Not Stoned...Exactly

Four days after the surgery, and the side effects are beginning to recede. My face, which had puffed out like the Pillsbury Doughboy, is beginning to resume its normal shape; the bruise under one eye - no idea what its from, but we're thinking something to do with sinus surgery - is beginning to fade - still quite visible, though. The ache in my hip is fading -- for a while there, seeing me totter around, you've have thought I was ten, fifteen years older -- so that now I can usually move without thinking about it. And I'm no longer loggy in the morning -- I find that I am thinking again. Not that I have ever been a Great Thinker, but I have my moments. Usually, they're just moments. Remember 'blipverts' from Max Headroom? Thats my insight moments -- blipthoughts.

I wonder about that sometimes, actually. One thing that I find difficult to do is follow a thought to a lengthy conclusion. I don't seem able to think about something that has multiple factors -- once I get past thinking about one or two, I lose track. I forget what point I was trying to make, or what else there was that I thought was significant. I don't like that feeling. I tend to get the same feeling when I am reading something -- I have begun to notice that if an article is more than five or six paragraphs long, I start skipping around. Its worse if its an article on the web -- there, if an article is longer than two or three, I whip to the bottom and look to see what the conclusions are. I was reading something the other day that was making the point that a weaker dollar is a generally good thing -- better for our imports -- and I thought Wait, didn't I read something yesterday where the French president gave a speech saying it was a very bad thing, and it really was? Which is it? Why? And I couldn't remember. I couldn't even remember the points that you need to think about to decide which way it is, what to base that conclusion on.

I think that I'm losing the ability to summarize as I go - to remember the key points that have been made, upon which the remainder relies, or at least relates to. I tried a Firefox extension called Zotero once, which is a web-based cut and paste tool, to keep the gist of articles I read on the web. Its a nice tool, but it didn't summarize for you, think for you. You've got to do that yourself. I think that to summarize as you go, you need to have amalgamated the material (sorry, I can't think of a better word). You have to have mashed it into some kind of shape that makes it yours -- otherwise, you're just copying words. I find that I write best when I write, and then move it around, but even before that, I need to have thought about the material -- and no tool can do that for you.

I don't like it, but I don't know how to address it. Is this -- the inability to focus -- what being stoned is like? Okay, not really, but somewhat?