Short Attention Span Theatre…
I’ve forgotten more good ideas than I can ever put to paper. Short Attention Span. More great ideas and more world changing (or at least life changing) concepts than any one individual ought to have in a single lifetime. And here I sit. Wondering if I will ever actually have any idea (or contribution to humanity) that will be worth pulling my name out from all the rest of these human remains left drifting in the wind once I join them and I’m gone.
Do you think we ever really do something special? I’d like to think so. But then I never got the chance to BE Martin Luthor king, Jr., or even Martin Luthor, or. for that matter, even fucking Paris Hilton (and I must confess to even hating myself for even committing the latter to this memoir). But I must make the point — a point — some point that must be made for all of us nobodies who wanted to be somebody, somehow, and wished for it, wanted it, wanted to do something — be somebody that had the power to impact people, or only one — the one that needed to hear and understand that they really could attain something “other” — something “special” — something more than just taking in the air around us and letting it go. You know! I always wanted to “be somebody” — “do something” — change the world in some small way. Make it better. Make a name for somethign — maybe me!
And here I sit, short attention span, hoping there’s still time to do the “it” that I dream of — see the “thing” that I wish for — make the one BIG difference in this all too common human race. Did I say “race”? Really? Race? The only real race is to the grave. Back to dirt. That’s the only real future we’ve all got — ever had. And here I sit, short attention span, hoping there may actually be more to it than what I can see — feel — sense with these five senses we share in common, and understand more than we understand even the functioning of the mind that conceives them and gives them names and given them some fake form of reality to live in.
I think some of the very best years of my life were in college. And the thing that’s really fucked up about that is that I flet the need to cut myself off from all of it almost as soon as I left it. Short attention span. Working harder to limit exposure than it ever did to make friends and influence the folks we might live with, and for, for the rest of our lives. College. It was, in truth, a fantasy. A world I was able to touch because I was both poor and a little smart. Thank the Unites States government (and the guilt of rich people) for that! Their guilt and extra money meant poor kids could taste a life they could otherwise only dream of. A world I wished for, and a world I could only watch from its most extreme edge. A world that wat handed to me for a minute, butnot for the hour. A world I might have wished to have been ready for when it was presented to me, and not some ten years later when it was too late to truly live it and make it into something that I could carry with me into the rest of my life.
You know, one of my great grandmothers ran a boarding house. I never knew anything about it except that it was a fact, I guess, mostly because it was way before my time, and, to some lesser degree, because I think the rest of the familty thought it might just have been something a little dirty. Funny, that. They were all too happy to confess their other sins — and there was/is certainly no shortage of sinfullness there — but in some funny ways, they thought some choices were more likely to cause disdain and discomfort than others. Trust me. I’vew become one of them! I can tell.
It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to be able to focus more time and more energy on a single thing or two. I would! It’s just that it isn’t in me, and/or if it is, it’s unfortunately connected to something so painful, and so destructive, and so vile, that it cannot see the light of day without pulling forth all those deep and dark and dreadful pieces of my self along with it. And so we leave it. Drop it. Let it go, while we search for all manner of thinge to fill our lives, and the void.