Day: February 26, 2022

It was all there in my head. A perfect gossamer soap bubble, it completely encapsulated what I wanted to convey. It was exciting and I’d just started to type it.

Then interruption upon interruption. Dog howling, Washer buzzer going, Extraneous conversation directed at me.

I usually filter out about 75% of the words I hear, to boil the conversation down to the actual facts. The process excludes attempts at humor, a myriad of detail that is not necessary to support the ideas and generally over complex sentence construction.

What I’m often left with is, “Do you want lunch?”

The problem is, all of this requires a ton of extra mental processing. In this case the additional processing load caused the beautiful soap bubble of thought, to go pop!

I tried to recover it, but while I was trying to recover it, store the words in my memory, more and more mental processing was being directed away just to determine if the conversation was anything that required immediate attention.

You know, something akin to, “Hey you’re on fire!”

Although the person doing the talking would probably have phrased that condition something like this;

“You appear to be hot, not in the sexual way, but there seems to be smoke rising from your general vicinity. Oh look, I can see now that you are actually combusting, or is that just your clothing? Well if it is just your clothing I’d suggest that you remove the combusting clothing and seek the resources of the nearest water access point. Unless the combustion is electrical in nature, then perhaps you’d like to have the fire extinguisher that is designed for that purpose. Do you think you’re likely to want the fire extinguisher and would you like me to retrieve it from the closet for you?”

This, I think is why, the person in question is virtually useless in an emergency. All the chatter in their brain limits their ability to actually take action.

Really, it’s interesting to watch. They just stop and stare glassy eyed at a situation. It’s like watching a computer trying to compute Pi to the last digit.

It’s also why I actively don’t hear what they say 75% of the time. Mostly, I scan the sonic stream for key words that may be actionable.

In the example above, the actionable words would be, “smoke,” and “combustion”.

With my stepfather the filtration rate is 95%. President Biden has a filtration rate of 99.8% Biden is harder because he usually manages to spawn at least 4 other conversations or stories and tries to tell them all at once.

Biden’s “word salads” are epic and wholly unsatisfying. The few times I’ve expended the energy to understand what he said, have led to my brain having to restart from first principals.

Autonomic functions – reloaded – normal.
Optical input – normal
Higher cognitive functions – Reloading
“I think, therefore I am…”
and so on until I’m operational again. This can take some time, and is not completely painless. On the bright side, It does clean out a ton of “hung threads” in my thinking processes.

Biden’s speeches are wonderful at rebooting my brain.

There are other things that can reboot my brain, for example 75% filtration of incoming conversation, a bunch of random input and having a really wonderful blog post, or chapter of a book spring fully formed into my head.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat ADD.

At any given moment there’s a lot of other stuff going on in my head. Some of it useful, and some of it not. This makes focus hard for me to achieve and maintain. Once I achieve focus, I tend to go to extreme measures to hold onto it. Including biting someone’s head off if they’re blathering on about something that is inconsequential.

More fairly, something I think is inconsequential.

The fragments of my soap bubble of thought, are lying in a heap in my brain. It will require a substantial effort to reconstruct, and I’m ambivalent about the ROI.

Even reconstructed, that particular train of thought will not be as perfect as it was.

That dear reader, is why you’ve gotten this goofy post, instead of something more enlightening or thought provoking.

Apologies!