Obsession
- Apr 8, 2022
- 2 min read
by Gresham Cash
My obsessions run thus: I would like to be with Joan Didion, to be her lover, her wavering infatuation, sweating on a beach towel in Baja while we kiss each other’s necks — electrolytes hard to come by in Mexico.
I would like to snare a fragment of her genius, her starkness. When we lie down at night, I would like to take notes on how she sleeps, watch her eyes flutter as her genius congeals involuntarily. She probably wouldn’t sleep, too busy observing my yellowed teeth and thinning crown.
After being together for some time, I imagine she would take me, my dreams, my baggage, metaphorical and otherwise, and tell me to clean it up. Tighten your sentences. Tell less.
And there I would see my obsessions as a tray of watercolor paints in a Florida thunderstorm. Ideas running together. What about clarity, Joan? Be clear concerning chaos.
I discard her as an infatuation and begin to obsess over how I can emulate her. And I fail. I interview no hippies nor Nancy Reagans. My work day at a Tampa bayside park: I watch as a hopeful young girl digs in a drainage area. What’s in this muck? Her baby brother says, Yuck. Her exhausted mother says, Stop!
I sweat while watching this scene, when I get home, and in bed pondering Joan and I.
And that was the day board-short wearing Marco chatted with me in our alleyway. The quintessential Californian. I would never be right for Joan. Perhaps, I would start my self-transformation by surfing and considering that Joan was eighty-six years old. Marco told me about the oil derricks that used to populate Huntington Beach when he was a kid. Things keep changing, he said. And I figured that perhaps my obsession was warranted. Certainty, genius, experience weren’t constants. Take the gifts that flux gives. Never settle for immutability.
Marco told me about how nitrogen from wastewater was leaking into waterways causing algal blooms. Fish kills. Environmental chaos at the hand of negligent men. I felt impotent to report on such a big story. Joan would know what to say in just the right amount of brilliant words and probably wouldn’t think very much of me surfing anyway.
Gresham Cash is a writer from Athens, GA. His work can be read in Litro, Popshot Quarterly, and Wilderness House Literary Review.
