Undivided Attention: a System

     "I have a system." 
     It was several months--maybe a year, at this point--when she finally told me. It's an ingenious trick that, I am certain, everyone should use.
     "I have a friend on standby. If the date doesn't go well, I send the text to have her call. Pretend that it's a family emergency. That way I get out without having to be a jerk."
     They always say that it could happen to you--something outrageous; something uncommon to the point of rarity. Faking memory loss or death to get out of a marriage rare. The story would be picked up by the Times or Reader's Digest. You'll see it if you're still a reader, which--let's face it--you probably aren't; who reads the newspaper anymore or the Digest? But it is safe to say that you will hear about it. No matter how far away you remove yourself from traditional written media, no matter how far you remove yourself from the news and nonfiction, the power of oral storytelling will always remain. And among the insipid gossip of celebrities or those who posture themselves as such, you will hear this story. Certainly, it will change. The facts and names will, but the core of the moral will remain. It could happen to you. It almost happened to me.
     And it all boiled down to that dinner. The one piece of normalcy that my fractured psyche could offer, almost made her put in the call within the first five minutes.
     "No one ever made me dinner before."
     "I thought it was nice."
     "It's weird."
     Which makes me wonder just where are we going in this day and age. It was not my showing off my cooking skills. It wasn't my manners, or unwillingness to make a move. It was not the fact that I cleaned house; she found that weird, also. It was the strangest part of me. It my fear of being left without anything to say that kept that call from coming.
     "So, Elliott, there is no such thing as undivided attention?"
     No. There is not. Like I said months ago before getting distracted and sick and learning just how poor my time management skills really are when it comes to doing things on my own without any monetary reward, it probably never existed. Our attention spans are just as bad today as they were fifty years ago. After all, our parents couldn't learn from history--or properly learn it. Neither can we.
     But for a shining moment I was able to hold--through Nietzschean practice and enough material to make Oprah feel like an introvert--that call off until her friend thought that she had been murdered. Then the call that came was one of, "I'm fine. I'm having a really good time."
     I think the moral really is this: be dedicated; motivated; practiced. Just because you can put something out willy nilly, doesn't mean you should. The extra love put into something is the difference between a fake emergency and a kiss good night at 3:30a.

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table, drinking Blue Moon Valencia Grove Amber.

Undivided Attention: a Delayed Story

     I have been off track for a while, writing a series on--I don't know what you'd call it--technology and narcissism? Then the tragedy that struck home. Finally, I was just thrown off course by the greatest mishap of all: inspiration. May it throw me off course everyday, if it so wishes. Now, I'll let it throw me off again...or back on.
     Here we go...

***

     It is funny how many times I have started past blogs, or written past blogs, about dates with girls and girls that I've dated. I haven't dated that many, and have kept even fewer around constantly. Yet here we are, again. 

     But this one has a nicer tune to it than the last few. Happily I can begin this blog with something other than a relationship or girlfriend gone sour. This story ends happily--with things going great. (If you're the kind of person who doesn't like the ending revealed to you, I'm sorry. You have my permission to go take a bathroom break.) This story involves my current girlfriend, and it took place in the same year that my son's mother walked out...

     It was the summer time, and my son and I were winding down our lease at the old apartment. I was still in a custody battle that was fast turning out to be less of a fight and more of a staring contest, to see who would blink and relinquish parenting time first. Most of my money had gone to the greatest lawyer on Earth, and I say that without any irony. She is the best. But my health was deteriorating, I dropped a lot of weight, and my writing was done. I was blocked up completely.

     There was not even a thought in my mind regarding dating.

     I take that back. I did try. It was one of those online deals, and nothing came out of it, save for a couple more bruises to my ego. Then there came a funny little message:

     "This might seem weird, but I met you at my Grandmother's house a few years ago."

I won't bore you with minutia. She wasn't lying. We did meet. I did remember with a few more clues. We went on a date.

     Aware of my situation, she agreed to come over to the apartment and have dinner--she thought the dinner part was just a joke. Only in retrospect do I see just how uncommon this really is. I guess it's downright weird. Cut me some slack, though. It had been almost half a decade since my last first date. I wasn't just rusty. I was terrified.

     What does this have to do with undivided attention, like your old posts?

      I will tell you.

