Pulled in a Million Directions

There is a scene from John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, that has always stuck with me. A sweaty, paranoid Frank Sinatra is explaining away the pile of books on a table he’s studying, enraptured with, fascinated by, drawn to:

Principles of Modern Banking

The History of Piracy

Paintings of Orozco

Modern French Theater

The Jurisprudential Factor of Mafia Administration

Diseases of Horses

The Novels of Joyce Cary

Ethnic Choices of the Arabs

Now, Sinatra, as Major Bennett Marco, is playing a Korean War vet struggling with partially-revealed aftereffects of psychological warfare and brainwashing.

What’s my excuse? In the past month I’ve been studying, enraptured with, fascinated by, drawn to:

General George Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

Fascist Buddhism

The exact authorship of Lennon-McCartney song compositions

Sherlock Holmes short stories

Various Interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve always been like this. In a given year I’ll be all over and all about the Dewey Decimal system, over and over, like a bee with ADD pollinating a patch of clover in a flowerbox. But it’s frustrating, and tiresome. Just once I’d like to wake up and say, authoritatively and with unfathomable certitude: “I must commit the rest of my life to the History of Piracy!” Or fascist Buddhism. Something. Anything.

I’m pulled in a million directions and like anything pulled in such a way, I feel diluted. I am diluted.

Or I can just be sleep-deprived.

That’s probably it. Went to bed past midnight last night, and got up a little before five this morning.

I’ll have to read up on sleep habits, REM sleep, lucid dreaming, how to get better quality shut-eye, sleep techniques of ancient Tibetans.

Yes.

Add that to the pile.