Clothespin.
New York Sketch Pad Clothespin
1965, Greenwich Village Period
ball point pen on paper
This was in the days before we knew about attention deficit disorder or dyslexia. Here I use the sketch pad to get a grip on myself in order to be able to at least start to draw the clothespin. Before I sort of made it, it looks like I came up with about fifteen things to work on in that one page. The large newsprint sketch pad was a wonderful tool for this kind of process, but the tack I took eventually was to bow to the previous pressures from the well-meaning experts. As I said, there were experts, whysperts, and zeesperts commin' outa the woodwork when you don't need them.
So is a.d.d. a handicap. Well, I don't know if mine is a severe case or what, but surprise. No. The handicap is the way the rest of the guys do it. They're the ones with the disability. Pity them. Of course I couldn't do it their way. No sane, rational person could. No one was born with a linear mind. The trick (I shouldn't call it that, but otherwise you might not understand or might not want to understand), is to "step" out of the sequential into the heretofore thought of as random. There. Now you're an instant genius.
And it's not just human beings. I had fabulous results with finches. I scared my wife, the research budget got to be over one hundred dollars a month. But in the end I had a flock of genius birds in the trees. Their favorite was a certain phrase of Procoviov's "Peter and the Wolf" but they sped it up to a fraction of a second.
Step back and get the big picture. That's the beginning of getting a view on how the mind really functions. Now you're getting out of that pea-sized section of the brain mass that the average person is confined to using for his or her depraved lifetime. The mind is capable of functioning at far greater speeds than the contemporary humanity permits it to do. Thousands of times faster. Or didn't you know that? There you go. Instant genius. And I didn't have to put it on a pay-me-first infomercial. This is the internet. It's a different world. Brilliance is not what you think but how you think.
You know, I could see this bear market and recession of two thousand one coming a long ways away. I knew it when I heard those self-confident jerks start using catch words like "focus". These guys were from the world of TV. where all you saw was what the camera let you see. That's what made the horror movies so effective. Without peripheral vision you had it. You couldn't see the danger until the director put it in as shock value.
You zero in on one tiny aspect and focus on something and you miss everything else, like the solution to your problem. So before we knew about a.d.d., I thought everyone's mind worked that way. I couldn't believe it when I found out they were doing that on purpose. One thing at a time. No wonder they built such a crappy civilization, without it they never would have survived.
When I worked in retail and the cheap two-bit managers dragged me off to the office two or three times a week to bawl me out insisting that I focus, I wanted to tell them where to get off. They were always doing great in only one of hundreds of aspects needed to effectively run a shop like theirs. All they could do was make it look good. Go to the mart and try to go take a look at the fixture room. Well, maybe if their p.r. guys read this they'll have some people focus on that till the poor little pea minds start to forget.
Get a camera and take a look at something in focus. Then look away from the box and see what you missed. Just about everything. Linear thinking may have it's uses but when you're really trying to get something significant done, forget about it.
Click here to see what I mean in the picture I call "Out of Focus Blossom".
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