The Future

X: The Future
Today it’s dead in here, which I didn’t expect. I thought all these artists would be habitating their habitats, eating and chatting and playing cards or whatever. But all except one are out. I guess I’d better take advantage of this quiet time to get something done.

Except that a gust of wind just blew the side door all the way open and threw a blast of dirt and dust into my eyes.

How do I come up with a personal distraction management plan? I don’t even know where to begin. Is it even possible to have a plan? Choosing which stimuli to limit, which to ignore, and which to absorb. Or maybe it needs to be more macro than that.

During a brief period when there’s nobody in here but me, I have a sudden urge to pick up one of the books or magazines stacked on my desk and peruse something. It hadn’t even occurred to me that these piles of printed matter would be a distraction. But with nothing else to focus on while I ponder my plan, they’re suddenly calling out to me with their beguiling titles and cover lines.

Just as weirdly, now that people are wandering in again, the urge to look at my books has disappeared. The slow, meandering movement of bodies through this space seems to serve the same purpose for me as that tree blowing in the wind outside. Both make it easy for me to sit comfortably within my own thoughts for long periods of time. Maybe I need to set my writing desk next to a window.

My mom came in. Although this is the quietest day yet, her visit was nearly the biggest interruption I’ve had so far. She walked here from her apartment and wandered around making remarks of utter delight at all the little habitats, eventually declaring the whole thing “cute.” Then she sat down and chatted nonstop for about ten minutes, during which time I simply could not bring myself to be rude and ignore her. Plus, I was so thrilled she came that I couldn’t bear to do something that would send her away. I ended up loaning her five dollars to buy some flavored water at Smith’s on her way home. Then just as she was leaving Emily showed up, so I introduced them, since they’ve never met. And then I felt like I should talk to Emily for a minute before she went to look around. It’s the obligation involved, usually, that turns a distraction into an interruption.

“Keep going,” Nick C just said as he walked by. I had been completely spacing out, turning over the idea of this distraction management plan.

Anderson concluded his article with the idea that maybe the human mind is plastic enough to more fully harness our newly abundant array of distractions. The state of the world as it is now might give an advantage to people with ADHD, or anyone who can easily bounce from subject to subject. What’s more, it might push these brains to develop their natural tendencies into newly useful skills. “Kids growing up now,” he argued, “might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new.”

But how, I wonder, can anyone see the connections between these infinite points if they never have the opportunity to stand back from it all and see how it fits together? Shallow engagement has a way of keeping you too close to the details to get that macroscopic view that you need for creative thought. Or conversely, it keeps you too far away to understand your subject well enough to do anything meaningful with what you see. His final statement just reads like a flight of fancy. “They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”

It’s likely there’s truth in the idea that in training the mind to better jump from topic to topic, the world as it now exists will produce in its newest generation people who can put things together in ways that will stagger us. People who have never read Moby-Dick, most likely, but who can succeed at mental feats we have yet to imagine. But focused distraction? I’m more likely to believe that becoming more skilled at choosing how to function in various circumstances—when to engage deeply, when to engage shallowly, and when to disengage—will be the biggest advantage for a 21st-century mind. What if the brain can learn to master both focusing deeply and bouncing erratically, without suffering the loss of one function in the process of developing the other? What if the brain can have better control over when it does which?

Then we’d have some kind of superhero who could write a novel in the middle of traffic, in between bouts of tweeting particularly poetic sentences and following a play-by-play feed from the Lakers vs. Celtics game. Someone who’d write when she wanted to write and tweeted when she wanted to tweet and followed the game when she wanted to or blocked it out when she didn’t. Someone who could pull all those pieces together into a coherent and surprisingly beautiful whole of the sort we’ve never witnessed.

Maybe.

Or maybe someone could just set a desk down in the middle of a chaotic gallery space and take a long, hard look at the various kinds of distraction, and think about how she might harness the best of them while protecting herself from the worst. Maybe that would be the best distraction management plan anyone’s come up with yet.

Defeated Again

IX: Defeated Again
How am I, personally, going to be able to do adapt to the world’s new kinds of distractions? Everyone needs to find her or his own way, obviously, since everyone’s brain is different. I expect I ought to start by categorizing my distractions: Those I could get rid of, and those I don’t want to get rid of but need to learn how to manage. For the distractions I choose to absorb (within limits I set), there’s then the question of how to harness them toward productive goals, as well as the problem of deciding what to absorb when I don’t know how it will serve me in the future. I guess that makes The Distraction Project an integral piece of my plan, then.

Oh my god, this is some of the best people watching of the past year. I swear that guy is German: His style is at once far to cool and too ridiculous to appear on any American. Somehow I’m surprised to be more distracted by something I’m enjoying, but duh. Of course it happens that way. I’m going to chalk this one up as a good distraction, though. The kind that feeds me, that will do me well in the long run. I’m just going to try to not get too pulled away by it, to the point that I don’t get any work done. I’m starting to realize how huge the element of novelty is in determining whether something’s distracting. The newness of this is killing me; killing my concentration. I just desperately want to get a sense of it before I tune it out.

This place is full of people now, dozens walking around and chatting and exploring, as well as quite a few of my friends stopping to say hello, although thankfully most of them aren’t trying to have much of a conversation with me. There is actually a dog in here. It’s a long-haired dachsund and it’s obviously having a smashing time. People are actually commenting on what a great time the dog is having.

Oh, Jesus, major major perfume blast. Total overload. How can anyone stand to smell like that? Ha, she walked around behind me just as I typed that last sentence, and I had to quickly scroll up so she wouldn’t see. Especially because I’ve met her before, although she doesn’t seem to remember me, but she’s a friend of a friend and very nice and I wouldn’t want to be rude to her. But this whole rigmarole is much more than an idle distraction—it’s a full-on interruption.
I can’t even count how many times I’ve gotten interrupted at this point. There’s a semi-steady stream of people commenting, asking questions, saying hello, or just doing something so silly that I have to take note of it. I mean, the dog. At least that was a welcome interruption. The dude who tried to pick up my books and look through them, on the other hand? Not welcome.

I was editing something I wrote earlier and I just realized that successive interruptions caused me to construct a completely nonsensical sentence. It read: “Zoning out seems to give networks that, when we’re engaged in focused tasks, don’t communicate with one another.” Yuh. Then I figured out how to fix the sentence, but before I had a chance to, my roommate sat down next to me and asked how this was going. So I told her it’s really pretty hard right now, just as her friend showed up and expressed her amazement that I was getting so much written. When I went back to the sentence I had absolutely no idea what I’d wanted to do with it. By now I was really frustrated, and I stared at it all pissed off for a couple of minutes, reading and rereading the paragraph until finally, magically, it came back to me and I typed in my corrected sentence as fast as I possibly could, before I got interrupted again.

Whew. This almost feels like a sporting event. And I’m getting tired of talking to weird strangers.

