ELMO KEEP

UPDATE! This is now in the past! Just like LOST! Except that not everyone is dead.

Some friends of mine run a semi-regular reading event, Even Books. To tie in with the Sydney Writers’ Festival they are putting on the Inaugural Sydney Readers’ Festival this weekend, for which they’ve asked a bunch of people to contribute to a one-off zine on the nature of obsession, that you can now buy here. 

I’ve contributed this. If you’re in Sydney, you should go along to pick up the zine, there’s a lot of great work in it. 

Sometimes, when trapped in the myopic gaze of narcissistic self-reflection, I wonder if I might have been a genius.  

If things had been different.  

Not in the If only I had been born to genius parents! way (which, incidentally, statistically retards your chances of being born a genius, actually, so let’s forget that), but rather in the Why did I obsessively hoard useless information? way. If, say, I’d spent my teenage years obsessively cramming my brain with facts about nuclear fusion, or solving the Poincaré conjecture (this would have been despite my hideous mathematical ineptitude), I think I could have achieved a certain level of genius.  

Yep. 

I say this because as a teenager, I was beset by a supernatural strain of obsessiveness (which I later learned was a way I’d developed to stymie a particularly crippling anxiety disorder, but that is not the point of this story, actually, so who really cares about that?) If only I had channeled that focus which burned like a thousand points of light into something useful, even vaguely, who knows what I would have done with my life? I was that powerful.  

What I did instead was collect music magazines.  

Between the years 1994 and 1999, I obsessively read only music magazines, and only music magazines with articles about U2 in them. U2, the band. There was nothing written about them in that time I didn’t read. Nothing.   

Athletes describe the moment before they run a race as entering the stadium, and the track being all that exists, the only thing they can see. The thousands of screaming people in their seats fade into silent nothingness and the track is all there is, such is their focus at this critical moment in time. Well, I was like that when I stood before the racks of magazines in a newsagent after school: I could scan their square meterage before me, taking in dozens of covers at once while all the varying typographies of “U2” leapt out at me like Russell Crowe’s wall of crazy newspaper connections in ‘A Beautiful Mind’. That letter and numeral together was all that there was to my eye. 

Then I would take them home, to my parent’s house where I lived in the attic, — the walls and ceiling of which were covered down to the square millimetre with pictures of Bono — and I would commit the U2 story therein to memory, devouring its facts greedily, escaping to the world I imagined beyond the confines of my parent’s house, outside the confines of my own anxious mind; somewhere amazing where incredible things where happening (and remember, please, that this was the 90s, those halcyon days when U2 were good — very, very good, perhaps at that time the world’s greatest band — a time which did very definitely exist. But this is not the story, though heartbreaking and provably true, about how U2 are now unbelievably shit, so let’s not talk about that.)  

Later in my life, this would become embarrassing. Perhaps not in ways you’re already imaging, but rather because when I later became interested in writing about music myself, I met some of the people who’d written those articles about U2 which were so embedded in my brain like a sense memory — like breathing, or walking, say. And it was difficult to feign surprise, to pretend that a story told straight to me from someone’s mouth was not in fact, already wedded to my cerebral cortex, that in fact, I did not know that about Bono! What an incredible story! Another beer then! 

“You know,” one of the writers said to me one time, “and this might break your heart. But you know what I think the great unwritten truth about U2 is?”  

“No, what?” I asked, expectant. 

“That of all the great bands, of all the great songwriters, they are just very, very diligent. There is really no genius about them.” 

And it’s true, there’s not. And neither is there about me. But I think we’ll live, somehow; the memories of those afternoons, that old, good music, and me.