Concentration

I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything for a couple of months now. Every thought I have breaks into a hundred thoughtlets that shatter into a million thoughtules that crumble into dust and flutter to the bottom of my mind and lie there in great undifferentiated piles of silt. The inside of my head is beset by snowstorms of confetti blown by hurricanes and lit by strobe lights.

I don’t read newspapers anymore. It’s hard to concentrate on all those words, so I just skim them. Lately I can barely make it all the way to end of the headlines. Here’s what I read in the Post today:

Harriet Miers Ba

Goss’s CIA Is Still In Tur

Wilma Bec

Every time I think about stopping to smell the roses, something else intervenes. I haven’t looked at the little buds blooming on the tree behind our house. I see flecks of scarlet in a green blur as I rush by, but that could just be the redshift. Whenever I consider slowing down to look, the notion is immediately set upon by a hundred others (buy batteries change oil get mail take vitamins call Stan pay bills). They drag it down and tie it up and hack it to pieces. I keep moving, the frenzied barker perched on my shoulder spurring me on. Go faster! he says. Read faster! Be faster!

There’s this piece of spam making its way through the nation’s mailboxes. It features a paragraph shorn of all its vowels, but you can still read it so long as you let your eyes skate over the words and your brain fill in the blanks. Which proves that you can rely on your preconceptions to wring some drab shred of meaning from this confusing and gnomic world. My shoulder-barker loves shit like that. To him, it’s proof that 80% of the universe is noise that you can ignore, must ignore if want to get to kernel of the nut of the core of the meaning of things.

I think that’s pretty depressing. I like lingering over vowels, and I like the sounds words make, both alone and in conjunction with other nearby words. I think there’s more to life than just meaning. It’s kind of unfair to expect the universe to mean something all the time. We should give the universe a break. We should sit back and enjoy its meaninglessness, and all the beautiful useless things it contains.

But there’s no time, that’s the problem. I have this code to check in and this workout to do, this meeting to go to and this article to read. I have these blogs to skim, these headlines to half-finish. I have this vacation to enjoy, this dog to walk.

The world observed in fast-forward devolves into a series of dissociated atoms, like a pointillist painting seen too close, until none of it makes any sense. Until it’s just the featureless landbridge between your first breath and your last.