The Lord of the Rings
As a young man, I lived very far from my Junior High School. As such, I endured a school bus ride of over half an hour each way every school day. The bus collected kids from my relatively sedate middle class neighborhood as well as traveling from some rougher parts of town before striking out on the highway that led to the school. While I was rarely picked on, being generally well-liked, the ride was often quite rowdy and noisy—altogether out of tune with my mild, slightly bookish personality.
On that bus, I immersed myself in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. I read The Hobbit, and the trilogy over and over again, vividly imagining myself in that far off land, engaged in noble and significant pursuits instead of sitting on a smelly school bus dodging spitballs and erasers in flight. I must have re-read those books twenty or thirty times.
At that time, and for much of the next five or six years, I considered myself quite a fan of those books. I was knowledgable, could recite scraps of prose, even attempted to figure out the incomprehensible meter in the lyrics Tolkien included.
And then, the internet happened. “The Information Super Highway”, as the media loved to call it, when first it hit the consciousness of the American public. It was the dawning of a new age. Small collegial usenet groups composed of close-nit college students and faculty were suddenly flooded with Compuserve and AOL users who now had access to this recently discovered country. It was then I discovered that, as Tolkien fans go, I was fairly small beer. I encountered people who had learned to speak Elvish, people who had read and understood the Silmarillion, people who had surgically altered their feet and ears to look like Hobbits. Suddenly, overnight, a niche I thought I occupied with a small group of like-minded people, was populated by throngs of maniac obsessives who were by any measure, doing it better.
Stars Wars
Star Wars Fans
In 1977, a little known film auteur released a low-budget sci-fi film that exploded like a nuclear holocaust on an unsuspecting public. I was five years old when my dad took me to see Star Wars Episode IV at little theater about a block from where I work today. I was a fan, of course. We were all fans. I had a Millennium Falcon, an X-Wing fighter, a Tie Fighter and all the important action figures.
I engaged in obsessive speculation about the curious “Episode IV” in the title. My friend insisted that George Lucas had already written nine episodes and he filmed the fourth first for mysterious reasons my friend could not explain.
I’m certain, Gentle Reader, that I don’t need to enumerate the lengths to which internet obsessives have carried Star Wars fandom. But I will mention that I have not declared myself of the Jedi Religion on a United State Census form, I don’t know how to speak Wookiee, furthermore I don’t even know the name of the language Wookiees speak, and I really don’t have a firm opinion on whether Han shot first or not. Clearly, a lot of people are doing Star War fan better than I.
A Horse is a Horse?
I’ll supply a non-geek example for completeness. My wife is a horsewoman. She enjoys riding horses and she owns a sweet old beast, a Mustang-Quarter Horse cross. You would think there’s no simpler pleasure. Images of throwing a saddle onto his back and riding through the desert at dusk surrounded by solitude and sage might spring to mind. But into the mix you must add horse people–other people who are fans of horses. There are cliques and opinions and unwritten rules by which one must abide or risk the shunning of the horse people. If you have a western saddle, god help you if you ride in the English style, or wear English boots. There are vertical conventions you are unwittingly buying into the moment you pick out a hat. Purchase a western hat, and you have immediately narrowed down your options for saddles, clothing, riding style, stirrups, bits, bridles,horse breeds, favorite musicians, and underclothing if you wish to retain the good will of the horse people.
Ergo…
Whether it’s a genuine love of the object of interest, or a symptom of a culture obsessed with extremism in all it’s forms, I am simply not obsessed enough with any of my interests to bend my daily life around them—to enslave myself to others demands regarding how I should expressive my interest. In short, I have decided to stop being a fan of anything anymore,of even the most underground artistic endeavor, for I know somewhere, out there, there is a forum on the internet where people are over-analyzing and over-obsessing it threadbare.