Attention

I’m sitting at a table in the North Boulder Recreation Center, my iPad opened up before me, with a pair of reasonably priced headphones plugged into my ears. Bon Iver is playing “Holocene” for me via my favorite streaming service and that unique blend of steel strings flat picked over a haunting melody keeps interrupting the thought process I’m trying to have. I’m trying to reconstruct some thoughts I had about what I was going to write, but my mind keeps running along with the music.

Multitasking, in practice, is so stinking difficult. I can do two things at once, but can do nothing well unless I do it on its own. Focus is a requirement. It occurs to me that when I write I need to remember how difficult it really is. My characters need to walk into a room and wonder what the hell they were going to do there. A smell, or sound, needs to transport them away from the moment, leaving them stranded temporarily in enthralled in memory. Consciousness is an unruly bitch as likely to be working against one as for us.

My attention is becoming more focused now. The album has advanced to “Towers” which, while it is a beautiful song, does not grab my heart in my chest demanding I pay any attention. Today the I’m going to put my focus on developing “Up Slope”. The project is coming along nicely.