The one about obsession

“Oh hell yeah, Sisyphus is gonna dunk on obsession, obsessive people, and everything that is not perfectly balanced, neutral, boring, non-emotional exchange! Let’s do this!”

Well, don’t count your injuries before you try to pet the cat, I say. Let’s go slowly.

So.

Obsession.

It’s in fashion right now, but apparently only when the obsessive one is the girl. And we know why, right?

Because when the obsessive one is the guy, it tends to involve fewer boiled-alive bunnies and more murder.

Or murder-suicide.

But I think everything, everyone, everywhere can turn into an obsession. I think we are all obsessive to a point, and targets of obsession to a certain degree. And obsessive doesn’t really mean evil, does it?

It has been a long while since I learned to separate an evil action from the person committing it. Not everything evil is absolute evil.

So obsession lives in a grey zone.

Our world allows it.

Encourages it.

Benefits from it.

And then, when it finally shows its teeth, pretends to be horrified by the results.

Why?

Because we benefit from it.

DNS was invented because a man looked at a system that stopped working over Christmas and decided that was unacceptable. The internet could not depend on someone being at a desk, in an office, during civilized hours, like a normal person.

Edison did not simply wake up one morning having stolen the lightbulb like Prometheus with a patent lawyer. He and his people chewed through thousands of materials, failures, variations, almost-lightbulbs, not-quite-lightbulbs, embarrassing lightbulbs, until one of them finally became useful enough to sell to civilization.

Barry Marshall drank Helicobacter pylori because the medical establishment did not want to believe ulcers could be caused by bacteria. So he did what any balanced, neutral, emotionally regulated person would do:

he drank the fucking bacteria.

And then there was Stubbins Ffirth, a medical student who became so committed to proving yellow fever was not contagious that he smeared infected vomit into cuts, dropped it in his eyes, inhaled it, drank it, and generally behaved like a man trying to speedrun every biohazard warning label ever written.

He was wrong, by the way.

Or right in the wrong direction, which is the funniest and most human kind of wrong.

But that is the point.

We adore obsession when it builds the machine, cures the ulcer, invents the system, writes the symphony, wins the war, finishes the book, launches the rocket, or turns a half-insane hunch into a Nobel Prize.

We call it dedication.

We call it genius.

We call it passion.

Then the moment it looks at a person instead of a problem, we clutch our pearls and ask where all this intensity came from.

John Lennon and Selena Quintanilla have something in common: their killers were obsessed with them.

Hell, the dude who shot Lennon wanted to dedicate The Catcher in the Rye to a man who was a known wife-beater. Look it up. You will never laugh at Yoko yelling in the Chuck Berry video ever again. And we will talk about Chuck and toilets eventually because, really?

Lennon was an abusive man, a father, apparently a Casanova, and this guy I will not name decided that Lennon was not living according to his ideals. He considered him a phony, decided that this was a capital crime, and appointed himself executioner.

Same with the woman who shot Selena. She looked for any and all ways of getting close to her, became part of her universe, and, in the end, stole from her. Then, when the situation was collapsing and Selena was going to break away from her — and yes, our obsessive murderer had tried to isolate her from the rest of the employees and all — she murdered her.

And she was another woman.

So maybe we can agree that obsession is perfectly fine when you isolate, analyze, understand from every side, solve, and earn a Nobel Prize for solving a practical problem.

But applying those same processes to a person is wrong, dangerous, and destructive, regardless of gender.

Hell, a couple of times a year, I get hate mail from a girl I used to date.

Maybe I’ll mail her my full medical history.

She’ll be so happy.

That’s the thing about obsession: everyone can feel it.

Yes, yes, even me.

I am obsessed with knowing the truth about the universe and proving that every single human is secretly evil.

And everyone can be a target, especially if you are a handsome, kinda melancholic, kinda contemplative guy with a sort of permanently broken-heart attitude, a quick wit, and, allow me to say it, a killer smile.

And very cute freckles.

And yes, yes, I am very handsome. What were we on about?

Oh, yes. My hands are gigantic and soft, and they say I have hunter’s eyes, and that my gaze is at the same time enticing and threatening, and yeah, we got off track there.

So.

Obsession, right?

