A little joke, riffing on what I’ve mentioned here before—I am one of those who carries around my own personal bard in my brain, ever singing the song of me. Sometimes—often? usually?—at the expense of me living the life of me.

Yes, I have a full-time narrator on duty. So most of the time I am multi-tasking. I am living my life on one track. On another track, close to simultaneously, though sometimes a little ahead or a few steps behind, racing to catch up, I am writing my life stories on the ever-unscrolling sheaf of perpetually scrawled-on white paper in my head. White paper-gray matter.

But as they say, you can’t truly multi-task, right? If you’re doing two things at once, you’re probably doing at least one of them sloppily. That is my fear.

So I’ve done plenty of Zen and other mindfulness work over the years, partly to counter all that. Also lots of mind-dumping: actual writing, where I write or type real words on real paper or a real lit-up screen. Both have helped a lot. More of both should help more.

In fact, without writing on a regular basis, I feel like I gradually get crazier by degrees. The ol’ brain barrel gets full of rainwater words and it comes time to dump it or that nasty green film starts to grow over it.

Which is to say, for better or worse, you’re not likely to be rid of me anytime soon…