I’ve noticed in every writing session so far, something in me breaks at around two hours and 20 minutes. Actually it’s more like something shifts and goes clunk, and I have to pause and reset for a few minutes before I can continue. It almost feels like I can’t continue at that point, but what I’m learning is that, if I just take the time to chill out (and zone out) for a bit longer than I would usually allow, I’m able to really go back to work and get back into a groove and keep going, even sometimes at the highest level of engagement—generating new ideas, solving sticky problems of structure and logic, all of it. One key to this, actually, is simply deciding to. The other is preventing distractions from happening, because clearly, there’s a point at which one is simply incapable of blocking them out. Like when they take the form of intrusions that force you to respond before you can go back to what you were doing before.

Perfect example: A few minutes ago Justin and Nick T were standing beside me, and Justin asked about the idea I’d tossed around of having my words projected somewhere else in the space. It didn’t work out because Dave forgot the cord, and I said so. Then he asked if I knew how to make my computer read my words aloud while I type. I said no, and he explained that all you have to do is PDF them or something. But, he said, it’s kind of weird because the computer reads it all in a robot voice.

Up to this point, my participation was entirely voluntary; I had only myself to blame for being distracted. Then before I knew what was happening, Justin and Nick were reading aloud everything on my computer screen, in robot voices. Different segments of visible text, at random. This made me instantly insane, suddenly flooded with all those feelings of writers’ insecurity and overwhelmed by hearing incongruent snippets of my own words, as well as somewhat disturbed by the robot voices.

Now they’re reading what I write, as I write it, about them. This is slightly less cacophonous, but even creepier. Also my friend Erin, who appeared in the middle of this, is trying to help by offering words of advice: Just ignore them. Don’t stop reading.

Oh. Boy. That was one of the most intense moments in recent memory. Now Will is showing me a picture of his son on a skateboard. I still have 15 minutes left, but coming up with a real thought might be hopeless at this point.

Actually, I’m sure it’s hopeless. My sister is ow standing over me telling a story to our friend Katherine about a weird perverted guy named Pablo. And after I told Katherine about Justin and Nick T, she decided to read this aloud as well, although thankfully not in the robot voice. She’s a little slow, though, because she’s dyslexic. I thought that would be less distracting, but now I think it’s even more so. Has anyone taken over your keyboard yet???

That was my sister who wrote that last line.

Depth vs. Novelty

VIII: Depth vs. Novelty
Opening night! The installation all these artists have been building around me for the past three days, Meow Wolf’s Habitats show, is officially ready for public viewing. I can’t even start thinking about my essay yet. I’m too pleased with my own installation—my habitat for Habitats—which simply consists of piles of books and magazines stacked all over my desk. I think it gives the impression of abundance, variety, and the psychic structure provided by the printed word.

But it’s quiet in here right now, and mellow. The lighting is dim, and the big garage door behind me has been closed, so the only intense light is a sunbeam coming through the door to my left. There’s a vocal broadcast happening, obviously part of somebody’s installation, plus sounds of soft static coming from an array of old TV’s set up against the far wall. Two or three of the artists are putting finishing touches on things and cleaning up, but most of that is already done. The public has not yet arrived. I feel the anticipation so fully that it’s hard not to just stare around and wait for something to happen.

It is hot tonight. All I can think about is how amazing it would be to have an iced coffee. Of course I couldn’t do that, because then I’d have to get up and pee. Anyway at this point, I feel pretty sure that nothing that could happen here tonight will distract me more than this wretched heat. It just makes me slump, deep inside.

It’s later now, and quite a few people are in here. They’re sort of stalking through, stepping lightly and peering into this and that, then turning to see where to point themselves next. It’s almost meditative to watch them. They too seem to be having their own meditative experiences—the act of absorbing art. It’s helping me understand why I love absorbing art so much. It puts you in a space where there’s only you and the thing in front of you. The engagement that happens is so direct and complete and rich. It’s the kind that, when we get it from the work we do, makes us feel fulfilled.

It’s what’s being taken away from us. No: It’s what we’re removing ourselves from. “Psychologists say,” environmentalist Bill McKibben tells Appleyard, “that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” McKibben sees Thoreau’s move from Concord to quiet Walden Pond as an impressively insightful decision. But he also points out that another part of human nature is “loving novelty”—a contradictory impulse that pulls us away from the depth we crave.

What this means is kind of what we already know: Where we place our attention is ours to choose. Changes in the way the world works have made it harder to choose depth over novelty. But they haven’t made it impossible. The technologies of distraction have just made it hard to make the choice unconsciously. Despite our natural tendencies, circumstances now require that we consciously choose to not click on that link to the YouTube video of the sneezing panda. When it comes to distractions, as Sam Anderson cogently put it, “Western culture’s attentional crisis is mainly a widespread failure to ignore them.”

But so what if people are distracted? I mean, I don’t personally want to be crippled or mauled by a driver on a cell phone, but part of me thinks, If I just solve my distraction problem for myself, I can have my fulfilling life and everyone else can just be as distracted as they want and that’s their prerogative. Right? Well, if incessant distraction impacts the way everyone else thinks, that could have a big impact on me—one I’m not sure I want to deal with. I don’t want to live in a nation of web surfers who never actually analyze anything they read, but just absorb the shallowest part of it and move on. That sounds like some kind of fucked up Huxley novel.

Avoiding that brave new future means consciously limiting how much we’re gripped by that state of disengaged distraction I described—no matter how many distractions we’re surrounded by. Basically, as Anderson observed, “The question now is how successfully we can adapt.” Or, in Gallagher’s more colorful language, “If you continue to just jump in the air every time your phone rings or pounce on those buttons every time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.”

So, like with so many other things, this greater freedom requires greater responsibility, and a conscious decision to not just take the easy way out. These choices we make, however benign, are more than personal decisions about our personal lives. They have profound social and political implications. Given that so many of democracy’s fundamental elements depend on what we’re paying attention to and why—government transparency, voting, and on and on—we do have a responsibility to consider where our attention should go, and make a real effort to put it there.

I seem to be turning into the Information Desk around here. I didn’t expect that. People keep asking me questions that I don’t know the answer to, like where the bathroom is.
Dave came up behind me and started reading over my shoulder. This was bizarrely intense and emotionally challenging. Something inside me totally recoils at the thought of somebody reading my unfinished work. It’s even worse when they’re watching as you do it, before you’ve even had the chance to decide to hit “Save” or just let that line disappear forever. I was halfway to mortified when, at one point, he laughed at something I’d written and repeated it aloud: “I didn’t even know there was a drum set in this building.” At least the response was positive.

There are lots of people coming through now. “Smells like Christmas,” a guy comments to me. I have no idea how to respond to that. “Must be the pine needles,” he says, wandering off. A woman is cooing over the igloo with the owl head over its entrance. “Ooooh, the Owl House,” she says, and pets it. Another woman holds a toddler’s hand as the child teeters along a platform. For the first time since I’ve started this project, I really would rather watch the human parade than write. I’m enthralled. The clothes people are wearing. These artsy funky Santa Fe types. I adore them. The older folks look out of place, like tourists, but they seem to be loving it as much as anyone else. Everyone looks happy. Smiling, bemused, intrigued, delighted.