Does obsession always kill? You ask me.

And obviously, I don’t fucking know.

It probably doesn’t.

It does kill the fucking mood, that’s for sure.

Hell, cigarettes don’t always kill. People survive strokes. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived two nukes. So hold your horses, because that is a very stupid question.

Unless, of course, we are talking about one of my strokes of genius.

Beware those.

Doing a Doolittle Raid into Venezuelan airspace with agricultural drones to drop supplies the government was rejecting was a bad, bad idea.

What? You can’t cause an international incident in the name of goodness?

But yes, even my non-credible friends considered this idea absurd, kinda suicidal, likely to start a war, and now I’m the “most likely to end up in Guantánamo Bay.”

And if I can do a raid into a hostile country to drop aid, I can definitely, aggressively insert myself into that person’s life, right?

I wouldn’t be controlling, threatening, scary.

Oh no.

I would be… caring.

I trust her, no problem. But the world is dangerous. I don’t trust them. I do not trust him. And that is why I watch.

Not violence.

Not control.

Care.

See how it goes?

Through love, violence.

Through violence, love.

And then it becomes dangerous, because you can easily convert care into control and, seriously, fuck that.

Obsession is not a Boolean factor. Obsession is an overreaction of things you use daily, things that have served you well your whole life.

No person can say, “I’m not obsessive.”

No person is safe from an obsessive infatuation, and when those happen, the obsessive spiral is happening to both sides: one side is receiving attention they do not want, and one side is giving attention they cannot easily stop giving.

The obsessive person just has to drink that vial of bacteria.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to become that person. Very few people watch the obsessive character on screen and think, “That’s the dream.”

It is, in summary, a bad situation for both.

Obviously worse for the target.

Possibly worst of all for the person who becomes that thing and has to live or die inside it.

But let me advocate for something new here.

Not forgiveness.

Not indulgence.

Not “romantic intensity.”

Not turning the target into a therapist, a judge, a confessor, a hostage, or a rehabilitation center with legs.

I mean something simpler.

An ethics of obsession.

A way to talk about it before it becomes a police report, a restraining order, a true-crime podcast, or a corpse with a Netflix documentary.

Or even just a life that gets externally managed while it lasts, then spent checking the locks twice after it ends.

And I know it works, because I have used it.

The Sawlittle Raid — yes, Doolittle with reciprocating saws; we were going to drop them so people could cut concrete — was aborted the moment I said it out loud and the words “international incident,” “counter-battery radar,” and “blown the fuck to smithereens, really, don’t do this” came back at me.

Nobody arrested me.

Nobody wrote a documentary.

There is just a nickname and a group chat that will never let me forget it.

That is the whole ethics: say the obsession out loud to people licensed to laugh at you before it says itself.

Because obsession is not evil by itself.

Refusing to govern it is where the evil starts.

There is an idea that helps protect me from obsession while keeping me passionate.

Talk about a thin line to walk above despair.

It goes something like this:

Those things, people, and ideas you love the most — the ones you treasure, the ones you keep close to your heart, the ones you could so easily mistake for oxygen — surrender them to the universe as a supreme act of love.

Not because you do not love them.

Because you do.

Because you understand that possession is impossible.

We are temporary.

Everything is temporary.

And it is better to treasure one happy instant freely given than to poison a thousand bitter ones trying to own what was never yours.

That is it, I think.

In the end, nothing you do can force an outcome. We are just math formulas crashing at high speed, and in that way, every outcome is already a thing of destiny, but only because we do not have enough time or enough pens to check the math.

So, quoting from a poem I was reading to a friend of mine a couple of days ago:

If you disappear from my life, everything will be fine.

I may be sad for a while.

But if you stay, I will be fine too.

And I will also be with you.

So yes, I feel deeply loved when I am asked, explicitly, to stay.

And sadly, that is the one thing the obsessive person may never hear.

Because obsession wants possession.

Love asks for presence.

And if staying is requested freely, without fear, without debt, without chains, then staying becomes the opposite of obsession.

It becomes surrender.

Not surrender as defeat.

Surrender as trust.

And what demands more trust than love?

This thing was 1,700 words long?

Hot damn.

Get a life.

Peace.