Writers are Crazy

I can't remember when or where I heard a statement containing a similar statement, but the following seems to be true:

"Poets have a lot of sex. Writers never get laid, and that heartbreak is evident in their writing."

Which is why I don't consider romance novelists real writers. Seriously. If they know the intricate details of sex to such detail (that's definitely redundant), than they are having way too much sex to be considered writers.

Meanwhile, I've begun reading the fiction submissions for my writing workshop and I've found a really interesting theme: obsession.

Seriously. Usually I assume I'm crazy for the level of interest/love I have in other human beings. It's an interesting contrast to my general, unworried and uncaring outer demeanor. No. But I have been obsessed. Most people I've obsessed over wouldn't know it. Some might have a general idea. Others might assume I did when really I didn't (I dated you. I didn't much care for you, though). Regardless, I was validated as I anxiously read over the stories written by writers in my group. Of the seven or eight authors I've read, three of them have written stories centered around the unhealthy obsession of their protagonist with a member of the opposite sex they knew in lower education that continued for at least ten, if not more, years.

HAH! The longest I was ever obsessed with someone was four years. In that time, I dated other people. I really wanted him to like me. I was in my mid-teens which is pretty ripe for beginning level obsession. I got through a summer by bribing myself to go to swim practice with the thought of seeing him there. My heart sank, was crushed, every practice he did not attend (I didn't really like swimming at that point, clearly). I, like the characters in these three stories, wanted to know everything I could about him, to the point of minor snooping around his house (though I never stole his personal journals, though I think I tried to access some of the stories he was also writing at the time). I didn't know how to deal with this attraction, because it wasn't simply sexual. Though, I suppose it mostly should have been. I was amused by the way he smiled and how he was always so much not like any other type of person I had ever met before. He was also younger than me, which jumpstarted my, by know well-known, trait of predating on younger men.

Irregardless, unlike the characters in these stories, I got over him quickly. He must've been asexual... or gay. Either way, he wasn't interested in other girls, and I, being incredibly jealous, was left with nothing to be upset about. (Fun fact: I get really fucking jealous to this day. I hope that goes away soon, because it's very dangerous... especially when the people you usually get jealous about are physically far smaller than you).

So I got over him. Also, I fell out with his parents. I'm going to be honest, I was crazy in high school, so I'm not really friends with anyone from that time in my life. But I miss him. I wonder if he still obsesses over video games. I wrote a story, not about him, but using his house as a backdrop. It seemed appropriate. I didn't have a lot of friends, especially friends of the opposite sex. It was an exciting, terrifying, and ultimately, frustrating time in my life.

BUT I'M NOT CRAZY IN COMPARISON! It took me four years to get over him. Who knows? Maybe if he gave me more to work with, I would still be obsessed with him to this day. Or maybe he was a helpful example of how to get over the many people I've had the opportunity to be obsessed with in the years after him.

It's easy to get obsessed. Most people have pleasant things about them that you can convince yourself you love. Truly. Madly. Deeply. But it's also easy to get over obsessions. There's a lot of people in the world. Only a writer, who is moved more by emotions than logic, who is destined to stay among the humanities for the rest of their life, could assume that obsession works this way, in decades rather than months, years. I suppose that is comforting for me. Despite being regularly described as attractive and pleasant, I am still offensively single. Obsessions get me through the years. I get obsessed with people like I get obsessed with new gadgets, though. I can only imagine us doing so many unique and exciting things that touch on your hobbies, hopes, and fears before I get bored, and I run out of new ring-tones and backgrounds to apply to you.

I am very curious to see if these authors actually drew on their own experiences to write these crazy stories. If so, it only proves the above quotation: Writers of extended prose are sex-deprived, and thus, better writers than poets.

Anyway, I will leave this post with a link to one of the Ultimate teams favorite songs: Obsessed With You by The Orion Experience. As I recently said to someone, "I know your middle name, but I do not have a lock of your hair." So I guess I will always be capable of obsession, but never of the crazy, life-changing obsession that at least 1/3 of short fiction writers apparently experience in enough detail to write at least ten pages of it in an (I hope) entirely fictional way. Maybe I'll never be a great writer. But at least I won't get restraining orders thrown against me or waste my life moving to some random city to be with someone whom I am in a one-way relationship with.