Obsession and fixation.

[April 4, 2025: No matter how many times I try to write about this, the post becomes disorganized. Clearly my thinking is still disorganized on this topic.]

I've drafted and discarded a few posts that I've written over the last few months on the subject of my teenage obsession with Christian songwriter Larry Norman, and what that obsession might show about me as a person today. I feel like my near-fixation on him in my teenage years should reveal something important about my character, something I should watch out for in relation to addiction.

Over the last few months, each time I tried to write the post I'd get caught-up in minutiae that only a fan could care about. The post would become an unwieldy series of connections: a list of different scenes in my life where something of my obsession/fanboy thing obstructed my happiness. Understandably, each post would turn into a self-serving, uninteresting mess. 

I'm going to challenge myself to picture my obsession in one paragraph, and make the necessary connections and conclusions after that. 

Perhaps when I was 12 years old or so, around 1993, my sister came home with a CD copy of Larry Norman's In Another Land. The CD sounded great and was far more interesting and well-produced than most of the Christian music available to me at that time. I liked the songs, and I also enjoyed poring over the liner notes in the CD case. Those liner notes contained essays, listed mysterious "lost albums," made connections to celebrities, proffered plenty of grievances towards the church and industry folks, and made plenty of unprovoked responses to supposed rumors about him. This album and liner notes combo led to years of Larry Norman fandom: I acquired dozens of CDs, signed up for the fan club, attended four concerts, and consumed as much Norman-related data I could find. Due to Norman's self-mythmaking and market-flooding business model, however, my fandom endured numerous disappointments before I finally settled on the truth that most reviewers of his music had said all along: that his albums from the 70s were generally very good, but everything afterwards was sub-par and not worthy of time or attention.

My question that makes this worth a blog post is, Why did I put up with so much disappointment in my following of Larry Norman's career and music? or, What is it about me that made me feed into this cycle of disappointment?

My behaviour followed an addiction spiral: I was addicted to justifying my first feelings towards that album. Despite dozens of disappointments, album after album, hearing In Another Land as an adolescent and reading those liner notes filled me with joy and curiosity that I could never really satisfy myself with. That CD built the beginning of a myth that I seemed to jive with and for some reason couldn't let go of, and I was addicted to feeling that feeling again. Some of those albums were so bad or disappointing that it brought me to tears, but I kept acquiring them, hoping for a hit like somebody who seeks out a drug for the first time.

I think age was an important part of the addiction. At my most impressionable age, Norman's story filled me with lots of questions that I wanted answers to: why did this musician I admired seem to have to defend himself all the time? why did the quality of his music plummet so drastically in the 80s? why did he have so many contradictions in his life? why didn't he do anything in a way that didn't seem to leave people so frustrated? I spent so much of my spare time in my youth searching for answers to these questions to the point that I might as well have been buying CDs more for the liner notes than the music itself. Ridiculous.

The addiction has consequences. Recently, my wife and I moved to a smaller home and I've had to downsize my hobbies. I've been culling many of the CDs that I'd collected over the years and I've realized that most of the Larry Norman albums that I ordered and bought so religiously as "Collectors Items" years ago are essentially worthless. This didn't surprise me, but it still hurts when I realize the money and time I put into that collection. I've managed to sell a few on ebay, but most of them simply aren't worth anything at all.

I have trouble just taking those CDs to a thrift store, however, because I feel like I'm passing hope and disappointment onto somebody else. There's so much hope bundled up in those CDs, so much hope that Norman would release something that was as good as the albums from the 70s, so much time reading the liner notes, listening to weak "Bonus Tracks" hoping for something that would hit like "I am the Six O'Clock News," "Be Careful What You Sign," or "Leaving the Past Behind." And that hope-in-CD-form is hard to throw away. I fixated for so much of my life on those CDs, hoping for answers to my questions, so they seem valuable to me. But... the value is a myth I told myself, nothing more. The value I put into those albums is little more than a myth bred from adolescent addiction.

So I think I just need to throw the addiction out, to count them as a loss in money and time, and to count them as a gain in stepping out of that addiction. I wish I was better at throwing things away. Perhaps this will be a good step forward.