obsession

I just spent a decent portion of my life trying to unravel a musical mystery over at the Fire Ant Gazette.

You should have seen me here in my living room hunched over the notebook, butt on the couch. I spent at least 90 minutes (at this sitting, I'm not even counting last night) scanning lists of virutally unknown one-hit wonders from the years 1983 and 84; racing to figure it out before someone else did. It gets worse... as I got closer to the answer, I repositioned myself on the floor in the 24 inch space between the sofa and the coffeetable, excited, my face a foot from the notebook screen.

Now, in the glow of victory, I'm thinking about all those guys I knew back at the University of Rochester. We called them "throats," as in cut-throat. These guys (women too, but they were vastly underrepresented in the throat population) would be the last to leave the stacks in the Rush Rhees Library (or Nipple of Knowledge, owing to the bright red light fixed atop the mammarian shaped spire of the library) at night. Any night. Whether there was an exam the next day or not; even on Fridays and Saturdays.

I worked at the library during my junior and senior years at the U of R, and I would see the same guys emerging from the stacks every night I closed.

Maybe they were just obsessed, like I was, with figuring out a mystery. Chasing the evanescent clue that would unlock for them the secret and vast pools of knowledge.

Or maybe they were just trying to ace out the other guy, like I was when I won that contest.