{"id":14303,"date":"2026-04-11T08:22:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T13:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=14303"},"modified":"2026-04-11T08:22:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T13:22:01","slug":"sometimes-i-wonder-what-it-was-like-to-be-able-to-concentrate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/14303","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes I Wonder What It Was Like To Be Able To Concentrate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m such a bundle of stress lately it&#8217;s really making it hard to live my days. If I could just get some of it out of me in my art room or with my cameras I would feel a lot better. But I can&#8217;t concentrate on anything, even just mindless housework, enough to do any of it.<\/p>\n<p>The best I can manage is write some stories and work on my ghost-ish novel, but that&#8217;s only because how I write. I don&#8217;t start at the beginning, I start in the middle, and write pieces of it from the inside out, then try to connect everything together and make it flow. It&#8217;s hard, but doable even in my present state.<\/p>\n<p>The only time in my life I ever started at the beginning of a story and wrote through to its end was my first ever erotic short story I finished a couple days ago. It riffs on something that was bothering me and I had it practically all written out in my head even before I sat down to it (which is kinda how I do my cartoons and art drawings) and I just blasted through it in one sitting and that&#8217;s never happened to me before. I remember reading that when James HIlton got the idea for Goodbye Mr. Chips he finished it in one sitting and I could not imagine how anyone could do that, even one as short as that one was (it&#8217;s more of a novella). But I did it and I&#8217;m pretty happy with it and no one will ever see it. Connoisseurs of pronography can laugh but I&#8217;m the kid who was shocked to discover there would be group showers in Jr. High School gym. I&#8217;m the gay adult who wouldn&#8217;t take his clothes off while staying in clothing optional gay resorts at Key West and Puerto Vallarta. Normally I write my fiction on Google Docs and my essays on my blog, so I can have them to work on no matter which computer I&#8217;m sitting at. I&#8217;ve got that story locked away in one of my IronKeys. I think Google Docs censors stuff like that anyway.<\/p>\n<p>I have an MRI scheduled for Monday morning at Union Memorial, and a session with a neurologist later this month. Hopefully I get some answers as to why I can&#8217;t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, why I&#8217;m getting more and more forgetful, and why I&#8217;m slightly dizzy all the time. I keep wanting to sit down at my drafting table and I don&#8217;t because I can&#8217;t concentrate.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m such a bundle of stress lately it&#8217;s really making it hard to live my days. If I could just get some of it out of me in my art room or with my cameras I would feel a lot better. But I can&#8217;t concentrate on anything, even just mindless housework, enough to do any [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[55],"class_list":["post-14303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-this-and-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14304,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14303\/revisions\/14304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}