“Are you writing down people’s comments?” Owl Woman asks me. “Among other things,” I say, nodding. She approves. I show her that I actually took down her Owl House comment. “Did you hear me say I wanted to pet it?” she asks. I am starting to feel like this is some kind of play within a play. Writing about art about writing about art. It’s so abjectly postmodern it hurts.

It's Personal

VII: It’s Personal
I think about the article I need to edit for a freelance client and how I’ve been having a terribly difficult time focusing on it. I sit down in my bedroom and can’t deal. My eyes flit across the corners of the room, itching to focus on something else. I go to a coffee shop and get up to leave after only 45 minutes. What is all this about? It looks like I get bored easily, and when I’m bored I can’t concentrate. Does that make any sense at all? Boyfriend pointed out the other day, actually, that when he interrupts me while I’m telling him something, even if it’s only for a moment, it’s often hard for me to pick up the thread of my thought again. Having my stream of thought intruded on, in other words, is more disruptive for me than for most people. I wonder if it’s not boredom but the constant interruptions I allow to occur, both at home and at coffee shops, that are the real culprits.

“Hey, wanna come get a slice of pizza?” Sean and Dave are standing by the door, giving me that ‘Doesn’t this sound like a great idea?’ look. I shake my head. Boy, I’d like to go get a slice of pizza. But it’s easy to say no. I have rules that I’m following. It’s amazing how easy it is to follow your own rules to minimize distractions when you know you’ll only have to follow them for one week. Weirdly, however, I’m having a serious urge to clear this empty food trash off my desk. Just to have things tidy. In fact, after three days in this place, I’m pretty sick of all this junk lying around everywhere. It’s an absolute mess. I put my foam critters back in their basket when I first got here, because the whole place was so visually overwhelming that I simply didn’t want anything more on my desk than had to be there. Am I getting more sensitive to visual distractions here? It’s definitely distracting that the whole place looks different every day. It’s not predictable like the tree outside, and that’s noticeably harder on my concentration.

This might have something to do with the fact that I’m particularly sensitive to unpredictability in my living and working spaces. It goes back to my childhood. My mother was the sort of person who would sell all the furniture while you were at school one day, without telling you she was going to. Actually, she was the sort of person who would sell the house while you were at school one day. And she did so, more than once. Such minor deeds as simply rearranging the furniture were so run-of-the-mill that I didn’t even register them half the time. But I have to admit that the bigger changes were tough. Especially the time she gave away the cat.

So things moving around where I’m trying to get things done—in a place I’m dependent on—is kind of a sore spot for me, an emotional trigger that has a much bigger impact on me than it probably has for most people. It is what brain scientists Florin Dolcos and Gregory McCarthy call an “emotional distracter,” and their f-MRI research shows that when one hits you, it not only grabs your attention away from your “working memory”—your mental notepad that holds relevant information nearby for easy access—it directly impairs its functioning.

I have a feeling the following, pulled from a 2006 article in the Journal of Neuroscience, applies to me perhaps more than anything has ever applied to me before: “Goal-directed behavior depends on executive processes, such as working memory… Distraction challenges our ability to maintain focus on goal-relevant information, and emotional stimuli are particularly potent distracters that can capture attention and reallocate processing resources (Ellis and Ashbrook, 1988) and thus impair cognitive performance.”

It’s a question of what Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt (a book about attention; and here I’ll add that I’m thoroughly distracted by her name) calls “bottom-up” versus “top-down” attention. Basically, the former is emotional in nature and is meant to save you from predators or natural disasters, while the latter is rational and enables you to complete complex cognitive tasks. When the bottom-up system sounds its alarm, it not only activates the emotional centers of your brain, it dampens the activity of the areas involved with thought and reasoning. Dolcos and McCarthy also found that the more emotional the distracter, the more thorough the interruption. Success or failure at concentrating, then, depends on two things: the sensitivity of your bottom-up apparatus, and the discipline of your top-down system.

What’s really damning, for me anyway, is that I fall into the category of people with “affective disorders, such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, which are characterized by increased susceptibility to emotional distraction.” I actually have both of their listed examples, meaning I have one of the more sensitive bottom-up systems around. And I can say from experience that taking medication for both has done wonders for my productivity, largely because it makes it possible for me to sit down and actually, truly think. I can also say from experience, however (as anyone who takes medication knows), that no meds make your mind run perfectly and really all you’re going for is the ability to function as well as the next guy. In other words, the chances of me ever getting really good at concentrating in difficult circumstances are pretty much zero.

And there’s more. There’s the fact that I have a “highly creative mind,” which is not unrelated to the fact that schizophrenia runs in my family. According to f-MRI studies cited by BBC reporter Michelle Roberts, this means I, like people with schizophrenia, “lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.” I question how important those receptors are—ahem, I seem to do just fine without them—but I do relate to this statement. I have figured out over the years that my brain really does not filter and direct thought particularly well. I think of it as a strength as much as it’s a drawback, since it’s the force behind my creativity, but it makes transforming the mess of ideas in my head into coherent language a sometimes formidable challenge. Even if you took away all these external distractions—the noise, the activity, the smells, the bad light—writing would be struggle for me. A struggle against the distraction of all those other ideas bouncing around inside my head.

I think this means I need to do some serious, serious thinking about how to minimize the distractions I do have control over.

Here’s something else: Now that it’s so quiet in here, with only a couple people working in the other corner of the room and night falling outside, I’m having trouble sticking to my work. Why? Because I feel lonely. That’s another emotional trigger for me. I absolutely hate to feel lonely, and it creeps up on me all the time when I’m at work. Because writing is of course a solitary pursuit. And often, when I find myself not only engaged in my solitary pursuit but also engaged in it in a solitary manner, I really feel that solitude and it really gets me down.

Somebody turns the music on and after a few minutes I realize I’m not lonely anymore. The sounds have made me feel comforted and content, although they are inherently distracting. Apparently they’re not as distracting to me as loneliness is. This is, I think, an extremely useful discovery.

Directly over me, a guy is literally walking on a steel beam ten feet above my head, adjusting a parachute that’s been put up there as a visual element. I have a moment of wondering if I’m distracted by this—the possibility that he’ll fall, on me or otherwise. But this triggers no deep-seated fears. I decide that I’m not particularly concerned about it.

Engagement

VI: Engagement
Today I am already distracted as I sit down because I’m hungry. I’m munching on dried mangoes and the remains of a scone, and this does divide my attention. It’s amazing how many ways we can multitask without even thinking of it as multitasking, like eating while doing absolutely anything else. Life is already full enough of distractions, just in dealing with the basics like eating and peeing and thermoregulating and hydrating and answering your mom’s phone calls. No wonder all this other stuff has us out of our heads.

But there are a few key differences between the distractions we’ve been coping with for eons and the ones we find ourselves facing in the 21st century. For one thing, the kind of multitasking involved in something simple like knitting and talking at the same time doesn’t tax your brains ability to process information, because this combination doesn’t use overlapping channels. Each task uses pretty much only one channel, and if you’re good enough at both that you don’t have to be actively learning while you do them, you’re set. But being good it both is important, because, as Anderson explains, “when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done.” That’s just fine if you’re folding laundry, but if you’re trying to do something challenging? What if you’re trying to grow as a person?

