My mind has a back and a front, just like everyone else's, or so I assume. I am apparently not able to "put" something (idea, emotion, memory, what have you) in the "back of my mind," or rather I can but I think this mental space was sloppily constructed by drunken contractors because things tend to roll forward into the front of my mind no matter how many times I put them back. So it's like a room with a sloping floor or the deck of a ship in a storm, or maybe a beach whose tidal incursions follow no predictable pattern. Or you could think of it as akin to one of those optical illusions, like the vase which is also two faces in profile staring at each other like idiots, or the cube which constantly changes orientation, the one you draw when you're on the phone. Anyway I think I possess the placement device but maybe it's faulty or underpowered or something. Surely this is further evidence of mental weakness, like I needed more, that verdict came back years ago. Background and foreground oscillate nervously, thoughts recede before I can grasp them and then re-emerge from the misty shadows only after I've moved on to something else, forcing me to double back and put out fires, like when Ripley tries to push those canisters back into place to cancel the ship's auto-distruct sequence in Alien, or it's like a demented game of mental whack-a-mole and I'm armed with a plastic teaspoon instead of a mallet. I wonder if this scatterbrained feeling of permanent distraction or inability to focus is something everyone suffers to one degree or another or whether it's severe enough to merit a diagnosis of some kind. What comfort there is in being diagnosed! A diagnosis suggests a prognosis and a course of action, a menu of options. To me there's nothing more satisfying than choosing from a menu. A menu promises a limited number of possible future narratives, none of which I'm personally responsible for. I could never eat in a restaurant where you sit down and a waiter comes over and stands there with a pad of paper waiting for you to think of something you want to eat, just off the top of your head. The whole pleasure is in choosing from among options someone else has devised. In this way I get the satisfaction of imagined free will with none of the responsibilities.

See, look at this, somewhere I lost the thread. This is exactly what I was talking about, I'm pretty sure.