My first world problems are kicking me in the grand posterior this morning. Woke up with a headache and a sugar rush. Listed all I ate yesterday and realized I had sugar and too much salt right before bed.

Oh, woe is me. What shall be done about this first world problem man?

I’ve been thinking about cats. I’ve had cats since I was a wee lad of 2 or 3 years old. And that’s about all I have to say about it. Then I thought my brain can’t handle more than one focus thought at a time and probably our social media scrolling and quick bite content appetites are just the natural way the brain works. Maybe our brains don’t want to focus on one thing for too long. That’s not a good survival mode to be in (or “in which to be”).

So, we were hunters and gatherers always running from predators and trying to find food. Foraging around in the bushes and chasing after gazelles and bears and lions and deer and who knows what other creatures—for a little meat over the barbeque (and now my mind has jumped the rails and is thinking about when we actually invented fire. And if I’m not careful, I’ll stop this missive and Google the exact date we discovered fire. But I’ll be disappointed, for Google will only give me an approximate time frame—some “period”—the Mesogeroic or Mesopotamia or Mesoskeleton—some vast chunk of history, and that’s that…).

So there; see what I did? I jumped off one subject and onto another—like scrolling through a social feed.

Maybe we’re in a cubist attention span art period. The way Picasso broke up his paintings into various squares and shapes to create the whole.

Is this bad? Who cares? It’s just an evolutionary process. Maybe it means we’re more advanced as a species. Maybe it means our internal processors can handle more bits of information and run different programs—all at the same time. We don’t just need to sit and focus on one thing, like needlepoint or baking a cake—we can bake a cake and scroll through our social feeds. We can talk to someone whilst texting 6 others. We can write a blog post while looking out the window at people taking their children to school—and have 22 windows open on my browser; check my email; Google prehistoric fire discovery; pay a bill; drink coffee; check likes on a TikTok post and think about the daily tasks—all while writing a simple blog post.

If I can’t just sit and read a book anymore without stopping to check my texts—is this such a godawful thing?

I don’t know.

I just know I forgot why I started this blog post and what the actual focus of it is…

So what else?

I’ve been waking up, as I said, and sometimes I’m still reeling from the food I ate the night before. Too much salt. Too many carbs. Too much sugar. And I feel it. I’m foggy.

Then I down a cup of black coffee and all is well in my world.

And speaking of the world, how about us human beings? A crazy bunch, huh?

I had cats when I was growing up and I’m trying to write like Ernest Hemmingway. Straight from the gut sucker punches. Little use of adjectives. Concrete.

Harry walked into the bar. He sat down. He slammed his fist on the wood counter. “Gimme a beer!” he shouted at the bartender, a small man, barely taller than the hardwood bar.

The bartender turned and looked at Harry. They both looked at each other. “I said, gimme a beer!” Harry said. He raised his left eyebrow at the bartender.  The bartender was a small man. His forehead peeked out from the top of the hardwood bar.

The bartender frowned. He grabbed a bottle from under the hardwood bar, handed it to Harry. “We don’t have beer,” he said, “we only have kombucha.”

Harry turned, ran out of the bar faster than you could say probiotic.

That’s my Hemmingway impression. New age, kombucha-style. And there you have two adjectives in a row to describe the man who deplored the over-use of adjectives.

Think I’ll try and read some Hemmingway now.

After (or while) I scroll through my TikTok feed.

©2022 Bruce Palma. All rights reserved.