Can you dig it?

I had 73 things to do today and somehow work came in at 74. You know how it is during a short week. I know that nothing will be open on Thanksgiving and I won't really want to do anything on Friday except for watch some football and eat some leftovers, so that leaves today and tomorrow to do everything. Of course, that won't happen since my time is rarely my own, and I won't leave with enough leftovers to last me very long. Oh well, no sense complaining about any of this.

I am struck by a single thought this evening, and that is how is it that people can interrupt you at precisely the moment when you were about to have that moment of clarity? You know that moment when the tornado that swirls the thoughts, activities, deadlines, worries, fears, and desires all around into a windblown cocktail that you alone get to enjoy from right in the middle of it Dorothy and Toto style, suddenly loses its steam and lays down each of the multitude of elements in your world into a very orderly grid resembling the situation room of a battleship (or at least the ones in the movies, half lit, but with green blips showing various items on the radar) and moving at the speed of that carousel with the horses and the circus music from your youth. That moment when you feel like you actually can do all of the things that you need to do if only you approach them in precisely this specific order and devote precisely this specific amount of brainpower on each and...POOF! Somebody interrupts you and it's all gone. You were a juggler and someone diverted your attention long enough to make it impossible for you to keep 4 balls that you had in the air from crashing to the ground. How does that always happen?

I've tried writing things down and making this imaginary perfect grid an actual living document, but even that doesn't quite get it done. Sure, I may have something to reference with respect to what has been completed already and what has yet to be completed but the intangibles get lost. What intangibles, you ask? The INTANGIBLE intangibles! If they weren't intangible, they'd probably be perfectly preserved on the paper and any clown could see exactly what they were. But since they are the style points that might define the difference between John Riggins' solid game and Walter Payton's breathtaking one, even though the stat line of each might be identical, there's no since in trying to teach you if you don't understand already. Sometimes I can leave one of the balls up in the air for awhile and keep on juggling just as if no time had passed at all. Other times, however, it's like I've stumbled upon some 13th century playwright's notes and am supposed to be able to discern the spirit of the subject matter and what exactly inspired him to write the things that he wrote and why he wrote them the way he did. It doesn't even seem like these were my own ideas in the first place. I can't even make any sense out of what I've jotted down.

I feel like Jack Nicholson's Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets sometimes when I'm on a roll and the phone rings or someone sends me a text. Maybe the only true way to get anything done is to do it at precisely the moment when you get inspired and then not to stop until you are finished. Now wouldn't that be something.