I'm doing a hunt and peck with a stylus. This might take an hour or two for your ten minute read. A little over a year ago I pulled off of I-5 to take a nap on my way home. An hour & a half later a drunk driver hit me at full speed, and launched me into freeway traffic. Epic collision. The concussion subsided 3 months later, and since then, I shake. A Lot. To the point where it's rare I can work a keyboard. I've mostly been out of contact with my friends, except the two who pick up the phone when I call (and I don't do well on the phone thanks to autism), and I'm thankful for that. I've wanted to chime in on life several times, but this is a truly arduous task. Here's what prompted me to stay up and slog it out:
I came up with a lyric. A good one. Not a song, but the germ of an idea. I forgot it for a few hours, because I wasn't home, but when it came back to me I thought it was worth writing down. I typically keep notepads scattered around the house for this very thing, but all of my caches were bare. I finally found one in my music room poking out from some clutter, and flipped through it. It wasn't one of my lyric notebooks. It had graphs & equations, but I skipped to the first blank page and wrote my idea down. Then I flipped back through the pages.
It was the scrawlings of a madman. It was notes from when I was studying economics. I didn't recognize some of my own handwriting. The math was brilliant. I had that "Aha, that's why I think that way" moment over and over. The way it wove into politics seemed like it came from a different guy, which, truth be told, I really was a different guy in my mid twenties. I've internalized all of that knowledge to where it seems innate, but some of those equations were eye openers. I was trying to one up my professor at every turn. But, the thing that made me want to hunt and peck my way through this was something I wrote in the margin:
More people die on their way to the airport than people in a plane crash.
I have no clue what theory we were studying that day.