BRAIN LOCK

Sometimes the words won’t come. They’re funny like that. Words are the tricksters of the mind. They’ll flow quickly enough when you’re making an ass of yourself in front of your colleagues or your boss, or when you happen to say precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong moment to someone you actually care about, but if you want them to come, the words simply vanish and refuse to be found. I wonder, perhaps, whether I’ve been trying to fight my own little war of words on far too many fronts. Words seem to flow quickly enough when I’m trying to respond to other words. Those words seem to weave quite freely, perhaps because they are stimulated by other words or perhaps just because there’s a natural flow to a narrative forming in my mind. Other words are trotting out in other places. I have been, for whatever reasons, attempting to be “funny” although, as is becoming patently clear to me, I am not really designed, I fear, to be “funny”, but I’m finding those “funny” words are flowing too easily, although, probably because I find them “funny” there’s a very good chance that they’re not actually remotely “funny” at all.

But these words, or rather the topics to weave these words about are failing to come to mind at all. Where once a whole string of not-so-pithy thoughts and observations would spring me into insomnia most mornings and find me composing at the keyboard when the world was still a slumbering and the frost was thickening on the ground, nowadays the cupboard is bare. I have managed to dig around and find some old examples of thoughts and words and deeds to get me out of this gaping hole in my hopes of providing successful regular word-wrangling, but there’s only so many of those left to draw on, and, in drawing on them, they only serve to point out with taunting mockery how threadbare my current attempts can be in comparison.

Maybe it’s because I’m so very sleepy again. Not sleepy enough to actually sleep, you understand, but sleepy enough to be moving around like a sleepwalker for much of my time, even though there is far too much that needs to be done. But when I do attempt to sleep, it all goes well for about five hours and then the lightbulb in my mind switches on and the brain is churning. Only it’s not churning with anything useful. No more are those finely honed words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs leaping to mind. Instead there’s a kind of nothingness that bothers me, memories of things long forgotten, and gaps where cherished memories should be: The dead friend whom I can now no longer remember anything of what they were like when they were alive; The person I lived with for over five years who now I struggle to recall to mind at all; The current friends who no longer come to call and are slowly slipping away or maybe have already done so; The readers who have chosen not to return.

All of them there, but gone in some way.

There are of course the standard worries and doubts that can keep many people awake still stirring themselves into the mix, but when I try to answer the question as to why I couldn’t sleep there’s nothing that I can quite pin down other than I didn’t, so instead I lie awake for hours until a slightly less insane time to get up clicks around on the clockface, and I attempt to try and make use of the thoughts, but the words won’t come.

As I was driving home the other day a science programme was blurting out of talk radio in my car. It was talking about friendships and networking and how the average number of “friends” on certain social networking media sites was around one hundred and fifty which is, apparently, identical to the mean of Dunbar’s number which speaks of the total number we can actually cope with which, apparently, falls somewhere between 100 and 230. I myself can muster thirtyish out of the eight hundred million users, of which I regularly interact with less than half a dozen, but that’s beside the point really. What was interesting to me was that the scientists were discussing a discovery recently made about the development of the brain in different people and how, if certain areas of the brain are underdeveloped such as the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex (No, I don’t know where - or what - they are, but the guy who published the research did, and I suppose that’s all that really matters - after all, I’m not planning on doing any brain surgery anytime soon), the person will be less inclined towards such things as networking, especially the kind of Social Networking that nowadays seems so popular with everyone except anyone who’s ever met me...

In other words, my friend, as the last remaining few of you have probably long suspected, I have an underdeveloped brain. Not only that, but, whilst the growth of these particular lobes doesn’t finally fuse and lock until you are between eighteen and twenty six years old, it is sadly far, far too late for my old, fused grey matter to do anything about it and it would appear that it’s been like that for quite some considerable time.

An underdeveloped brain that’s fused and locked in its unfriendly state…

No wonder the words won’t come.