I’ve been thinking a lot recently. Not about anything in particular – just about things. Any old things, really. Anything will do. I’ve been thinking about bongs and beer mats, trombones and turnips, telephones and tea stains, starfish and satellite dishes, glass eyes and gyroscopes, table legs and tensor algebra, razor blades and Rasputin, windowpanes and weaver fish. There are so many things to think about, aren’t there? So many things, so many things. Where to begin and where to end? There are bananas and buttercups, nodules and natrium, carborundum and cabbage leaves, whistle-blowers and whirligigs, turtles and tulips, rice pudding and ravens. So many things, so many things. There is an astonishing profusion of things that one might think about. There are too many things for any one person to think about in one lifetime in fact – there simply isn’t time, no matter how fast you might think.

My mind hops from one thing to another, from hexagons to homunculi, from leap-years to lycanthropy, from Ludo to lava lamps, from clinical depression to clairvoyance, from rhododendrons to rapscallions, from scabs to suitcases, from lozenges to lycopodium, from somnambulism to structuralism. My mind hops like a high-powered flea from one to another, never pausing to draw breath, so to speak. Never pausing to take stock. You could of course ask where exactly my mind thinks it is going with all this? What is the point of it all? What is it hoping to discover as a result of all this high-speed hopping?  Has it got a master plan?

That isn’t the case however. Nothing so well thought out, I wouldn’t say. I really don’t think that there’s any plan to it at all – it’s not an ‘intelligent’ thing. It’s more of a nervous reaction than anything else. A kind of a twitch. An involuntary reflex. It’s like running because you can’t stop. You’re running because your legs are out of control. You’re running because you’re running. You’re running because you have to obey the law of running and the law of running says that you can’t ever stop. Kind of simple really, isn’t it? Bit of a no-brainer. What else are you going to do?

So many things to think about and so little time. What are all these things that I am thinking about, I sometimes wonder? That’s a metathought, by the way. Not a metaphor but a metathought. I don’t like thinking about my own thinking though. That gets dark. I’m not getting any wiser by all of this thinking – I just feel a bit frantic in myself, that’s all. I’m getting stretched a bit thin. I think I’m turning into a bit of an idiot, actually. Always looking for the next thought, the next thought. And what will I do when I get it? Promptly forget about it and get momentarily excited by the next one, I’d say. That’s what I usually do. Spit out the old one when it loses its taste and get ready to be temporarily titillated by the next one. What’s the next thought going to be? Will it be a good one? Will it be a beaut? Will it be a corker? Will it be something especially tasty? Will it be the thought I’ve been waiting for?

I was thinking about many things. Flying woozily from one to the other. Scattered and deranged. I was thinking about mips and woozles, slarts and ferniculoids, scrungeballs and bodgers, goosefarts and fudderbums, worbs and scutterbugs,  poopsuckers and wubberlugs, morbichokes and mangepills. What did it all mean, I found myself wondering. Was my mind losing the run of itself?