My Obsessive-Compulsive Order

This one will be short! Really more of a listicle than a blog post.

[Editor’s note: It didn’t turn out to be all that short. Surprise, surprise.]

Without further ado — and I’m nothing if not a shameless purveyor of ado — here is a partial list of my compulsive obsessions and my obsessive compulsions. None of which constitute a disorder.

But even if they do, I don’t mind being disorder-ly in my conduct.

So these are some of the things I simply can’t get enough of.

Movies: When I was 19, I spent most of my disposable income at the movie theater. I think I watched 40% of the movies released in 1999 on the big screen.

Now at 45, I don’t have the time or the money to watch nearly as many now. But I follow movies ardently. I know who directed ‘em, who starred in ‘em, what critics thought of ‘em. I watch trailers, I read reviews, I watch celebrity & director interviews.

Heck, I follow ‘em so closely I might as well be the paparazzi.

And if you ever want an earful, I’ll happily try to reel off my 50 favorites. (No pun intended! For reel.)

Box office: As a movie guy and a numbers guy, keeping track of box office hits my sweet spot. Like did you know that the highest-grossing movie of 2025, almost doubling the #2 movie with an absurd 1.9 billion (with a B) dollars, is a Chinese “3D-animated adventure fantasy action” sequel called Ne Zha 2?

I did. I totally knew it.

And I like to think my Mom is very proud of me for that.

Cereal: It’s the greatest comfort food God ever created. (Okay, I guess John Harvey Kellogg is more rightly to be credited. But it feels God-given to me.)

See my absurdly ardent recent tribute to cereal for more detail. Much more detail.

Park-hopping: My obsession with collecting parks, by visiting them with my kids, is already well-documented. (My working theory is it’s because I have documented it quite well.) We’re currently at 199, dangling precariously at the edge of 200. We have enough time to snag a new one this very morning, but I want to make park #200 count. So I’m waiting until next weekend. I plan to find a doozy.

You can bet I’ll write effusively about the milestone shortly thereafter. And I’ll tell you one thing…

If this achievement doesn’t get me nominated for the Nobel, the system’s rigged.

Ryan George videos: Just look him up on YouTube. He’s so funny and so purely enjoyable to watch — and so wonderfully Canadian too — that I’ve seen some of his videos 6 or 8 or 10 different times. If you check him out, message me and tell me which one you liked the most!

Post-rock music: I have been a die-hard music lover since I was about 13, when I loved 4Him and Steven Curtis Chapman and Johannes Brahms. But it wasn’t until I discovered post-rock music that I truly learned what it was to be obsessed. This genre is my holy grail. I currently have 230 (that’s not a typo) favorite post-rock bands. I try to revisit every one of them in any given 6-month period. Keeping a massive master spreadsheet helps me keep track of them all.

If you ever have 10 minutes to kill, come up to me and say “Hey Jeremy, what’s post-rock music exactly?” I’ll be more than happy to explain. Thrilled, even. The volume of my enthusiasm will pummel your helpless eardrums.

You’ve been warned.

Caspian, specifically: I’ll bite my tongue and say, as concisely as possible, that to me Caspian is the greatest post-rock band (and even the greatest band) in human history. Please go find their music. It might even change your life. I’m living proof.

Greyson! Violet! Of the 4,100,000,000 boys on earth, my favorite one is a 9-year-old named Greyson. And of the 4,000,000,000 girls on earth, my favorite one is a 7-year-old named Violet. They are sugar-sweet and relentlessly curious and genuinely funny and wildly creative and refreshingly innocent and endlessly fascinating. And the most beautiful sights I’ve ever beheld, dwarfing the Swiss Alps and the Canyonlands of Utah and the Atlantic sunrise and the Pacific sunset.

I would love to somehow introduce Greyson and Violet to each of you in person. I guarantee you would immediately love them.

But not as much as I do, because that would be impossible. I’m offended you would even suggest such a thing.

(Sorry, I get irrationally defensive about my kids.)

So these are some of my obsessions and my compulsions. Far from being a disorder, these passions and proclivities bring order to my life — and to a world that increasingly seems to be dis-ordered.

Is it madness to be this obsessed with things both small and big? Or is it madness not to let yourself be obsessed? For the answer, I defer to Jack Kerouac:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who… burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”