Addle the Brain

March 16, 2015

5475191Overcast and chilly this Monday afternoon on California’s north coast, dampening the air with moist, low clouds that appear thick as shit.
Sunshine scheduled for tomorrow and Wednesday, rain expected again toward the end of the week.
Dry changes in a routine that’s as fluid as a brick.

In retirement now close to seven months, life has ostensibly evolved into a daydream-fueled, kaleidoscopic cinder block of a calendar, slow days passing so quickly, it’s hard to keep track.
Weird, too, such a personally-unprecedented period of empty clock-space, has led to a humongous-shitload of thinking, most ending in the abstract, does remind me sometimes of the opening bit in “Annie Hall,” the deep well of philosophy: ‘Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.’

Honesty, though, mostly all good so far.

(Illustration found here).

Oddest maybe is the movement forward of time — despite doing pretty-fucking-close to ‘nothing,’ time keeps churning-grinding quickly into the immediate future — and here I find myself like everybody else on the end stretch for the month of March, seemingly quicker than a gnat’s fart farther from that asshole Santa Claus 2014, who’s retreating deeper-back into the bowels of history.
And since I’ve always been a world-class daydreamer, maybe since birth, but especially since I started going to the movies as a real-young kid (movies are heroin-like fuel for daydreamers), the last months have allowed a lot of free time to dream the days away.

Although I’d figured last fall to post more on the blog with all the free time, now seemingly all that excess space has been chunked-full of daydreams. Apparently, I can’t daydream and write at the same time — ain’t that some shit? I do manage to twattle-out some stories, but nothing like advertised, or able to do. Sometimes I do feel guilty, but I just think about something else. And no, daydreams aren’t all X-rated (besides, that’s fantasy, dumb-ass), but can be created from a nearly-unmeasurable list of subjects — like for instance, wouldn’t it be neat to dream back to a talent show in high school (1966), where my rock band would perform the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night,” as rendered by the Scorpions 20 years later? I can’t download the Scorpions’ YouTube version, for some reason, but you get the daydream point. Dude, I’d graduated not 0-for high school!
Writers desire to write, but sometimes it’s way-easier, and way-more lazy to lay about and just think about shit. Just maybe getting too old to generate hard, serious, reality thoughts; maybe my brain’s ability to actually function has peaked, now it’s on a downward slide into pure daydream.

All our noodles are the same, but not at all. Some are more dumb than others, can’t be helped, but age might not be a real factor — new brain developments via Pacific Standard magazine:

Sports writers will tell you that athletes peak in their 20s, after which point their skills quickly erode.
Most other things in our lives—our careers, for example—take a good deal more time to develop.
Intelligence, it turns out, peaks a bit later, too, though with a twist, according to a recent study: Some facets of intelligence peak when we’re still in high school or college, while others continue to improve into our 40s, 50s, and beyond.

Depending on which of those given measures you’re going by, people peak at very different times.
Some of the youngest participants did best on the number-to-symbol coding task, with the peak performance around 19 or 20 years old.
After that, performance steadily declined with age.
Working memory peaked between the mid 20s to mid 30s before beginning a relatively slow decline.
Those over 40 shouldn’t fret, though.
On the “mind in the eyes” test, participants reached near-maximum abilities by their early 20s but kept improving until 48, after which emotion-recognition skills declined very slowly.
Vocabulary, meanwhile, climbed with the participants’ age, and gave little sign of slowing down.

One can never learn enough words, whatever strikes your fancy.

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