Here we find another key difference between past and present. Our environments once promoted aimless zoning out, but now they tend to prevent it. Melville described the danger of his tendency to slip into states of so-called distraction while he was high up in the crow’s nest on a ship’s mast, working as a look-out. This got him into trouble more than once, apparently, but it didn’t pose the same kind of threat as it would have if he had instead been incessantly tweeting. Failing to notice a blowing whale might have gotten him a physical beating, but in a mental sense his daydreaming was more positive than negative. That’s because letting your mind wander is not the same thing as functioning in a state of consistent distraction. What happens when your mind wanders, actually, is kind of the opposite of what happens when you skip distractedly from topic to topic.

God, another cigarette. Benji’s standing right next to me with the thing dangling between his fingers, so that smoke roils right up and over to me. But I’m not reacting. I’ve logged it and sent it away. I refuse to care. And luckily, he’s walking away now so I didn’t have to put my Zen powers into practice for very long. Then there’s a shop-vac going and now somebody’s listening to a Ted Talk. Or Radiohead? There’s definitely an electronic voice happening. I can’t make sense of it. Why am I trying? It’s across the room. But boy, is it hard to block out. It’s totally arrhythmic. There’s no groove to slip into. The tempo keeps changing and throwing me off. Now somebody in the other room is playing drums. Drums. I didn’t even know there was a drum set in this building. Luckily whoever is practicing is pretty good and apparently in a mellow mood. It’s a chill, jazzy sort of beat he’s got going, although with a lot of cymbal, and that’s a bit difficult.

Then I notice something extraordinary has happened: It’s quiet in here. I only hear the sound of a blowing fan and a robin singing. It’s so amazing I have to stop writing for a moment and soak it in. Am I genuinely distracted by silence? I guess the answer is no, because it didn’t pull me away from what I was doing. Instead it allowed me to float away, until Sean started using a staple gun.

In order to be creative, we have to float around some. We have to let our minds drift. When we zone out, says a 2009 Discover magazine article, both our cognitive and emotional neural networks are activated at the same time. When this happens, the mind is thinking and feeling in that low-grade way that has led to some of history’s most famous “Eureka!” moments. Zoning out gives networks the chance to communicate with one another in ways that don’t happen when we’re engaged in focused tasks. When they do, there’s a potential for putting the pieces together in a new way.

I think an important concept to note here is the relationship between distraction and engagement. Distraction pretty nearly means disengagement, but what you’re disengaged from—and whether it’s because you’re engaged with something else—makes all the difference. If you’re disengaged from what you should be doing because you’re engaged in something fulfilling, that’s good for your mind even if it’s not good for your survival. If you’re disengaged from what you should be doing because you’re zoning out, and therefore your mind is engaged with itself in a healthy way, that’s fine too.

But if you’re disengaged from what you should be doing because you’re skimming or jumping from subject to subject or task to task, and therefore basically disengaged from everything, that’s what we’re all trying to figure out how to avoid. Likewise, if you’re disengaged from what you should be doing because you’re engaged with something that inherently doesn’t allow deep engagement but instead requires a shallow, addictive sort of relationship, you probably should avoid that too.

Attention!

V: Attention
This day begins with Ray Charles signing the “Mess Around” in the speaker behind me. In an ironic twist, the artists were content to work in silence until about five minutes after I got here. Now there’s music.

Wow. I swear to God that’s a chihuahua in a fight on the other side of the parking lot behind me, snorting and snarling like some kind of gremlin. I can hear it through the open garage door behind me. Oh, it sounds bad. I’m fighting the urge to go look. Eez. Or maybe I don’t want to look. Also, the dust is getting worse. It’s getting thicker the closer we get to the opening of the Habitats show. Plus, this is a dusty time of year since it’s hot out and windy, but the afternoon rains haven’t come yet. With all the doors open, the dust just blows on in. I just sneezed one of those huge, throw-your-head-forward, maniacal sneezes aimed at clearing every last particle out of your sinuses and beyond. I realize I’m unprepared for allergies, which could seriously disrupt the writing process. I have no Kleenex or Claritin D. I will make a note of this for tomorrow.

I get another text from my boyfriend: “Xoxo and also distraction distraction distraction.” Yes, he’s having fun with this. The problem is that I’m having fun with it too, so I keep looking at the texts when they come in. I could argue, however, that it’s not what I’m doing (joking, communicating) but how I’m doing it (sporadically, while trying to get something else done) that’s the problem. Not so long ago, people used to get the mail delivered once a day. And at one time each day, they received all the messages anyone had sent to them in the past 24 hours. That time, actually, didn’t end for me until somewhere around 1995, when I got my first email account. But even then, not having a computer of my own, I didn’t have instant access to those messages until 2002, when I connected my new laptop to a modem and accessed the Internet from home for the first time. Of course texting wasn’t even in the picture until after I got my first cell phone, in 2006. And then I didn’t bother to learn how to use the texting feature until some time in 2008, when my friend Emiliano moved to Santa Fe from California and threw all his new friends into confusion by texting us instead of calling. No one in my age group in Santa Fe really did that yet. That was only two years ago. Two years.

It’s no surprise people are sounding the alarm on distraction. Both the scale and the rate of the change in how information comes at us are staggering. There’s an urgency in peoples minds about the issue because it’s simply so huge that we feel, whatever problems may arise from it, we’re not prepared to handle them. I mean, what do you do if you’re that 40-something guy who ended up as the managing editor of a magazine and now, instead of ever reading a book, you spend your days manically returning emails, searching the web, answering phone calls, and shuffling half-written documents? This isn’t what your father’s life looked like. Your dad had clients who sat in his office and chatted about golf for two hours before taking five minutes to make the business decision at hand. Then your dad bent over his work and, uninterrupted, got it done.

Twenty-seven minutes later, boyfriend sends me two more texts: “Distrac” and “tion.” I almost reply just to tell him I thought that was clever, but I delete my draft after realizing I’ll only prompt more texts from him.

I’m starting to nest. A short while ago I noticed, on the platform against which my desk is shoved, a straw basket containing colorful foam sculptures. There’s a little frog creature, in green and pink, and a three-petaled flower in yellow and orange. I’ve pulled them out and set them on my desk, on either side of my computer. It makes me feel cozy, which is relaxing and, ideally, will help me concentrate. Some writers are minimalists—they think best after clearing away the clutter. I’m sort of the opposite. I want to be surrounded by things that make me feel good, like foam critters.

Are these critters a distraction? I’m not sure. They just sit there. I consider what economist Herbert A. Simon said in 1971: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources.” A logical inversion of this argument would be to say that poverty of information leads to a wealth of attention. This would suggest that, to achieve the greatest level of attention, I should reduce irrelevant incoming information to the barest minimum, and therefore move the critters off my desk. But I don’t want to do that. And actually, science is on my side this time.

When it comes to peace and quiet, there is in fact danger in too much of a good thing. Studies done in the 1960s revealed that the human brain requires a certain level of stimulation in order to function properly. Removing all stimuli (read: potential distractions)—as was done in experiments in which people were put in empty, evenly lit, silent rooms for days on end—severely fucks a person up. Some of the test subjects started hallucinating after as little as 15 minutes, their minds producing their own sensory information to fill the void of their deprived senses. People’s visions grew increasingly bizarre, even macabre, and would not cease until they returned to normal surroundings—someplace where there were things to watch, and listen to, and smell, and feel.

