My attention was scattered. Scattered, scattered, scattered. I can’t tell you how scattered it was. You wouldn’t believe me if I did tell you. My attention was scattered like heavy driving rain landing on a corrugated steel roof. My attention was scattered like a big old sack of marbles that have just been emptied from a height all over a tiled floor. Scattered, scattered, scattered. Going here, going there. Flying all over the place. Bouncing here, bouncing there. Rolling here, rolling there. Look at this, look at that. What about this, what about that.
What the hell was wrong with me, I wondered in a dull sort of a way. How had I ever managed to let my attention get this scattered? Scattered, scattered, scattered. Scattering here, scattering there. Scattering all over the place. Scattering all over the shop. You couldn’t collect it all back together again. My attention was scattered just like a big old sack with ten kilos of crazy grasshoppers in it liberally emptied all over the floor. Released. Set free. Hopping all over the place. Hopping here, hopping there, hopping everywhere. Hopping like mad things. Ricocheting from one place to another like little steel springs. Bouncing from one wall to the other like super-charged multi-coloured super-balls. Unleashing their infinite elasticity in gay multicoloured abandon.
Where do they get their energy from, I wondered dully. How do they get the energy to do that. The energy to bounce like that. They never stop bouncing. Bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. They never stop hopping from one place to another. Hopping, hopping, hopping. Like a big old sackful of hyper-active demented fleas liberally emptied out onto the carpet. Dark brown and glossy like chocolate, ricocheting from one place to another faster than the eye could follow. A big heaped-up pile of them emptied out on the carpet boiling up all over the place. A sea of fleas spilling out everywhere hopping and hopping and hopping. Spilling out, spilling out, spilling out. Exploding into the air. Rebounding from one place to the other like little super-compressed springs. Like pure mad things. Like little demonic bullets shooting here and shooting there.
That was my attention. That was what my attention was like. Just like that. Like ten kilos of high-octane crazy grasshoppers released from a big old sack in your living room. Like a big old bagful of demented fleas dumped unceremoniously on the carpet to do as they please. Emptied out liberally in a big seething heap. I just couldn’t follow what they were all doing. It was just making me dizzy. I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t stand a hope in hell of keeping up.
My attention had fragmented into a million pieces and they were all running away from me. The broken bits of my shattered attention had escaped from me. They’d got away from me. They were over-flowing. Seething and boiling on the carpet. Hopping all over the place. Climbing up the curtains. Ricocheting off the walls like bullets. The one thing they weren’t going to do was go back in that sack. No sir, no way. That just wasn’t going to happen…
They weren’t getting back in the bag and that was that. No way were they going back. Hopping here and hopping there. Bouncing off the walls like super-charged super-balls. Climbing all over the curtains. No way, no way. That wasn’t going to happen. Flying all over the place. Ricocheting from here to there and then somewhere else again. Never staying still for a minute. Going pure mental. No sir, no sir. They weren’t going back. That just wasn’t going to happen…