new story, part 1

I’ve been counting backwards from thirty-one million, six hundred and twenty-two thousand, three hundred and ninety-nine for 15 days now. Progress is slow, mainly because I only “count” attempts that I don’t get distracted from halfway through by some random noise or fleeting thought, and I’ve noticed that I tend to subvocalize a lot of the time to keep from losing my place, which also slows me down. I also don’t count ones that I do while asleep, which has cost me quite a few, especially once I got about 4 or 5 days into it.

It’s kind of like that old joke about being a vegetarian…one guy says to another, “Hey, I read that vegetarians live longer,” and the other guy replies, “I don’t know about that, but it sure SEEMS longer!” It’s like the anti-TV, the anti-video game, instead of looking up from a screen and seeing that five and a half hours have passed since the last time you could say with any certainty that you had a conscious thought, you come up from a session, write down the last number you got to, and see that 17 minutes, that six and a half minutes, that not even three or four minutes have actually passed, and as far as you know it could have been hours.

So I made the mistake of telling this to a girl I met in a bar a few days ago, I obviously wasn’t getting any counting done with all the distractions there anyway. She had been at the jukebox with her wallet in hand, lost in that pre-decision phase where you try to check out what the jukebox has on it without standing so close that anyone else interested in playing some tunes assumes that you’ve already put in money and are actually making your selections. It’s harder with modern jukeboxes, since to get a real feel for the scope of the music on there you have to page back and forth through it a couple times, where in the old days you could just check out the whole selection from afar, as long as your eyesight was good enough to read all those tiny labels from more than a foot and a half away.

continue to part 2 of the story...