me, is far greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve played the games for several thousand hours in total, from the first time in my teenage years I saw this thing of beauty:
I’ve written crackfics too embarrassing to share here, shipfics (Lady and Trish specifically) that need more editing before I share them publicly, and more risque writings not to be spoken of. I’ve crafted two-thousand word summaries of the story for the series on a whim, simply because a friend said they didn’t know anything about the story beyond shitposting. My 2019 Spotify In Review was just the entirety of the Devil May Cry soundtrack—with the single exception being The Police’s ‘Omegaman.’ As an aside, can Andy Summers fucking shred or what? He made that guitar sing.
But now my current hyper-fixation is FLCL, an anime I think I wrote about in my years-old grandfathered post ‘Anime Songs.’ It’s six episodes long, shorter than any of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies and a concentrated rush of animated joy with a heartwarming coming of age story wrapped up in so much bizarre plot that it makes most viewer’s heads spin. In the past three weeks, I’ve rediscovered the anime after watching it in full for the first time since I was twelve years old. I’ve watched it again, with voice actor commentary. Once more, with subtitled director’s commentary. I plan on watching it a fourth time with dialogue turned off so I can appreciate the art and animation, with the excellent soundtrack being all the noise needed. This is in addition to my simultaneous fifth time, one episode a week on the cable TV block ‘Toonami.’ (As an aside, I did try FLCL Progressive. Episode 5 was a joy of animation, but the show wasn’t that great. Further commentary on it I will abstain on for now, and instead refer you to an excellent review located here.)
The good news is this revitalization of my adoration for FLCL hasn’t led me to a solipsistic rejection of reality in favor of living vicariously through Naota’s coming of age, again and again until I’m under the impression that I’m a part of that world. In fact, fueled by the soulful tunes of The Pillows, I’ve been quite productive lately. I’ve finally revamped my professional website, doubled the amount of jobs I apply for so I can break out of the hellish cycle of writing smut for money, stopped skipping gym days and even started smiling more, of my own accord. It’s an obsession rewarding me instead of consuming me.
Now, with most sudden obsessions, there’s a time limit. Once you exhaust every ounce of joy held within the thing, you move on. Have you ever listened to a song that’s phenomenal on every level? Then looped it hundreds of times, listening to no sounds without those dulcet tunes playing over what you hear. Until one day, when the track time rolls back to 0:00 you feel nothing. The spark has faded. You poured so much gasoline on it to keep the flame going you actually snuffed it out.
I hope I don’t do that with FLCL. I want to feel the same uplifting, summer-of-love joy I felt watching it recently, or a new rush of emotion that comes with the change in perspective I achieve in the future, much like how differently I see the world now versus when I was Naota’s age. I want to consider how differently I think of Mamimi now versus when I was a child, versus when I’m old enough to be her father.
I also hope this trend of me becoming obsessed with increasingly smaller/shorter creations doesn’t continue. Or rather, that it isn’t a trend at all. I fear that when I turn thirty-five, I will discover a haiku written by an anonymous person on a tertiary imageboard that leads me to reinvent my entire life, fueled by the epiphany discovered in those seventeen syllables. Or that my mid-life crisis is an utter worship of a punctuation mark for Kanji, to the point of having it tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs so that I may gaze upon the glory of the wave dash.
Though, I suppose as long as I’m able to support myself and enjoy a fulfilling life of creative expression then perhaps the wave dash is just what I’ll need. I do seem to only add to my obsessions, which necessitates me downgrading them into hobbies or interests I really enjoy. The day I stop grinning like a kid watching Tony Hawk skate while I style on enemies with Nero’s badass motorblade is the day my soul dies.
