FOCUS!

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the back row of the Nightingale Theater, watching the rehearsal for On The Verge. My involvement in this play started and was supposed to end at the poster design. It has expanded into running a chapter title slide show, maybe running some sound cues, and now it looks like I may be running the lights as well.

The slide show is a learning process. I was afraid I would have to learn to use PowerPoint, which I've always thought of as completely evil. But instead, I'm gonna set it up in AppleWorks...which is still evil (by graphics standards, but it's made by Apple, so I guess that makes it alright.

This whole experience is exciting and frightening at the same time. Exciting because it's a challenge, the unknown. Frightening because it's gonna require a lot of focus on my part. A.D.D. has always been my worst enemy. Even now, I'm drifting off as I type.

I was diagnosed when I was eighteen, the summer after graduating high school. Had I been given Ritalin a couple years earlier, I might have qualified for a scholarship or two. Fortunately, I had some of my father's life insurance to get me through my trade school education. Strange how that worked out.

My condition, I was told, was borderline. The doctor gave us just two pills to start out. I was to take one after breakfast and see how well it worked. If it didn't I was told NOT to take the second pill, as it would create a paradox and rip a gaping hole in the space/time continuum...or that's what I had imagined would happen.

That morning, I had my bowl of cereal, and washed the pill down with my morning orange juice. It was the middle of summer, and I didn't have to work that day, so there wasn't much I had to fully focus my attention to. So, I watched TV. After my mom pointed out that I had made it all the way through Last Action Hero without making a sound, it was decided that the pill worked.

After lunch, I took the second pill and spent the afternoon quietly doodling in my mom's office, helping her out with her work when she needed me to. My God, she was practically in tears, as if this was the climactic scene in Larenzo's Oil.

I was cured, as long as the drugs lasted. I didn't need the pills every day; just when I needed to focus. As a result, I managed to make a six-month supply last about a year and a half. I only had two more refills up until I was about 22, when I weaned myself off of them and learned to focus on my tasks naturally. I had a few pills left, but I lost the bottle for a little over a year when I found them again. Just as a goof, I took a pill for old time's sake. I felt like I could see through time. No wonder this stuff is now a street drug.

I have found a substitute, if I need it: Mini-Thins, or any variant of uppers that can be found at the counter of every truck stop in the country. So, if you happen to see me eating a pecan log, you can reasonably be assured that I've got a bottle of pills in my pocket that Congress is rushing back to Washington to debate whether they should ban or not.

All this, just so I can get through an hour of work without going "Oooh! Something shiny!"