Obsession has always interested me. And I am not alone. Artists from day one have either written about obsession or been obsessed. Think Dante and his Beatrice, for starters.
I have had my own obsessions. Rather than people, I've tended to fixate on games that combine skill and physical exertion. Currently, for me, that's golf.
But as a young boy in the rancid reaches of the Lower Midwest, I lived, ate and slept baseball for three or four years.
All my friends played baseball, in those glorious days before computers, cell phones and obesity. But they played only in the spring and summer. Come fall, the rest of my friends put down their bats and picked up a football or basketball.
Now, I too played those sports, but I kept baseball front and center even in the dank, cold Ohio winters. I haunted the only indoor batting cages in our area. And I read about baseball. Not just sports magazines glorifying guys we now know had as many or more problems than our parents did. I read strategy and instructional tomes I hauled home from the library by the bushel.
My obsession ended when I reached the ripe old age of 14 and moved up from Little League to Babe Ruth. I started running into pitchers who could actually throw a curveball. I laugh with scorn at those pathetic nerd scientists who still pop up every spring claiming that it is impossible to curve a baseball. A kid named Paul Ange, to name just one, could break a ball off about 5 feet.
I hated batting against Paul. The ball would be coming right at my head. I would try to stay there in the batter's box, but sooner or later, usually sooner, I ate the dirt, as we used to say. And for the first 10 times or so, I was always stunned when the umpire behind the plate would call out in stentorian tones: "Strike one! Strike two! Strike three!" The balls that had been coming right at me kept dropping and then curving over the plate. Ange, a tall kid, used to laugh at me as I trudged back to the bench. I quit baseball at 15 and switched to basketball.
* * *
I started thinking hard on obsession the other day after the fatal shooting at the King County Courthouse of a man named Perry Manley.
Manley was protesting in some way known only to himself about the unfairness of child support. He was dressed, according to news reports, in military fatigues and was brandishing a dud grenade. After 25 minutes of trying to talk Manley out of whatever plans he had, the cops shot him to death.
I wasn't there, so I have no idea if Manley needed killing. But I'm always skeptical of police shootings when the victim (or miscreant) isn't in the act of shooting back. What the hell is the point of all that police training if their solution (too often around here, lately) is to simply waste a fella?
Hell, I could do that.
I qualified marksman and expert on a couple of firearms in the Armed Forces, and I am a pretty good shot. However, I am not always the calmest cat in the litter, though, which is one reason I never became a cop (although I have family who did).
But this isn't about police shootings, either.
It's about obsession.
I met the recently deceased Mr. Manley about six years ago, right after I became the first editor of the Bremerton Patriot, a startup weekly that is still going strong.
Manley was parading around the sidewalks of Bremerton wearing a signboard and not much else, condemning, if I remember rightly, the federal government and the country's child-support laws.
I sent out a reporter, a bright young kid in her first professional job. She came back with a pretty good story and a pretty good photograph of the nearly nude protestor, and within a day or two we published both. That's when I met Mr. Manley. He showed up at our downtown office to thank us and seek more press coverage.
If I remember correctly, we immediately turned down his request - although it's possible I commissioned a second story to try and shut Manley up. But I remember our conversations much more clearly because of the intensity with which he talked about his ex-wife and the inequity of the court system. His physical demeanor was laid back, but his rap and his eyes were disquieting. He kept coming around, and I began to think of Mr. Manley more as possibly dangerous than as a possible news story.
I know people have been quoted since his death, saying he was a calm fellow. But I don't remember him as such. There was something very odd about his soft-spoken tirades and his overweening desire for press coverage.
After all, even back then his divorce was 10 years old. He couldn't get over the end of his marriage, or accept it, and it seemed obvious to me, as an editor and a part-time amateur psychologist, that most of his anger was directed at the woman he felt had spurned him, despite his endless talk about the courts.
When he finally realized he wasn't getting any more coverage from us, Mr. Manley grudgingly drifted away.
I left Bremerton not long after. As it turns out, Manley did, too.
And now, five or six years later, and 16 years after his divorce, Perry Manley has died because of his obsession, whether that was child support, courts, the federal government or the woman he must have really loved at one point.
Or maybe his obsession was press coverage. He was always seeking that, too. But whatever it was, there's little doubt in my mind that Perry Manley was obsessed.
Obsession is a strange and fascinating thing. And sometimes, evidently, it can even be fatal.
Dennis Wilken's column appears periodically in the Capitol Hill Times. He can be reached at editor@capitol hilltimes.com.[[In-content Ad]]