So what’s the right amount of distraction? If we break down what was happening in this experiment, we see that it was about more than distraction. It was also about it’s opposite: attention. In removing all distractions, the experiment’s designers also removed everything a person might possibly pay attention to. It looks like this poverty of attention—the same problem Simon pinpointed, but for a different reason—was truly what was so hard on the brain.

I lay my head on the corner of my computer keyboard, resting my cheek against the warm metal. As it happens, this makes me look out the open doorway, through which I see, across the empty street, a large tree. Its branches, all leafy and green, blow in the wind in a cradle-rocking sort of way. In a moment I realize I feel a little bit refreshed. And I’m amazed. Of course I knew that being in nature is healthy, that meditative movement feels good. But I never really noticed it before. Not like this. Not in the sense that I am aware of it at the very moment it is saving me.

What exactly is happening here I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s not interruptive, and that’s the key. The tree isn’t yanking me away from my thoughts about this essay. It’s just giving me an opportunity to let them lie for a moment. There must be something unconscious going on that’s important here. Like, my brain has been only separated from my task on a very superficial level; the rest of my mind is still holding onto it and working through it. The distractions that hurt our lives—what writer Sam Anderson dubbed “the technology of distraction” in his New York magazine piece on the topic—are the ones that pull us away much more completely.

That tree is giving me something to pay attention to, but it doesn’t feel distracting. I suspect this has to do with the kind of information it’s communicating to me. What I mean is, information can be defined on a very fundamental level not as knowledge (what we usually take it to mean), but as a change in conditions that, if we were recording changes, would require us to take note. A tree blowing in the wind, then, is always providing us with new information. It never does exactly the same thing twice, so we can’t put our record-keeping on autopilot and only note when the cycle repeats. Instead it does nearly the same thing in an infinite number of ways, while always staying within certain parameters. The leaves aren’t falling off; branches aren’t breaking. The leaves are just blowing, doing their thing again and again, yet never identically. In other words, that tree is completely predictable and utterly unpredictable at the same time.

Lots of things in nature are like this, and they tend to make us feel good: a campfire, gently breaking waves, clouds forming and transforming. Watching these processes relaxes us and makes us feel like space is opening up inside us. This tree is playing some sort of amazing game with my twin functions of attention and distraction. It requires just enough attention and provides just enough distraction that rather than taxing my brain, it actually feeds me in some way. I suspect that our brains have evolved in sync with nature in this sense, so that our ideal baseline levels of information to be attended to or distracted by—that balance point, maybe, where we get just the right amount of each function—are aligned with the baseline levels of change and repetition in nature. I suspect that we’ve evolved to think best when we’re in the conditions in which we evolved.

Agh. And then a guy appears between me and the tree out of nowhere, stands in the parking lot over some sort of plastic dome, and starts blasting it with spray paint. Which blows indoors and straight to me. Now I’m sucking spray paint fumes. And I feel more tired than ever. I want coffee. Wow, do I want coffee. Iced coffee. It’s hot out. Not insanely hot but hot enough to get old after a while.

A girl on a platform to my right is thatching the roof of a miniature white clapboard house. Actually I don’t know if it’s clapboard. Actually I don’t know what clapboard is. But it sounds good. And her thatching job looks pretty good, too. The grass she’s using is still green, so it has a sort of fresh look to it.

It’s infinitely easier to write about the distractions than in spite of them. To my far right, a skinny kid whose name I’ve forgotten constructs a miniature adobe hut, pulling straw-riddled mud from a wheelbarrow behind him. Then he pauses and heads past me, and I can’t resist telling him the house-cave looks really good. He says thanks, and asks how the writing’s going. Good, I tell him. But I’m a little fried right now. I get a little fried near the end.

Defeat

IV: Defeat
Buddy Holly just came on the stereo—Peggy Sue. I’ve been writing a book for which I’ve learned that Buddy Holly recorded most of his big hits at a little recording studio in Clovis, so hearing this makes me happy for a moment, and I listen closely to the song, probably for the first time ever. I’m allowing myself to be distracted from writing this essay, but it’s because I’m truly paying attention to something else.

Then it’s gone. The song’s over. I shift back. And that’s the problem. This constant back-and-forth trains your mind to always be switching gears. This is another thing scientists (and many ordinary citizens) have discovered results from always reading short snippets of text like what you find online. What happens is, after a year or two of doing this every day, say, for your job, you find that when you want to stay focused on one thing for a long time—like read a feature article in the New Yorker—you can’t.

I’m not sure where to go from here. And this music sucks. I want to be done for the day. Or at least just take a little walk. Now I need to pee. I wondered if this was going to happen. I don’t even know where the bathroom is, let alone at what point I should allow myself to go use it.
And I’m concerned with the problem of organizing this essay. Organizing essays is difficult for me because I don’t have a very well-organized mind. This worries me.

Sigh. My mom called. And I answered. I was really really going to not answer for anyone. But I just had to. She only wanted to talk for a couple of minutes, as always. And I felt good to talk to her. She leads a pretty lonely, simple life. I can’t bear to not be there for her. Looks like the idea of leaving the phone in the car is not going to work.

I notice that my concentration has severely deteriorated since I began today. I’m trying every bit as hard as I was earlier, but it’s not working. I’m not getting anywhere. Is this thing that’s killing Appleyard having a similar impact on me? This low-grade, cumulative affect on the mind, even when you think you’re concentrating just fine. The way a chaotic environment eats away at your focus until suddenly you pause and realize it’s shot. This has been a mellow session. Less distracting than a coffee shop, actually.

So far today I have received seven texts, sent one, answered a brief phone call, listened nonstop to music, gotten up once to move my chair for the guy who had to get past me with a wheelbarrow, gotten dust blown all over my computer by one rogue gust of wind, handled the disturbance of wafting cigarette smoke, halfway heard countless conversations both quiet and loud, briefly paused to speak to four different people, and resisted getting up to pee. Altogether it took just over two and a half hours for this to irreversibly blow my concentration.

I am forced to give up writing for the day, 11 minutes early. I will spend the rest of the time reading articles about distraction, hopefully absorbing something I can find useful tomorrow.

It's Complicated

III: It’s Complicated
I realize I’ve been incredibly productive so far. It’s the excitement of embarking on something new—the novelty of it all. The setting, the topic, the whole effort. But it occurs to me that it’s also that, in putting myself here, I’ve unwittingly removed a lot of my usual distractions. There’s no wireless Internet in this building, so surfing the web, checking emails, and wasting time on Facebook aren’t even options. And since I’ve made a rule that I have to remain in my chair for the entire three-hour duration, I make sure I’m hydrated, fed, and prepared to last, before I even sit down. I'm beginning to wonder what's so distracting about The Distraction Project.

