For a while I was writing most days the chapter in which Nat is introduced. But of course, very soon, I became distracted and my priorities were shunted about, with Russian shooting upwards as it had done back in perhaps April, May. Even if it were not for the concentration problems associated with ADD/ADHD, this problem of distractability would be problem enough.

Some kind of consistency is needed in life. However much in modern times people may admire those, like Madonna, who constantly reinvent themselves, it’s true that without a consistent personality, consistent likes and dislikes, goals and dreams, we cannot adequately determine what it is in life that we want, and settle down to striving for that end (yes, I know, the idea that we must strive for any end at all is a profoundly un-zen idea, but some of us could never do otherwise).

I had settled down and determined that my novel would be the goal, and that I must finish it. It was the latest in a sorry history of thousands of such resolutions. And then at a training day the supreme leader approached me and asked if I speak Russian, telling me that a student would be coming from Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country retreat and the current home of the school set up by his family based upon his principals. Apparently, the millionaire founder of the institution had suggested an exchange, and it had been hastily arranged with little consultation so that no details about the prospective student were known at first but that she was a she. Still yesterday nobody seems to know her name and she is supposed to be arriving this weekend.

In any case, I had started to learn a little Russian a few months back when I was informed that I would be going to Russia on a History of Art trip that would take in Chekhov’s house, the Tolstoy museum at Yasnaya Polyana, the Bolshoi ballet (you can’t have everything), and I forget what else. I doubted the educational relevance of this trip for all but one of the students chosen, and the one I thought it would suit - my student - ultimately didn’t go because he has a tendency to wander off. My doubts were vindicated when the students returned. One of them, on being asked if Chekhov was a famous chess player replied with feigned enthusiasm, “yeah, that’s it,” another, a black country character more or less mute aside from his attempts at Elvis Presley on being asked what he had learned from the trip, replied that they drink different tea there.

Back then my priorities shifted. I streamlined my pursuits, held up on a few books I had been trying to read, narrowing down more or less exclusively to Anna Karenina. I bought a good clutch of Russian textbooks on E-Bay and then a fat biography of Tolstoy. I dug out too a biography of Chekhov by the same author that I abandoned years ago whilst I was still in Scab City. (So many books half read!)

A whole series of reveries and dreams built itself around the trip, as it does with every change in my life - one of the reasons that being away from the social world for a good period of time will one day do wonders for my writing and leave me with a masterpiece. This is one of the reasons it is so impossible to resist this shift - the whole change in my mind is at least as all-encompassing as the seasons and so can determine a whole change in lifestyle. I would go there, speak tolerable Russian, convince the impetuous millionaire boss or some other potential benefactor, such as one of Tolstoy’s descendants, that I should be helped in my ambitions, or perhaps be helped by no one at all, but merely leave a note on my door at the end of the trip, that I would not be found in my room for the trip home, but that I would stay on in Russia to write. Indeed, it was around this time that, forever weighing up whether I would travel over the summer to write, perhaps to the Ukraine where the au pair of the story is originally from, I ordered a typewriter to be delivered to my work. Work on the basis that my parents would be out, and that they would in any case ask why I had ordered one when I had one already (I told myself that the old one was of poor quality, plasticky and not up to the job of being carried around on my travels).

Of course, reveries are very different from plans, though these may at times overlap. I am not a dreamer in the sense that I forever build castles in the sky. I have always had my feet on the ground. Reveries are daydreams, fantasies, which, like sexual fantasies, are pleasant distractions, sometimes volitional sometimes not, sometimes a little of both but which certainly do bolster a sense of purpose and help bring you towards an end.

Right now, these reveries are sexual in character. A young Russian woman is coming over who I may be charged from time to time with speaking to in Russian. They are still looking for a place for her to stay. M_____ is going back home for a funeral. There’s plenty of material there to spur the mind into a little diversion from time to time, to play on the charecterisations of Russian women often seen in films, to dwell on the morality of such a scenario, and so on and so forth.

Just a while back, I had a reverie of being asked to read the girl’s name from a computer screen, talking people through why it wasn’t possible, since the computer was displaying the wrong character set; this then became being asked to read out a letter, putatively in Russian in one of the morning meetings, and becoming as so often at work I am not, something of an extrovert by pretending to translate, “Her name is Nadia… She is older than we first thought, twenty three, not eighteen. She has… a penchant for wearing short skirts. And she is a Nymphomanka.”

A whole world is created from such scenes every time.

I had got pretty far in just a few weeks the first time around. This time I haven’t done quite so much, though I’ve almost caught myself up in one of the books, but it has in any case completely sent me from my trajectory, and sends me off once again in another direction. It is not possible to live like this.

The idiot doctor I see denies I have any kind of problem [cue reveries, as every time I think of this man who really gets my goat: arguing with him, telling him (on the phone at work) he hasn’t done a damn thing for me, leaving a message cancelling our next appointment, and so on and so forth.], has made no move to diagnose me or give me any kind of treatment since an attempt a year ago, simply meeting me every two months to dismiss all of my concerns. I have always had a lot of difficulty in understanding the US attitude to drugs and psychological problems, in the sense that it is evident that pharmaceuticals are too often thought to be the answer to all mental problems, diagnoses given too freely, and drugs too lightly. This is exceptionally dangerous. But here, perhaps the opposite is sometimes true. Perhaps in addition to the nutritional approach which has clearly been of great benefit to me in the last few weeks, I would benefit from a relatively small dosage of stimulant drugs. What I think they could do, perhaps, is free me to use the time I have more productively. I am aware of the use made by such writers as Graham Greene and W H Auden of such drugs and am sure it may seem that it may seem that I want these drugs purely for my writing. That may be so. I am working well now in my job. I can feel the difference in my ability to process information. It is in the evenings and in my free time that I feel the strain of this constant distractibility, the inability to turn off, but also that inability to finish anything. It is this that puts a great strain on my mental health, and since writing is the expression of my creativity, which is a [] of my ADD reveries, anything which has an impact on my ability to write has also a direct impact on my mental health, my stability, and my sense of wellbeing - my health.

I suspect distractability may be an excellent way of soaking up a great variety of knowledge and experience, but a very poor way of expressing it. I hope this can change, and that I can finally find an answer to it, because it is perhaps this which has changed the least.

I have resolved (!) to attempt to implement yet another structure by writing up a top ten of to dos in my blog. This would chart the risers and fallers so that I might be more aware of what is happening in my head, because, amazing as it may be, I am often completely unaware of the change that happens within my head. The transition is so smooth.

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