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Please Pardon Me if This Is Hackneyed

If I could solve one problem, I think I would be all right here.

Here is the thing: picture me, if you will, as a little robospider in the middle of my web, the strands I built stretching around me in all directions. Let us say that each strand represents a worry, a goal or a care: here is can we find a better place for Dad?, here is I still have to get a tax ID number, here is someday I'd like to own a house, etc.

My little spider self can pick a strand and climb nimbly along for a certain distance – oh, how impressed you would be at the coordination of my little legs! How thoughtfully I approach each concern, each woe, each happy possibility!

But before I reach the end of the strand I am on, I invariably look to my left or to my right, and there I see another strand, looking no different, no less tempting or urgent than the one I've chosen. My dainty spider foot cannot resist the urge to reach out and touch that strand. And, lo and behold, what do I find there but some other need to be fulfilled, waiting patiently for my regard, as vibrant as the last time I visited it and every bit as important. And next to that one, another. And next to that one, another.

And so what happens is that I never really get anywhere with any one piece. I venture out, and return to the middle, over and over again; I crabstep sideways and call it progress. I start out on organize the bathroom cupboard and end up on oh fuck credit card debt, and somehow I don't notice, in all the whizzing to and fro, that neither one is any more dealt with than when I started.

Sometime in the last six months or so I have lost the knack for tunnel vision. Maybe I've just got too many things to maintain at the moment. But I suspect that this problem, while it seems new, was lying dormant all the time. I could never handle those choose-your-own-adventure books, either, always second-guessing and coming back to see where another choice would have taken me. Do they put "damn the torpedoes" in a pill these days?

Posted by hilatron at August 4, 2004 12:37 AM | TrackBack