A few months ago I went on a diet. I did a great job with it. I cooked vegetables, ate salads, and cut out sweets entirely except for once a week. I ate well—food I really liked—and I lost weight. But after eight weeks, I got tired of it. I was bored of dieting. I was annoyed by dieting. I was disenchanted with dieting. All it did was remove fat from my body. It didn’t solve my relationship problems. It didn’t get my book written. It didn’t make me happier or fitter (the diet didn’t involve exercise) or more popular. I did, at least to my mind, look better. But nobody cared. Maybe my boyfriend liked it a little bit, but he didn’t say a word about that because it’s not something he thinks is particularly important. He waited until I said, “Can’t you tell I’m skinnier?” before replying in the affirmative, validating what good work I had done. My roommate, who had been against the idea from the beginning, was just relieved when I announced that I was through with it.

I do have a point. It’s that there are many, many things that prevent us from doing things we supposedly want to do. Blaming distraction is the flavor of the moment—the thing we’re just beginning to notice because it’s changing the way we live. But it’s just one aspect of the way we live, and it’s only one of many things that affect it. Getting work done requires an understanding of much more than simply why it’s a good idea to turn off your phone.

Sometimes, it turns out, distraction can be the best thing that ever happened to a person. It’s an important tool we use to save us from ourselves. “Habits aren’t broken,” I once heard Dr. Phil say (I know, I know). “They’re replaced by other habits.” I found a touching example of this on a website called TheSite.org (“Your Guide to the Real World”) under the “Mental Health” heading. It was a list of “Coping Tips and Distractions” for cutters—people who suffer from the urge to inflict “self-harm.” In this contest between the lesser of two evils, distraction stands like a paragon of health. The idea is that although distracting yourself to get through an intense moment won’t cure your deeper problem, it will at least prevent you from doing physical damage to yourself while you are (hopefully) working on solving the bigger issue.

The advice is along the lines of, “Rub ice on your skin in the place you would usually cut”—ice feels intense enough, evidently, to do the trick. And honestly, to me this sounds like genius. The long list of possible ways to distract yourself from cutting actually looks like a lot of fun: “Bake or cook something tasty.” “Dance your socks off.” “Pop bubble wrap.” It’s obvious that there could be far worse things happening to us than being distracted.

Just now I couldn’t resist picking at that paper in front of my desk. Turns out that’s real glass, and sharp. I almost cut myself. I guess it would serve me right. And it points out an important truth about self-harm: People do it to distract themselves from other, deeper, overwhelming negative emotions or traumas that they can’t cope with. The intensity of the physical sensation of being cut, and then the immediate need to deal with the damage, pulls the mind out of its bad place, at least temporarily, into the present. So cutters are, in a way, addicted to the distraction that cutting provides.

But what if the things we’re most distracted by are things we love? Or are ways to be closer to the people we love? For example, watching sports is the ultimate distraction. I’m looking forward to watching basketball with my boyfriend tonight. Lakers versus Celtics. It’s kind of a big deal because my grandmother is the biggest Lakers fan of all time. She’s 90 years old and, when my sister visited her last month, she was wearing her “Lakers colors.” I have a memory of watching those two teams play with her when I was about ten, sitting in her bedroom cheering on Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Marveling at Larry Byrd’s mustache. This was a distraction, sure. But it was special. It transcended what we mean when we say we’re distracted. It makes me wonder how to even define the word “distraction.” I read that it’s the opposite of attention. But my grandma and I were paying attention to those basketball games—close attention. They had our full attention. They had our sustained attention.

Are “distraction” and “attention” purely relative terms, then? Something’s a distraction when you should be, or think you should be, paying attention to something else. But it’s not a distraction if it’s somehow sanctioned as a valid thing to focus on, by you or by society. In this sense, distraction can be (and is) anything and everything.

In the sense that Appleyard rails against, however, the meaning of distraction is much more specific. In that case, distraction is a way of functioning defined by continual skipping from one thing to the next without ever really settling in and truly absorbing any single thing. In the sense that it has changed our world in ways we have not even begun to grasp, “distraction” does not describe what life consists of but how it’s lived.

The Problem

II: The Problem
I found this quote in a Times article by Brian Appleyard: “I had become the embodiment of T.S. Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: ‘Distracted from distraction by distraction.’” He’s convinced that distraction is literally killing us. And in some ways, it is. Car accidents caused in part by texting or talking on a cell phone while driving are getting increasingly common. State legislatures keep trying to pass laws against it, but failing. Nobody wants to stop.

It seems these traffic fatalities are a price we’re willing to pay for the privelege of 24/7 connectedness. I admit I’m no different. I try to be careful about texting while driving—partly because I’m bad at it and recognize this—but I have absolutely no qualms with chatting while driving. Like me, most people shrug off the risks. But this isn’t the only problem linked to our growing distraction. There’s also the horrifying but utterly understandable trend, given how harried people are these days, of parents forgetting their babies or toddlers in the back seat in the heat of summer. A 2009 Washington Post article put the number of deaths each year in America at 15 to 25—a figure that’s jumped sharply in the past 20 years, and one that’s not likely to drop any time soon.

Oooooooh, cigarette smoke wafting in. Gak! Ack! I hate that shit. Ugh. Do I just pause and wait it out? Or push through? I’m going to try for pushing through. It’s pretty mellow, coming from somewhere outside. But still, that stuff makes me feel tainted deep in my soul. Igh.

Study after study shows that people are not only impaired while distracted, but also tend to underestimate the degree to which they’re impaired. Everyone, it seems, thinks they’re better at multitasking than anybody actually is. Neurologists point out that the brain is simply not wired to do two things at once. The same neural networks that decipher spoken language also decipher road signs. One has to take precedence over the other. You switch back and forth between tasks, very quickly, processing only one information stream at a time. If you don’t make the choice, your brain will. Even tasks that don’t seem to require the same “channels” (your brain has a visual channel, for example, and an auditory channel) like driving and talking on the phone, actually have overlapping channel requirements: Both have visual, manual, and auditory elements. The inefficiency and potential for overload here creates a perfect setup for mistakes to be made. And that can be deadly.

Still, I’m not the apocalyptic sort. I know this puts me at odds with the majority of Americans, but I firmly believe that the world is not going to end any time soon. I am, as a rule, skeptical of doomsday proselytizing of any kind. So I don’t really buy Appleyard’s prediction that distraction will be the death of us. But what I do buy (and maybe this isn’t really so different) is that it’s already killing him. Apocalyptic visions, in describing a future death for ourselves, often are simply metaphors for deaths we’re already experiencing, right now. Quoting psychology professor David Meyer, Appleyard points out that long-term, chronic distraction can cause stress-related illnesses, or even, he says, brain damage.

What does this mean for us? The question is a gripping one, hanging in our minds as we read these articles about teenagers who damage their thumbs sending hundreds of texts a day, and as we check our Facebook profile for the 18th time. It’s even made its way into dystopian literature, like the Young Adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go. Set in the future, its characters’ thoughts are broadcast, by an epidemic virus (clever), into the minds of everyone around them. There’s no privacy, but also, it’s loud: The characters call this phenomenon “Noise,” and it’s described in a New Yorker critique by Laura Miller as “a cacophony of impressions and ideas, rendered at one point as a web of overlapping scrawls.” Try concentrating with that going on. Oh wait, you already do.

