The Goldfish

I talk to myself a lot. Obviously I only do it when I am by myself, as I already attract enough disparaging looks when I venture out in public thanks to my general air of untrustworthyness. I debate with myself in the car on long journeys, I voice lists of task aloud, and I sometimes read out loud in the bath or in bed, because I’m a solipsist and like to hear the sound of my own voice. In all these things I am not alone. But mostly, when I talk to myself, I insult, berate and criticise my own actions and outlook, and with good reason: when I am by myself, I metamorphose into an idiot. Seriously. An utter dim-wit.

Clearly I am no Einstein when I’m in a crowd (at work today I spent thirty seconds trying to open the safe door against its hinges) but when I am alone it becomes ludicrous. It would be unnecessarily long and tedious to list every faintly idiotic thing that I’ve done recently, but I shall give you a few examples so you can see what I’m driving at.

Firstly, I am capable of some truly incredible acts of clumsiness. I occasionally have accidents that require a perfect storm of physical ineptness, lack of forethought and sheer ignorance. I once almost succeeded, no word of a lie, in choking to death on an ice-cream while sat at the back of a rave. My panicked, potential final thoughts, were consumed by the knowledge that the ice-cream would melt before my corpse was discovered, leaving the authorities baffled as to the manner of my demise. I haven’t touched a Calippo since: they are as treacherous as frozen confectionary can get.

I am also guilty of some spectacular negligence. Given a kitchen to myself and enough time to wander off distractedly, and I will happily set fire to a pan of water.

Finally I occasionally find myself engaged in acts of monumental hubris. You know how sometimes on Casualty some idiot gets rushed into A&E because they were trying to replace a light bulb in a pitch black bathroom above a bath full of water up a rickety ladder while listening to thrash metal on a personal stereo and having a distracted conversation with someone three rooms away? Yeah, that sort of thing is right up my crippled, scarred-for-life alley.

I am not unintelligent. I used to get answers right in school. I have held down various jobs, some for several years, without ever getting into trouble or being disciplined. So why, when I am by myself, am I such a flippin’ retard?

The answer is my attention span, or rather the manner in which I focus it. I cannot keep my mind focused on a single task for more than about four seconds, unless that task requires my complete attention. Things that require extended concentration (driving, video games, cunnilingus, that sort of thing) are all fine, as long as they last. You cannot get away with letting your mind completely wander during these activities, and so it obligingly stays put. This allows me, incredibly, to split my attention in the manner so readily available to other people, and perhaps even do something else at the same time. This is why I can drive my car and talk to myself at the same time, without constantly heading down one-way streets or into canals when I reach a particularly difficult sentence.

Things that require little attention, things that should be easy: that is where I generally come a cropper. Cooking is, normally, not a difficult task. Unless you are making soufflé or ice swans or something equally complex, cooking is really just a collection of small, simple actions: you do the things in sequence and at the end, food happens. But it is because the actions are normally so small, so simple, that I regularly fuck the whole thing up. It’s easy, and so you have plenty of time for your mind to wander, and mine wanders a pretty long way, coming back with its boots muddy and its cheeks red to find the kitchen on fire and the stomach pretty hacked off.

If I have one simple task to do, I will either get distracted and forget about it, or I will become bored and try to multitask unsuccessfully. When I play video games I get bored at loading screens and try to read, an impossibly task that merely result in my reading the same sentence four hundred times and invariably missing the start of the game. Whenever I try to tidy a room I attempt to accomplish every piece of cleaning simultaneously, which means each task advances infinitesimally slowly and I spend the entire time in a state of high irritation. I regularly come back from the post box with the letter I went there to post. Once I put the slice of toast I’d brought with me in there instead.

I don’t do this, crucially, when there are other people around. This is because I am a) more aware of my actions when there are other people watching me, and b) because when there is someone nearby I am less likely to let my mind wander. God knows what I was thinking about when I started choking on my Calippo, but I sure as shit wasn’t focussed on the task at hand, and that wouldn’t have been the case if there was someone talking to me at the time. I can carry on a conversation with someone else while I’m doing practically anything (cunnilingus is a hard one, I’ll admit).

The solution, then, is to either start paying more attention when I’m on my own, or start pretending that I’m not, if you follow me. They say you should always dance like no-one is watching. I’m going to start thinking like someone is watching, and see if that ends up with fewer burnt stir-frys, fewer home decorating accidents, and fewer ice-cream related near-death experiences. I’ll let you know how it goes.