I’ve been noticing my attention wanders a lot lately. It happens whenever I’m doing most anything, including playing guitar. This tends to mean many retakes, and sometimes I wonder if I’m not getting enough caffeine. One of the tracks in Songs, Long Gone, took quite a few takes to get it close to ‘right,’ whatever that might mean. If you listen to the song, you can tell it’s not what could be mistaken as complicated. Too many distractions? Sure, probably. It could also be a brain trying to push along all the excess crud I keep throwing into it. Every morning, I wake up and read about a dozen blogs. Every morning. Also, I read Doonesbury, the D23 Comics page, and click on a Breast Cancer button that gives a free exam (theoretically, hopefully) to someone in need. During the course of the day, I check a couple of news sites and retrieve email from a couple of different sources, plus get buzzed by various social media and answer a couple of phones. Oh, and I have a steady parade of people giving me projects that usually have tenuous connections to each other. Not that I’m complaining, because I like the work. But I’m a long way from Inbox Zero, Merlin. To further scrape my grey matter, I listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m in my car. Mostly news from NPR or Disney-related or Mac-related stuff. Information overload? But wait; there’s more. While I’m at work, I have my iTunes playing constantly. I pretty much gave up on setlists for work and just play whatever is new in my music library (so I can take it off my Mac in what is rapidly becoming an OCD to rid my hard drive of extraneous stuff) or whatever I’m craving at the moment. Those of you who have known me for longer than this blog may remember me as a voracious reader who liked to put words to paper as often as possible. I have hardly read anything this year beyond the blogs I’m following and a couple of manuals for pedals and software. This will not do. But I also have to free myself of other distractions, just so I can get back to playing simple chords in their right sequence and remember lyrics. All those words. It’s hard to write the blues with complete sentences, Pat. It’s communication, and I used to be a lot better with it.

And I’m distracted again. Someone is texting me. Shiny bottlecap!

Tags: Long Gone