      My one great fear is not having anything to say. Not anything good, mind you. Shooting the breeze is a great American past time: an event commemorated through divulging into idle gossip and superfluous daily events. Now, in many cases--mostly in music but in recitation of scripts too--I could memorize with the best of them, but when it comes to conversation I freeze up faster than a Floridian at the Ididerod. To combat this, I prepared. Like Nixon, I committed to memory what I thought was a solid hour's worth of material. Or so I thought. As it turns out, conversation doesn't move as fast as a play, and it often takes unexpected turns--like a play. We went on until four in the morning.

     And yet it could have all been over before nine thirty. How is that? That's a story for next time.

That's all from Elliott McCloud at the Kitchen Table rewinding his Olivetti Lettera ribbon spools.

Undivided Attention; or, Hang on I Just Need to Send This Text...uh...yep...Okay. I'm Good.

     It is the latest phenomenon to strike the human race: connectivity. And it is doing for us today (if you adjust for inflation) what written language, the printing press, the coffee house, the newspaper, the mail system, the telegram, the telephone, and radio have done for us in the past. It reduces the time lapsing between queries for information.
     I know what my son is doing nearly thirty miles away, because of constant updates--text messages, phone calls, pictures. And all of it goes from a phone in one pocket to a phone in my pocket.
     A little reflection is good for anyone's day; I just want you to stop and think about what I just wrote. In 2013 I can have a picture sent to my phone. In 2003 a camera was not yet standard on a cellular phone; Android was still in the works. In 1993 we could barely make a phone call on a cellular phone; pay phones were on every corner. In 1983 computers were still getting used to the idea of using something other than command line; Atari just came out. In 1973 no one had heard of AIDS, and had no means of looking it up, unless they found a library with a national science journal from THE FUTURE! 
     It took a decade to make the computer accessible to the average Joe when the Smart Phone Android and iPhone took about 10 minutes. In just the past ten years we've seen touch screens become so standard, their BS children toys! Important people use Twitter when once it was implored by the likes of the New York and London Times to ignore it, for it is a silly thing that will fast pass.
     That is how fast and crazy our world is. We have--never in all human history--been as advanced as we are today. Not that we know of anyway. Yet, when you look at what we do with all of this new stuff, it is kind of saddening. They put a man on the moon with the equivalent of my high school calculator, and I need my Windows Vista 64bit computer to do addition and subtraction--I haven't seen a single lunar landing that isn't somehow tied to Angry Birds. 
      Sure this new world of uber tech and connectivity has had its out of the park homers: Libya, Tunisia, and now (maybe) Syria; the Kilpatrick sex scandal; Wikileaks...But these social revolutions and "we gotcha!" have been swept under by the waves upon waves of useless facebook posts, twitter messages, instagrams, and piles and piles of redundant porn.
     And most importantly, we have forgotten how to pay attention. I wonder who got to this line. After all, statistically speaking, if it isn't 100 words or less, no one will read. Prove me wrong world. Prove me wrong.

***

     There was a date I had  many years ago. Over all, it was a forgettable affair. We had little to nothing to talk about, and, truthfully, neither of us really knew how to hold down a conversation like adults. We were just 18 and 17 or something like that. I don't blame her for that. I don't even blame myself. But what I will hold against any human being is that darn phone sitting at the center of the table, as though it is some kind of fashionable conversation piece.
     "O, is that the new blackberry?"
     "Why, yes, it is. It really is one of a kind."
     "Is that so?"
     "Of course not. It's just like another 100 million phones sitting in the pockets of on the go businessmen and women and truck drivers and kids and drug dealers and door to door salespeople."
     Worse yet, not only is it unoriginal and uninspiring, it is my competition. Can I out wit and out charm the next text or phone call she gets from her friends? The answer is, "No," and--honestly--how could you? It's like being that guy who is really good at of the cuff humor, but the moment your put on the spot because everyone is expecting you to say something hilarious, nothing comes out.
     Maybe it's just a myth--this full and undivided attention--that our parents made up when they hearken back to the gold age, when men were men, women were women, blah blah blah. After all, they had TV and radio and a growing social dissent from the Korean War and later Vietnam.
     A grand fantasy, yes, but a fantasy nonetheless. And, once long ago, I did experience it. Or, I was able to feel as though I did. But that is for another day.

     That is all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table with his old Olympia SM-9 and a bottle of Oarsmen Ale.

     P.S. Did you notice how the first Mac ad was made to be view in print--vertical, like a magazine page--and this last one is made to fit on a widescreen computer?