By the time I was old enough to know what an attention span was, I had spent most of my money on car parts, and could only afford a very tiny one. I keep it here on my desk, inside a hollowed out m&m.I fear someday I will actually eat it, and then my attention span will really end up in the crapper.
Consequently, from Captain Kangaroo on, I have needed a constant influx of colors, shapes, and ideas all my life. The “information age” has dramatically worsened my condition, and I arrived at the point ages ago where no computer I have ever used can keep up with the speed at which my thoughts carom off one thing and head off to another.
If I had devoted that microscopic attention span to sports of one kind or another, I might have been something- but I have always had the coordination and reflexes of cheese, and because I was the only kid my age in my neighborhood, and there were no sports leagues or anything nearby, I never had much opportunity to develop that coordination and get good at anything. So I spent most of my evenings being the ravenous bibliophile beast of Cedar Lake. By fifteen I had read from one end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the other, and exhausted the library’s supply of science fiction, mystery, horror, science and technology. I usually had four books on the go at any time, one in the bedroom to read at bedtime, one in the living room to read while everyone was watching something toxic like Lawrence Welk or the like. Another in the bathroom- those were usually Vonnegut or Heinlein. And yet another book just for the car. Often these books got ‘Cleaned” by mom, which is to say, they were taken from their place and tossed into a box in my room. A powerful lot of my lawnmowing money went to library fines, and I’m still convinced that the library’s “Amnesty days” were designed for me and me alone.All of this was in addition to the Herters catalogs, Johnson Smith catalog, Sears tool specialogs, Boys Life (I STILL love reading that magazine, which may be a little weird- does anyone else remember Kai Beezy Tentroy?)
I never did well in school because my thoughts always wandered. To the book I was reading in the bathroom that morning. To the rabbit I scared up on my way to school. To the deer I wanted to be shooting that fall. To the new hackle I got for my flytying kit. To the whatever, a hundred times a minute, six thousand times an hour, fifty thousand times a school day. Oh, the Chemistry professor or the dr of physics could pique my interest for a few minutes, but it was all just boring, boring boring. College was no different and after a couple years of dicking around I just moved on.
When I got my first apartment, and my very first color TV, and the guy came and hooked up cable to it, I looked like this, for about a solid month.
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