This is Appleyard’s own life—one intruded on, on the day he chose to count, by 72 legitimate emails, 38 junk emails, the noise of others on his commuter train, numerous phone calls, and 400 news alerts on his iPhone (his own fault, this last one). But still, this guy’s a writer, not a party planner. And the damage, he says, “is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work.” He’s mourning his own death, here—the death of his idea of what his life was going to look like, and of his hopes for a kind of satisfying depth that should be inherent in the writer’s existence but now seems beyond his reach, blasted away like a thought formed in “Harrison Bergeron.”

The Beginning

Now that the week-long project at the Meow Wolf space is over, I'm going to post the resulting time-based article in pieces, since that will work best for the blog format. I'm also not going to explain the basics again here, so if readers are confused they should go back to earlier posts. Here is the first piece:

I: The Beginning
I begin at 3:55 pm on Tuesday, June 15. Already I’m a bit blown away by the distractions I’ll be contending with here, and this is probably as mellow as it’s going to get. As I sat down to write, I note the obvious ones: pop-electronic music coming from a speaker that, unexpectedly, is three feet behind me on my left; light coming from the open garage door directly behind me, casting a somewhat irritating glare on my computer screen; my nerves, which are wired, both in positive (excited) and negative (angst) ways; people talking and calling out to one another across the space as they build their installations; briefly (thank God), a power saw; and (also briefly), one of the artists doing his best imitation of a drunken Inigo Montoya.

Almost immediately my friend Justin walks in, wandering up to me and expecting engagement. Of course I oblige. We chat for a couple of minutes. He forgot his wallet, it turns out, and is hungry. I loan him ten bucks. He asks what I’m doing. I hand him a card but refrain from explaining beyond, “It’s an art project. I’m gonna blog it.” Thankfully that satisfies him, and he moves on. Then it pretty well mellows out. Once I adjust to the new surroundings, it’s not very different from working in a coffee shop, which I do all the time.

I’ll start with what we already know about distraction. I’ve been surfing the web in search of good articles on the topic, and the basic story line that’s on everybody’s mind right now goes something like this: We’re too distracted these days. It’s the Digital Age and we’ve got information flying at us in a mess of sound bytes, emails, and headlines scrolling across screen bottoms. It comes at us so fast that we bounce around trying to keep track of it all, never really sinking in to any one topic anymore. The skill of multitasking is a prized and fabled gift. What’s funny, however, is that science shows that people are inherently pretty bad at multitasking. In fact, our new Digital Age, by preventing sustained concentration, is actually making us stupider.
It’s like we’ve all become characters in that Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron,” with gadgets attached to our ears that blast disruptive sounds at us every few minutes to shred whatever thought might be forming. Only this wasn’t done to us by some Handicapper General; we’ve done it to ourselves.

So, am I going to do about it? Stumped by this question, I find myself closely examining my surroundings. My desk is pressed up against some kind of Plexiglas window coated with colored paper. The paper is peeling at the edges. I’m fighting the urge to pick at it. WOAH: The music is now doing a glitch-dub thing that is out of hand. Suddenly I wonder what I was thinking to decide this was a good idea. How the hell am I going to actually write something that requires not only actual thought but creative organization? I have a hard enough time concentrating in the best of circumstances. How can I possibly do it here? I don’t even know where to begin.

Anyway. Wow, I’ve actually already lost my train of thought. And the music isn’t even disruptive right now. Oh yeah. So the solution I seem to most often come across online is that we need to remove the distractions. Resist the temptation to let them into your life. Although this makes it sound like distraction is the eighth deadly sin, it is probably the best possible advice. If you can keep distractions from physically getting too close, you don’t have to contend with them in an internal way. This is good because we know how bad people are with self-control. If you don’t hear any music, you don’t have to ignore it. If you don’t have wireless Internet, you don’t have to choose not to click on that Firefox icon. If your cell phone is turned off, you don’t have to decide not to answer, even if it’s your boyfriend. Well, I can resist my boyfriend. The one person I absolutely can’t resist answering for is my mom.

“Hey, Emily, do you want a ceiling over your cave?” calls a guy standing right directly next to me, to another artist across the room. I seem to be smack in the middle of a discussion that started a few minutes ago. Hah! I didn’t notice that at first, because I was concentrating. This is promising. I have skills.

Except that now my boyfriend has texted me a joke. I couldn’t resist checking it, and then it was funny: “Neutrogena all day projection.” Oh yes, distracting advertising. I like to think this doesn’t affect me much. I have a deep-seated dislike for the idea that people are trying to make me like something so they can separate me from my money, so I tend to look away, or change the channel, or whatever. And in Santa Fe it’s not much of an issue, unless you’re on the highway with obnoxious billboards all around. But I can only turn away if I’m conscious of the distraction. What about getting distracted without even realizing it’s happening? How often does that happen to me?

Maybe I need to make a rule against checking my texts. Maybe I need to leave my phone in the car. I consider this for only a nanosecond before I’m swept with the feeling that I couldn’t possibly do that. What if Mom calls? The chances are slim, I know, but she’s so sweet and she might need something and I might be the only person around who can help her. Maybe my sister’s at work and my aunt’s not home. My mom doesn’t have a car, or a phone. It’s my job to help take care of her. So this is my weakness—not connection to purchases, but connection to loved ones.

The thing about the way we usually think about distraction is that we tend to focus on the obvious. Like, Duh, of course we should turn off the TV if we want to get work done. TV is stupid anyway. But not everything that distracts us is stupid. In fact, on some level at least, most of it is not. Distraction is now starting to look like problem of organization—not so much about what our lives consist of, but how we arrange them.

Oh wow, bad music. “Crystal ringlets paint a picture…” What? Oh, it’s either Stevie Wonder or somebody who wants to be him. Lyrics. Listening to music with lyrics is definitely dangerous to concentration, especially for a writer: I automatically focus on the words and I can’t help it. I’ve lost my train of thought again. I really was getting onto a track worth following. And now it’s vanished. And now—I’m not kidding—we’re listening to Christian music. Horribly bad Christian music. Benji and Emily are laughing and singing along. “Oh yes, what a novelty,” says Benji after it ends.

Cacophany and mayhem

When I decided I wanted to be a writer eight years ago, one of the reasons I thought this was a good idea for myself was that I knew writing is hard. Good, I thought, it will continue to be a challenge for a long time so I won't get bored with it after five years. What I've discovered since then is that it is much harder than I thought, but not for the reasons I expected. The hardest thing, day after day, year after effing year, is simply to sit down and do it. And the bitch of it is that the more I want it, the harder it gets. The more I feel like what I'm about to write matters—like, it's going to get me something tangible—the harder it is for me to get it out. So we come to my number one distraction: anxiety. And really, in my world that amounts to all-out panic far more often than I am in the habit of admitting.

