“Stuff” is one of the greatest terms ever devised. It can (and does) mean anything. It is the ultimate catch-all. There is not a better descriptive term out there. It tells you so little but oh so very much about our entire existence. It is one of the only reasons I write at all. I want to find out more about stuff. I have, as the title says, OCC.

Obsessive Compulsive Curiosity is simply my psychological desire to understand stuff. I am a scavenger for understanding, the knowledge of why I find myself attracted and repelled from whatever topic falls into my mental cross-hairs. I may have an itchy trigger finger some of the time, but once it is dead I can only burn the carcass and move on to the next savannah, next veldt, next wide open plain where more big game awaits to attract my ever-smoldering brain pistol. The thrill of the hunt, not genocide, is my passion.

Is that really it, though? Is my entire reason for existing just to live the life of the unsatisfied hunter, never happy with what I drag back home at the end of the day? I really hope there is more to it than that. The problem lies in the satisfaction itself. If I am out searching for anything, I do want to experience that big ta-da eureka moment eventually. I want to have that moment when I can sit back and realize that all the work I had done had paid off. I just never really seem to hit that moment. I’ve come close, probably hundreds of times in my life, but I never seem to really latch on to it and drag myself inexorably toward it like a lost space ship into a growing black hole. I don’t want to know what is on the other side of that hole – the other side of satisfaction. To finish the hunt is nowhere near as pleasuring as keeping it going for as long as possible, allowing the prey to escape even if it was never truly your intention. It always seems to escape me, anyway. I would probably do better with giant boxes of traps from the Acme Corporation at this point.

But is that really what I want? Do I want the Roadrunner cooked through on an Acme dinner plate? At this point in my life I do not see myself really looking to catch the Roadrunner as much as I enjoy figuring out all the millions and billions of different ways I might be able to catch it. To be fair, I have found myself staring down at a trap and finding little animals of knowledge stuck inside, just for me. It is a good feeling, but the second I swallow that down and hear that “Meep-Meep” of escaping and unattainable information speeding away I feel a sense of invigoration for what brought me all the way to where I am in the first place. I never cared about what I was finding on the savannah, veldt, or otherwise. I cared that I was there, that I was hunting, and that even with my brain firing at full-auto I was never going to catch everything, and thus there is always a hunt to continue.

See you next week.