“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”–William Blake
Satiety is a relative concept. What is enough for me may be too much for you. Take The Doors, for instance (please). I have a limit of about three Doors songs (two if one of them is “The End”), and then I’m good. I’m full up on The Doors. It’s not that I hate The Doors—it’s just that it doesn’t take very much of them for me to reach my limit.
With other artists it’s different. Back in the day when people still played records because that was how they sold it to you I used to be able to play one Dylan album after another all day long and never grow tired of it. My roommates, however, were a different story. They usually hit the wall around album number seventeen, which, if I was playing them in order, was usually somewhere around Slow Train Coming. I found their lack of Dylan stamina to be intolerable: how could they be done before we even got to the ’80s? But then one of them would take over the stereo for an extended Grateful Dead bootleg session (“No, we haven’t heard this tape yet: that was July 13, 1983. This one is July 14th, 1983. Two totally different shows.”) and I would understand. Sort of.
I tried to keep these memories in mind when I found myself bemoaning the fact that my son, Clyde, had just spent the nineteenth straight day of his summer vacation shooting zombies in the head. The same zombies, because apparently the only way to get to the next level was to go back into the same room over and over again until you figured out the perfect series of moves to get out alive. It was kind of impressive, actually: that’s the kind of dedication that, in another setting (say a cancer research lab) would eventually result in a Nobel prize.
In fact, the man I had in mind when picking Clyde’s name had that same sort of dedication: Clyde Tombaugh was a “junior” astronomer when he spent close to a year of his life painstakingly looking through detailed photographs of the night sky in an attempt to discover “Planet X”—the little blur that would come to be known as Pluto. (This was supposedly well after most of the “real” astronomers up at Lowell had already decided that they had had “enough.”)
There are times, of course, when I am not so willing to let Clyde determine his own level of enough. Soda is a good example of that: given the choice, I’m afraid that Clyde would attempt to subsist on soda alone, like those lab rats who starved to death because they chose to push a button stimulating their brain’s pleasure center over and over again instead of eating. Then again, I could be wrong—I’m just not willing to invest in enough soda (and dental bills) to try and find out. I guess you could say that my reluctance to do so is my own “enough.”
For other things, though, I still think it’s okay to find your own level: just like we hate it when people tell us to take off that sweater because “it’s not cold” (to them, maybe—mutant freakazoid space heaters), we rightfully hate it when someone else tells us we have had “enough” of something we love. Especially if it is obvious that they themselves do not share that same love. Kind of like me and the zombies.
And hey: eventually the summertime zombie slaughter stopped, and it was safe once more to be undead in my living room. Unless, of course, you happened to be an undead Jim Morrison. And then, zombie or not, three songs and you’ve got to go.