I seem to have a certain kind of mind that can be characterized as such: I live within an ongoing inner cacophony that is both the source of all my creativity and, in the deepest sense, all my distractions. The thing is, I think I'm actually capable of blocking pretty much anything external out. [Major exception: jack hammers.] It's a knack I've had since childhood. I was so good at it actually that my dad used to stand in front of me, pause as if to take in the complete and utter detachment from my surroundings that I had visibly achieved, and say, "Earth to Marin! Earth to Marin!" It was sort of a ceremonial greeting. I do take some pride in having overcome, for the sake of my social existence, this tendency. And it's true I'm not as good at it as I used to be. But the point is I think I still can pull it off if I have to.

The thing that concerns me, then, are these inner distractions. It's not ADD, but it's something vaguely comparable. My brain goes here, then it goes there, then it goes somewhere else, then it comes back—but just for a minute—and then it's off again. The good thing is that it's clear to me that this process has something to do with how I manage to be creative, and particularly how I come up with my ideas, which are, as I like to say, "so ME." The bad thing is that as these thoughts happen, they sort of bang into each other all the time. Shit's always bouncing off of other shit, and then I'm chasing after something, and hit a wall, and pause to look at something pretty, and trip on something, and on and on. My thoughts aren't thoughts so much as they're collisions. My head is like that paper route video game from the 80's, where you have to navigate on your bike without something disastrous happening like getting run over by the blind old lady. Only it's in reverse; instead of throwing newspapers, I'm grabbing them out of the air as they fly by. I'm not kidding—it's mayhem in here, people, and if you read this and say in response, "But you sound so coherent and logical," all I can say to that is that I have heard that before. And I still have no idea how it manages to come out in such an apparently orderly fashion. Because that is absolutely not, I mean not remotely, what it looks like where it came from. And the truth is, I only know I'm making sense because people tell me so. And I do ask. Often.

This cacophony—the way things come together and engender, for instance, the Distraction Project—is both my favorite thing in life, and the bane of my existence. Because it's somehow related to the fact that it's extremely, extremely difficult for me to just sit down, hour after hour, day after day, and write about what I'm supposed to be writing about. It's connected to this low-grade agitation I seem to almost always feel, which just grows when I'm under pressure until I basically buckle. That's part of why, when I write, I want to write about whatever's in my head right now. Not what I'm getting paid to think about. Or supposed to think about even if I'm not getting paid. Either way. That sounds very artistic, I'm sure, but the reality is much less glamorous. Because the reality is that it isn't about writing what I want, it's about writing within a structure, or not. No matter what I "want" to write about, I have to put it in a structure that does NOT resemble the inside of my head in order for it to make sense. And in order to do that, I have to truly become a physical embodiment of a much calmer, more focused reality than the one inside my head. And THAT'S hard.

So, as I've maybe said before, the Distraction Project is in part an effort to sort through what distracts me, and basically figure out how to write. Maybe it's just about discipline. Or feeling like it has a point. Or just being excited about the discoveries. Maybe external factors are far more important than I realize. And if so, maybe I can figure out what works best for me. Maybe the way for me to write is to write short. Oh, but that's so tragic if it's true. I have of course tried lots of different tactics and techniques, so I'll describe what's happened with those in the coming weeks, before the Experiment gets underway. Then, let the wild rumpus start!

First article effort set for June

Wow. Sometimes people inspire you and sometimes they leave you speechless. I went to a weekly meeting at Meow Wolf artist collective last night to see about getting permission/support for my idea of placing a desk in their way for a week to do my first time-based article. I knew one person there, out of about 15, and generally in circumstances like this, having to stand up and describe CTD coherently to people who had no idea what it was, I'd be pretty intimidated. But the whole vibe there was so welcoming, warm, and fun, that I almost immediately felt comfortable.

After an hour or so of sitting around a circle going over "business stuff," they shifted focus to their upcoming June show—a massive installation project called Habitat, for which they're going to fill the entire MW space with all manner of sculptural/performance/whatever artwork that relates to the idea of home. The project has barely begun to be developed so far. Nick Chiarella unveiled (with an eloquent dedicatory speech, I should add) a half-scale model of the MW building, which everyone then more or less jumped on and began playing around with ideas for structures they could build as the framework for the show. Somewhere in there I had a few words with Emily Montoya, who suggested that maybe I'd like to do CTD in conjunction with Habitat in some way. It opens in mid-June, she said. I thought that would work well, so halfway through the discussion, she announced that Habitat had its first real "idea." Then everyone was staring at me and I began explaining my concept and what I wanted to do in the MW space. Amazingly, I started seeing eyes widen and heads nod, and when I finished several people said, "That's a really cool idea!" So there it was.

But that, it turned out, was just the beginning. A couple of guys started peppering me with questions. "Could we incorporate that into Habitat?" "Like, could other people use your desk to write in when you're not here?" "Could we leave a typewriter on it for anyone to use?" "What if the desk moved across the floor?" "And then ended up in like an empty office? Like it comes home." "What if we projected your words onto the wall behind you?" I said I had thought of that and wasn't sure I was ready to be that exposed yet. "We could project the words backward then, or sideways, or any way you want." I mean, this all happened in the first five minutes.

I conceived of CTD, in part, as a way to have a collective experience even while engaged in the solitary pursuit of writing. I think my experience here is going to be much bigger, and much more participatory, than I expected. And I think its going to involve way more of what someone last night referred to as "manic creativity" than I had envisioned. The surprises have already begun! It makes me think of a list of performance-art tenets I scribbled down and stuck up on the fridge on the morning I came up with the CTD idea. I was inspired by a New Yorker profile about performance artist Marina Abromovich, and a group of artists in the 1970s who decided it should be done this way:
No rehearsal
No predicted end
No repetition
Extended vulnerability
Exposure to chance
That's what I wanted to do with CTD. Amazingly, I'm already doing it.

Creation Through Distraction

Creation Through Distraction is a time-based art piece involving a busy public location in which I sit and write, three hours each day for one week. My goal is to confront and utilize the distractions around me—while also trying to block them out—in order to write an essay about the experience. My hope is that this experimentation with my own writing process will yield insights into how and why we create. CTD is also intended as an examination of the boundaries between art and art criticism, focus and distraction, performance and product.

For me, CTD is an attempt on some level to confront and make peace with the tension I constantly feel as a writer—between the isolation of the writer’s experience and the need to connect in order to create. (I'm also aware that CTD may eventually become somebody else’s distraction.) It's a twist on the idea of creation through destruction, playing instead with our sense of time as a commodity we never have enough of, and the feeling that distraction has become central to our way of life. The idea is to generate circumstances that bring these daily struggles into relief, so I can learn from them and write about what I find.

Most fundamentally, I want to make my writing process a collective experience—to see if that’s even possible—because no one writes in a void anyway. CTD additionally touches on, and somewhat upturns, the conventional relationship between art and article. As an art critic, my creative act is to react to the art; although it’s in conversation with the art, it is considered to be utterly separate from the art. Yet art itself is always reacting, in some way, to something. This piece is, for me, both a revolt against and a deeper inquiry into that separation. Also, as a performance, it inverts the conventional relationship between writing and performance in traditional theater. Instead of the written words coming first, and then being shared through the performance, here the performance precedes the presentation of the words, and is their subject.

What will I write? I'm curious to find out.