Psychic Protection

"I was one of those skinny young men in scary glasses and thrift-store clothes whom you see on Boston or Brooklyn subways, young men who look like they possess massive amounts of data about small-label rock bands or avant-garde literature or video technology, the very size of these data-sets affording a kind of psychic protection."

                - Jonathan Franzen, "Mr. Difficult"

When I read Franzen's essay on his major influence and literary frenemy, William Gaddis, it was that quote, more than Franzen's remarkably intelligent analysis of how we approach difficult systems-novels, that resonated with me the most, and it's not the physical stereotype -- true as it might have been -- but the fact that it's there's something protective in those data sets.

Consider the archivist, the curator, the enthusiast who has translated their passion into expensive, exhaustive collections and bases of knowledge about things that few people care about.

Now consider how unlikeable that person is, by and large. We think of the snobbish douchebag record store clerk, the Simpsons Comic Book Guy type who brutally gatekeeps his fandoms, the sweaty-palmed erotica hoarder who actually went to the effort to start a Pornhub account, the sports-stats guy who knows just how to turn a great play into a mere data point (the subcategory of baseball dads being the worst of the bunch), the health and exercise fanatic who has uses the word "gains" unironically, the conspiracy theorist who can manage to string together every major current event of the past 100 years, the frugality Nazi, the video store weirdo (nearly extinct species, that), the natural healing guru, and so on.

I can't say I'm a fan of most of these types, either, and it's largely because I've been most of these at some point in my life, at least to some degree.

All my life people have asked me how I amass so much useless knowledge. I don't know, nor have I ever known. It was always said with a mix of wonder and contempt. Because outside of bar quiz nights where it occasionally yields a free pint, useless knowledge is indeed useless, especially in an era when the whole fucking encyclopedia is in your pocket.

As a small child, I made lists in my spare time, lists to accompany the drawings of trucks and rockets, maps of imaginary nations. I kept boyish collections, Hot Wheels cars, brightly colored bottle caps, street maps, old atlases I found at garage sales, foreign coins -- an interest sparked, I believe by an Indonesian 100 rupiah coin with a Sumatran longhouse on the obverse, which I accidentally got in change at some point in time in the early '90s.

And as an adult, I might not collect much, but instead I keep obsessive lists of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, recipes to cook, fitness goals to reach. So even when my obsessive habits are productive and yield positive results -- when I read those books, watch those movies, travel to those places, cook those recipes, reach those fitness goals -- I wonder how much I am truly enjoying myself, and how much I am simply trying to bring some veneer of order to a life that so often seems directionless and dysfunctional, against the backdrop of an uncaring and disordered universe.

Hence Franzen's use of the phrase "psychic protection." This is my attempt to cope with that chaos. OK, I hate it when laymen use psychiatric terminology without regard to the actual implications -- consider how many times per day you hear words like "OCD," "bipolar," "autistic," and "anxiety" radically misused. But I can't help but think that my amassing of knowledge and lists is only one or two steps from washing my hands 30 times a day.

And there is an anxiety that haunts me at those weird moments when I'm leafing through an old notebook, staring at my computer screen at my office, watching the sun glint off the skyline on the train, lying in bed at night. That all there is left is a collection of lists, categories, hierarchies, bullet points of mundane accomplishments, banks of knowledge about geography, literature, and the natural sciences, frameworks without content, content without frameworks, like a whole series of Excel tables you find in a file somewhere on your work computer, with no idea quite how to interpret it.