My Anvil

There's an anvil at the top of my brain. And usually it just hangs out up there and that's fine, and I can think and work and get stuff done, but sometimes it falls down, *kurchunk!*. And when that happens there's just no making anything work.

I tried, I really did. I sat in front of my work computer for two hours this morning, and I tried. But my brain was full of anvil and it wasn't working out. I'll try to describe what it's like.

So if you picture your brain as soft and easily penetrable, then your intellectual input (things you read or listen to) can be like arrows or something. And when you read or listen, the arrows go into your brain and you understand them (or maybe you don't understand them, but you recognize that you don't understand them and you can try to work out what they mean by inviting more arrows, if you want).

The anvil is hard and can't be penetrated. So when the anvil that hangs out at the top of my brain falls down and fills my brain the arrows can't penetrate. They just bounce off. It's not that I stop being able to understand things, it's that the things that I'm looking at or hearing don't get read or listened to, because the arrows can't get in. I think that that sort of thing can happen to everyone sometimes. When we're worried or anticipating something, or otherwise preoccupied, then we'll read the same page in a book five times because the words aren't penetrating.

Well my anvil is like that, only without the preoccupation. It just happens.

Sometimes the anvil is situation-specific. So I'll get a work anvil, or a blogging anvil, or a knitting anvil, or a gardening anvil, or whatever, and then I can still think about (and therefore do) things that aren't related to what the anvil is about. But sometimes the anvil is general purpose, and that really sucks, because it means that I can't do anything but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, or maybe watch TV.

Sometimes if I change activities for a while, when I come back the anvil is gone. But sometimes not.

Sometimes I try to force the arrows through the anvil, shooting them harder and harder. That can work for a little while, but I'm still really slow at whatever I'm doing, because each arrow takes several tries before it penetrates.

There's been some talk that I might have ADD. I wonder if that's the technical term for my anvil.

Stupid anvil.