A Conversation With Distraction

I conceal myself and stand guard over the cache of purpose, my only estate.

Comes an interloper and an apprehensive glimmer of memory.  I should know this one but the mist is so heavy.

"Halt!  Who goes there, friend or foe?"

"Friend, friend."

"Step to the light and name yourself."

"I, friend, am Distraction.  We know each other.  We have long been traveling companions."

"Bring yourself to rest on the far end of that log.  Be cautious in the doing of it.  I shall sit on the near end and we shall talk.  I will allow you this brief period.  But make no mistake.  This time in yielding to distraction I have a definite although subordinate aim."

"And what may that aim be, Sir?"

"To become intimately familiar with your vagaries thus enabling me to dispense you finally.  I shall then be done with your enticing detours and your alluring false trails.  I shall be able to conserve my time for single purpose with no more scent of red herring."

"Although ignoble your intent is understandable."

"Why then do you call it ignoble?"

"Because it is beneath your capabilities.  You said that we would talk and that you wished to acquaint yourself of me."

"That's right.  I did."

"May we then mutually agree as to when the conversation is finished and my annihilation takes place?"

"Since my poor sight turns any attempt to view my surroundings to drudgery rather than entertainment I'd as well put to use my excellent sense of hearing.  Go ahead and sound off.  If a subject as old and tired doesn't lull me to sleep I'll match you tit for tat."

"Excellent!  We shall both find our entertainment.  If I demonstrate to you that your intent for me is based on fallacy and at the same time impossible of accomplishment will you then grant that the plan be put to rest to be considered no more?"

"Agreed.  It is hardly a concession on my part since it would be imbecilic to further pursue it.  Now I have some ground to establish before you begin."

"That is your civil right to claim.  Besides it will undoubtedly give me more ammunition.  I'll accept all the help I can glean.  Go on.

"Thank you.  You approached my treasure trove in the guise of a friend.  I know you as something else.  There in that cache lies my purpose unfulfilled because you have hounded my tracks and have continuously decoyed me.  I find no valid reason for my further condonation of your existence."

"May I then invoke your patience?  It seems proper that we should find a common premise from which to launch ourselves into what I think will be converging orbits."

"Do you have a question to ask me, Mr. D.?"

"Yes.  Do you give credence to the immortality of mankind?"

"I think it would be a mistake to attempt to use it as a community blanket.  However if an individual merits it I think it likely."

"And who is to judge that merit or lack of same?"

"I would say that the end judgment would come from the seat of creation."

"I think we have our springboard.  Do you want a cigarette?"

"Don't try to distract me."

"As you will.  I'll take off.  You may not recall me as Distraction but I was with you in The Garden when you were known as Adam."

"Perhaps.  Maybe not."

"Let us cover this inch of the first mile before we proceed.  Let me ask you this:  What would you name that unfulfilled, frustrated feeling which was with you before the advent of Eve?"

"Admittedly whatever it was it made it very difficult to keep my mind on the business at hand."

"Exactly!  I think we can move ahead.  Do you now concede my presence here on this log or are you indulging in mad ravings at nothing?"

"Oh, you're here all right.  For several moments I have forgotten my purpose."

"Then do you find it possible to credit me with immortality also?"

"Touche!  I guess I'll have to."

"Take your time on this one.  Do you still think you can extinguish me?"

"Don't consider this my final answer but we have been told that all things pass away."

"Granted.  But they return full circle."

"All right.  I'll pigeonhole that one and wait until irrefutable inspiration comes."

"When your last answer comes it is my opinion that you will call it by a name other than inspiration.  You see, when we find a usable thought we are sometimes too lazy or think ourselves too busy to return and enlighten ourselves as to how we came by a piece of knowledge.  We shun thoroughness by simply claiming inspiration.  As most of us will when confronted by death I have concerned myself first of all with a reprieve.  That is why I attacked your program back to front."

"Do not presume, Mr. D.  Your patonage is not sought or needed."

"I am sorry.  I sometimes fall prey to distraction myself.  It seems to be good for the spleen.  A lapse and nothing more.  Let us now consider the first part of your problem, namely your ambition to become intimately acquainted with me, to ferret out my Achilles heel.  I would if it were relevant save our time by apprising you of all my weaknesses.  However you shall soon understand that there is no need for this.  You can never know me so well.  You, immortal mortal, are one.  I am a horde, infinite in my numbers.  Seldom in one man's experience do I appear twice in the same guise.  You yourself lend me the power to operate in this way through your wishful thinking and other devices.  Actually you compel me."

"Where is all this taking us?  Is it designed to immobilize us?"

"I intend to sketch a few of the myriad images of distraction."

"Move on, please move on."

"There was that portion of pulchritude across the back fence.  You noticed her and hoed a prize tomato plant off flush with the surface of the earth."

"Yeah, boy.  She was some chick.  By the way, why did you bring her in at that time?  I told my wife that the starlings ate that plant."

"I arranged that to relieve you of boredome for a while.  You should be grateful."

"Why?  Nothing came of it."

"But your blood coursed faster.  You almost came to life.  There was that beautiful double rainbow.  You had to straighten from your toil in that ditch in order to view it.  You gained a little rest and a renewed spark of something indispensible.  There was the little boy with tear-muddied cheeks.  You missed your ride to work so that you might retrieve his marble from a storm sewer.  There was that moonlit glade some distance from the unfamiliar trail you walked in the Arkansas Ozarks.  You had to explore it.  Afterward the trail was hard to pick up again.  How about the crap game out by the area fence at Fort Leavenworth?  It held just enough fortune to make you a week late in your arrival home on a two-week leave.  Since you had to allow for travel time you had two days at home."

