By Ted Gargiulo
How can I describe my problem? There’s a lack of focus, a disconnected-ness when it comes to mental activities. It’s like perceiving the world through slits that broaden on better days and become narrower on not-so-better days.
Processing what I read, unscrambling words, constructing sense out of what I’m looking at, has become such a slow, tedious pain in the butt that it hardly seems worth the trouble anymore.
Plowing through an entire book is almost a thing of the past. It takes me several minutes just to read the jacket.
Skills that normally improve with practice seem to unravel the more I practice them. Hard for me to believe I once performed on a stage. Plugged away at it with a passion for 14 years…until the gears upstairs began slowing down. No way could I tackle anything that challenging today. Set foot on a stage? Heck, I wouldn’t even know where left field was.
I’ve had cracks in my woodwork all my life. Except, they appear to gave gotten worse with age. Emphasis on “appear.” It’s the old riddle of “Is my nose getting larger, or is my face shrinking?”
My doctors have all identified Attention Deficit Disorder-or ADD. If you’re at all familiar with this topic, then you know that ADD has become a very popular handle these days. Personally, I hate being pigeonholed. Whenever I read about a so-called “ADD community,” I become suspicious.
Seems everyone belongs to a “community.” You’ve got political activists, white supremacists, heavy metalists, pro- and anti-abortionists-a virtual smorgasbord of “ists” and “isms” to which people profess allegiance. I’m not one to jump on a bandwagon. I avoid pastures where too many cattle have trodden, and I keep my “flops” to myself.
My only reason for identifying with a known disorder is that there are known treatments for it. And yet, pharmacology, for all its benefits, is hardly a cure-all. My neurological mis-configurations are too deeply gouged into my foundation to be wiped clean by an attention enhancer. Even on Ritalin, I still become confused in parking lots, and am just as likely to mistake my death warrant for a library card.
On the surface, I display the standard symptoms of ADD: inattentiveness, difficulty finishing projects, lack of organization, restlessness. But the profile doesn’t account for those other less obvious glitches in my circuitry that have bugged me long before space-age analysts invented trendy names for them.
Although ADD afflicts people of all ages, most of what you see or hear about it in the news revolves around children. I’m sick of it. Everything today is kids-this and kids-that. Where was all this information when I was growing up?
Thankfully, I’m not a kid anymore, haven’t any small ones of my own, nor am I concerned about anyone else’s kids…just as long as they don’t run me down with their skateboards or mug me while I’m at an ATM machine. (No, “ATM” is not a disorder.)
Members of the ADD community like to flatter themselves by pointing to some of the greatest minds in history, who, they theorize, may have been afflicted with a similar disorder. Now, isn’t that a neat conceit! If a man’s affairs are in disarray, if he can’t balance a checkbook, remember to bathe, or change his underwear, it’s because his mind is operating on a higher, loftier plane. Another Beethoven! Another Van Gogh! It’s the old Decartian proverb: “I think, therefore I stink.”
It’s hard to separate the facts from the froth. I suspect there’s more to being a genius than choosing the wrong socks or dropping pizza sauce on your pants. (What a shame. I cooda been a contenda!) Considering all the things that can go amuck within a person’s brain, my situation is hardly interesting, not destined to take its place among the celebrated cases of clinical neurology. I’m not brilliant enough to change the world, nor sufficiently demented to be excused from dealing with it.
One major advantage to being loopy, off-balance, and/or inattentive is that the rest of the world appears straight. Crooked pictures don’t offend me the way they offend my more discerning Better Half. Neither do crooked situations. Flaw cancels flaw, error cancels error. Bumpy roads, filtered through a bumpy mechanism, seem smooth. Noise doesn’t sound noisy to me because my head’s already filled with it.
Truth is, I may already have the best possible deal in life. Suppose I’d been in full possession of my faculties during my formative years. Suppose I had remained focused on my schoolwork, finished college, pursued a promising vocation. What if I hadn’t succumbed to the lure of undemanding, blue-collar monotony and regular paychecks, but had braved the challenges of the stage and made a career in show business?
Chances are that on April 20, 1979, I’d have been under contract with some rinky-dink dinner theater in Two Shoes, Nebraska, doing No Sex, Please, We’re British…instead of at a Trailways station in Detroit, Michigan, which is where I met my future wife. That bus carrying Jann would have left without me. Without ME!
Here, then, is the moral of this strange, serio-comic tale off Dr. Garjekyll and Teddy Hyde. If, in fact, I’m “cursed” because I have a flaw in my mainframe that forces me to compromise my goals, expectations, standards of excellence-and if, for all my compromising, I’ve found such contentment in a woman who’s utterly devoted to my happiness and well-being, who loves me in spite of my glitches and hitches and crotchets and quirks-then I say that all men should be so “cursed.”
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Ted Gargiulo’s stories and essays have appeared in The San Jose Mercury News, The Monterey County Herald, Wilde Times, The Gamut, and The Fringe. Born in New York City, the former stage actor and prize-winning author now lives with his wife in Seaside, California. Ted is currently working on a collection of short stories. He In Me, available from PublishAmerica, is his first published novel.