The point of this is only to ease into a cliché of my own: according to Neil Gaiman, some tribe of native americans used to divide people in two thusly: foxes and badgers. Foxes know a little about a lot of things, whereas badgers know one thing really well. The badgers have often been at it since they could crawl, and so they’re obnoxiously good at it, and the rest of us will never catch up. The foxes, on the other hand, have broader skills, which presumably make them more flexible.

I’ve known some badgers, alright. Within their element, they made me sick with a varying degree of envy, pity and loathing, depending on how well I liked them, but they all made me sick. I can do a number of things well, but I’m not exceptionally gifted in any particular field. I’ve always been somewhat confused as to what I should make of myself, and so I’ve tried to do many things at once. But my brain is a scattered thing, and more often than not, I catch myself having segued into something else, long before I’ve finished what I was doing. For instance, I was working on some bookcovers a minute ago, and was derailed by a glance at something someone wrote about journalism (because I secretly want to write for a living, as well as being a designer and that), and now look at me. Before that, I was in the middle of tinkering with this webside, trying to make it better, somehow. It’s like the Arabian Nights, with one beginning tucked inside the last one, and you have to read a gazillion pages to get to the end of the original story.

A while back, I read an article about the way the internet is rewiring our minds. It may or may not have been this one (a quick google search to find it revealed a plethora of information on the subject). The basic idea is that we’re all becoming scatterbrained multi-taskers. We’re not getting smarter, we’re just changing, and it’s happening terribly fast:

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom.

On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.

I fancy that’s how it’s always been for me. And that troubles me a bit: if this is happening to everyone, what happens to the ones who were already easily distracted? No good will come of my attention span shortening. While writing this, I’ve checked both my twitter feed and google reader, stroked the cat, gotten up to get a meatball from the leftovers in the kitchen, looked up two words I couldn’t spell, and added two songs to a spotify playlist – and it only took about twenty minutes altogether. I don’t see how I can benefit from this condition getting worse. Incidentally, The Arabian Nights must be going out of style now, with all this brain-rewiring going on. Unless, that is, it perfectly complements the way our new and improved minds work.

At least, I get to end on a high note: Whatever this thing I’ve written is about, hitting “publish” means that, despite the weird jungle of scary gibberish that is my head, I just finished something. Perhaps there’s hope for us yet.

This particular story is a dream I had, presented in the form of a short animation. In a fit of megalomania, I set out to make a choose-your-own-ending sort of story, with multiple forks. That didn’t happen, or rather there is only one “fork” throughout the story. The upshot of this is that, each time the protagonist stops, you have to click on something to nudge him on. It will be fairly obvious what object is clickable at any given time. Do that, and the story will reach its inevitable conclusion.

This link will take you there.

The place was more of a den, really –– the kind of place one would assume to be inhabited by eighteen year old male communists with a penchant for bongs and anything from the seventies. The walls were covered by red stars, red flags, pictures of Che Guevara etc. Every flat surface was littered with ashtrays, brimming with butts, and emty bottles. In short, the place was as good a reason as any as to why the revolution never came about: the revolutionaries were at home, quite baked, caressing their berets, daydreaming about the Spanish civil war.

Gingerly placing my coat on a chair, I greeted the room at large, where, along with my friends and the stranger, a couple of french lads were sat round a coffee table, listlessly trying to keep the conversation going. I don’t know if the french all lived there or not, and I don’t presume to know anything about them. In fact, they seemed capable of being perfectly charming, if they put their mind to it. But I will say that they seemed very much at home amongst the debris, and so, in a way most unbecoming, the place did become them. The situation did not work to their advantage, and so I was glad to be rid of the place when we left, and it did not particularly bother me that they stayed behind.

Our first stop was Mono, a pub I know of, and do visit from time to time, allthough I seldom relish the experience. It is quite spacious, or it ought to be, but still invariably induces a sort of claustrophobic despondency, which always makes me dislike the place, and all of its patrons. We all felt it, and promptly finished our drinks and left. And then came the moment where I should have known something was up. Like a herd of sheep, automatically following the foremost one, without even bothering to ask if it knows where it is going, we let the Stranger lead us. Aside from my french friend, she was undoubtfully the one with the least experience in our fair city’s nightlife. I distinctly recall her saying she does not even get out much, so I am at a loss trying to figure out why we let her take charge. Possibly it was the same sort of nihilist aimlessness I had felt in her flat, by now affecting us all.

Anyway, we arrived at Dr. Jekyll’s, a brown sort of name for a pub if ever I heard one, with a vague promise of music which would not be worse than the last place (Again, the word listless comes to mind. Aiming for “not worse” seems rather defeatist, considering the plethora of bars and clubs available to us). Having already strayed dangerously far west of my natural habitat, I was disheartened, but not surprised, to find the place packed, with a fifty metre que outside. I wanted to turn around on the spot, but the lack of initiative which had brought us there in the first place, prevented me, even from that. I just wanted to go home, but in stead found myself following the herd, as the Stranger, in her sole demonstration of grace, charmed the bouncers into letting us in ahead of the crowd in line.

It was a sty. Once again, I got the impression of space, without any of the benefits. It spanned several floors, all crowded with classes and casts of people I never even could have imagined running into anywhere else. It was the sort of bar where crossing paths with someone’s parents, utterly pissed, hell bent on catching something they could be ashamed of, was definitely not out of the question. As for the promised music, in the brief period I was there, they played three songs, all well-known, in which the chorus consists of “whooahh!” and similar memorable morsels of American poetry. There were grown men, and I could have sworn they were all wearing headbands, vehemently singing along, as if they were suddenly able to express themselves through the eloquent words of powersmith or whatshisface. The moment af clarity came when the “dj” suddenly turned down the volume, to reveal that virtually everyone were genuinely singing at the top of their lungs. To say I flinched would be an understatement. I’ve never experienced such a thing, and certainly would not have expected to, since I don’t live in a ditch where the barn is basically the place to go for fun times. I felt my face pull into a scowl, noticed W noticing, and said “I fucking hate this place” and left.

I cannot for the life of me understand how the Stranger could choose such a venue with dancing in mind. To be fair, there is no accounting for taste, but –– oh, forget it. That place was the Pit, and I’m lucky I got out unscathed.