"I think you are stalling for time, Mister D.  The things of which you speak are all very true but what do they say?"

"They tell me that I am one of the mainstays of true perspective without which our values would become a culture for the propagation of social chaos."

"Could one of your vices be pomposity, Mister D.?"

"That is not impossible.  Given the power to so do, would you erase, cancel out, or completely obliterate an item of your experience here in this sphere?"

"No!"

"Why not?"

"It was my trail.  I came here by it.  If any of it were changed I might be somewhere else."

"And what would be so terrible about that?"

"Nothing, perhaps.  I just like where I am now.  I wouldn't risk any change.  I don't have to understand the road which brought me here.  I need only to prize it."

"Well spoken.  My previous remarks were intended to bring forth that very thought.  I knew it was in there somewhere.  Never in my experience with you have I been disappointed as to the degree of your intelligence."

"Thank you, Mr. D.  By that same experience I am no longer subject to flattery."

"You should understand that I am not fighting for time.  Your prolonged audience has convinced me that I need not fear assassination at your hand.  What I now struggle against is the prospect of being merely tolerated.  I seek to show that I have my usefulness and to employ that as an approach to a mutually beneficial friendship.  You understand this desire to be useful.  It has always been paramount among your aims."

"That is so.  It has brought me back from the brink time and again."

"I feel that we shall each benefit if you see fit to answer.  What in that cache do you so jealously protect?  What is this all important goal which you call your purpose?"

"It is to journey to the place from whence I came when I began this quest, in possession of something of worth which was not previously mine."

"So why the desire to be useful?"

"It makes the road more tolerable, even enjoyable."

"We seem to be approaching identity.  That is my precise feeling as regards this subject.  Please try to realize that this secondary desire can properly bear the title Diversion which is really a self-induced form of Distraction."

"You are mercurial in your mental acrobatics, Mr. D.  Nonetheless I deem your processes dependable."

"Then boot this thought around.  What properties would make a single goal attainable?"

"Offhand I must list perseverance, endurance, and a willingness to close out all side show attractions."

"I tell you with conviction that these three traits cannot survive without the company of others."

"Name some others."

"If the task is to be performed one must have the power of a motive.  Call it zest, enthusiasm, gratification, or another name.  Whatever it is it feeds on adventure.  Adventure survives by ingesting the unknown, even surprise, and thoroughly digesting it.  The provender known as the unknown brings in all creation past, present, and future.  Hence survival makes it mandatory that we have good peripheral vision and ignore nothing."

"My values may be a little misplaced.  I hadn't considerd these things very deeply."

"Then please do so now as we go along."

"I shall so do.  You know, Mr. D., I'm beginning to think that my best course is to learn to co-exist with you."

"It is my hope, immortal mortal, that our association develops into something better than that.  Do you happen to have a favorite possession?  I don't mean that it should be of necessity something of great monetary value but something that you would least like to part with."

"That question interests me.  I don't know  - Oh yes, yes I do.  I think with things just as they are at the moment I'd like least of all to part with an old claw hammer of mine.  I acquired this thing early in life and it is still with me.  I have replaced the handle in it once."

"Did that hammer ever seem to mash your finger?"

"Well, I used to think it had.  There were several times when I mashed fingers with it.  I now credit myself with the blame for each injury."

"There may be a parallel here involving the hammer and me.  It seems, sir, that you now place a value on that hammer which the Internal Revenue Service would not recognize for the purpose of computing your income tax."

"That is an absolute fact.  I tried for a deduction based on what I consider its worth to me, listing the commensurate depreciation.  They laughed at me and I had to do the whole damned page over."

"By public standards then would you not say that you are bcoming a wee bit senile?"

"No, by God!  That hammer has helped me to build.  I bet I have sheathed five million acres of roof with that thing.  And it would be impossible to count the number of studs or estimate the area of forms that I have hammered home with it.  All ot this is to the benefit of humanity in general I'll have you know.

"Careful now.  Excitement could be a detriment to reason.  Do you still use the hammer?"

Well, you see - not very much.  My eyes, uh."

"And you do not wish to part with it?"

"No.  I don't."

"When you first acquired this hammer - you got it how?"

"Why, I picked it up from a traveling salesman who was passing through Ozark, Missouri."

"When you first became its owner did you anticipate forming such a close attachment to it?"

"No.  I gave it no thought.  It was simply something to use.  I needed a tool."

"Since you no longer use the hammer what would you call the relationship which exists between you two?"

"Why, I guess you'd just have to dub it a friendship.  You know, old buddies."

"What value or lack of it do you place on the injuries suffered when the face of the hammer came in contact with your digits?"

"Mr. D.  The only thought in my mind is that they made us blood brothers."

"Tell me.  Has my aim been clarified by this engagement?"

"Perfectly.  You have put togwether a splendid defense.  It is as though you had become prosecutor.  It shall be as you wish.  There is one condition."

"What is it?"

"Instead of skulking in the undergrowth you will walk up here with me and make certain we do not pass any side roads.  We'll explore them all.  Thus when we arrive back at headquarters we shall have the log of our travels teeming with data."

"Agreed."

"With your incisiveness you can cut things to size before I nail them down."

"That will be interesting."

"Who knows.  We may be sent out on another expedition right away if we can to a thorough job of this one."

"What about the cache?"

"Leave it.  We know what it is and it hasn't changed though the probability of success is enhanced.  Let's hit the trail."

- William E. (Bill) Maples, 1916-1986, So's Your Old Man.