The Scattered God

I drive by casinos and snicker at the number of cars in the lot. I am aghast at the flagrant disregard for life. Gamblers. Poor, poor gamblers. Stuck in there pulling down on the arm of that machine. Pulling. Hoping. Dozens of cars. In the afternoon. On a Monday. Where do these people get the money to pour into the machine. These people. As if I am different. I am enlightened. Above. Beyond the low desperation of the Depends-clad die-hard slot-machine addict. I would never stoop to that world. Pulling. Spin. Pulling. Coins. Spin. Bing. Bing. Lights. Pulling. Spin. For the promise of winning. The hope of victory. Of fixing all my problems. Saving myself. If I only had a million dollars. I would be out of this rat race. This hamster wheel. Always trying to survive. To stay alive. To keep afloat. On top. Treading water. Making money. Spending. Making. Spending. Those people. Who are they? Those people with flashing lights, and the bing, bing of a cell phone text comes in. And my body tingles with excitement. Have I won? What juicy lemons have lined up for me. And it’s not even my phone. But I salivate for my own email. Just to check. Maybe I have one. A message. A golden message. And I crave checking. If only I could see. Just one email. Just check it. Just one text. Just give me one. It could be Important. Relevant. Spin. Pulling. Coins. Pulling. Bing. Bing. For the promise of winning. The hope of victory. Of fixing… and so I am those people. I am that car in the lot. I am a Depends-clad die-hard email addict. And I am not.

There is a program for writers called Q10 that blacks out your screen, provides green type-writer font, and a rectangular, blinking cursor from the first Commodore 64. Nothing else. No distractions. No checking email in the middle of writing. No looking at Facebook while I think of the next thing. No background screen image to wander into while I wait for inspiration. Just a bright green blinking cursor. And the tick tick tick of the keyboard. Back to writing on a typewriter, rolling the page back with white-out to fix a mistake. Just the ideas. The flow. The writing. We are trained to distract. To look for the next thing. To check the text. We are conditioned to follow the monkey mind. To worship it as a kind of scattered God. The scattered God. The mind as God. Distraction as our Church of Worship. We sit at the Sacred Alter of Multi-Tasking and feel productive. Feeding the scattered addict. Over and over and over again. We spend our days as if our head is us. We are our heads. And stopping is sacrilegious. Breathing is blasphemous.