I wish I had a mental task manager.

Obviously one that nixes people and events would be optimal…but I fancy myself a realist.

So, I’ll settle for a behavior-modifying brain app.


(A mockup of .0001% of mine. A legit scroll bar’d be naught but a horizontal sliver. What would yours say?)

Yeah. One like this image.

Just something that just changes me – my perceptions – without me having to, ya know, try so hard. And it’d work by cutting away the bullshit born in my brain (instead of letting it just sit there in a million hidden tabs, slowing down my life). I mean, think about it. When it comes to the tranquility hiccup that is generalized anxiety, it’s just a blanket symptom. Not the actual problem. It’s the poison polished trophy we earn for burying true issues prematurely in a grave like some still alive victim with the tombstone epitaph “I’ll sort this shit out later”. Eventually, that engraved phrase fades and all we’re left with is the feeling. The feeling of the problem six feet below, thumping the earth upward while screaming to be exhumed. Acknowledged. Addressed. We just add more dirt instead. This may not be you. So, don’t read on if that’s so. But if it sounds familiar, that might be ‘cause many of us have this problem where we’re half-assed serial murderers. We look at our problem prey only long enough to stick ‘em in a hole – but don’t fully execute them before pouring denial dirt on top. We just go onto the next one and do the same. Before we know it, there’s no more room in the cemetery, all the epitaphs are illegible, and we can’t even remember what the problems are – just hear their muffled bloodcurdling cries from below.

Sure, you can go to therapy.

Hand some clipboard bearing stranger a shovel, and ask her to help you unearth your slipshod handiwork to be addressed, dismembered, and buried anew for good. One by one. Hour by hour. Week by week. But much like a loyal Patron sipping patron getting a lap dance, it’s just a costly and short lived tease – you almost reach a conclusion… and then you have to leave. What’s my other option? Well, you can try to do the mediation/yoga route for long enough until the problems claw their way out on their own. Cheap if you do it on your own using YouTube (free, actually, minus your internet bill costs). Not so much if you join a studio – where you pay exorbitant amounts of money for the pleasure of breathing uncomfortably close to randos and wondering when that guru lady who teaches it is gonna start bringing a bull hook to class just for you. (Read my Mrs. Ballard and recent yoga post to understand why I’m so mistrustful of authority under any circumstance.) Plus, your issues (why you’re here in the first place) generally surface in the middle of that already awkward tree pose, and you start crying in the middle of class and trying to pass it off as “that virus that’s been going around”.

Deep down, though, you know the only virus is your own self-replicating capacity for turn-a-blind-eye-self-destruction – as you become blinded by all your anxiety’s sources rising from their graves, one by one, like a scene outta Thriller. So, yeah, that all works. It works ridiculously well. Almost too well. But the problem (another problem) is that it takes so long to get there. And I’m busy. Why am I busy? ’cause of the kind of life that causes me to hold funerals for my miscellany of un-murdered issues in the first place. And since the problem solving thing is a problem itself (in that it takes too long), the solution gets pulled down “Carrie” style into an early grave too. And good riddance, right? It’s hard. It takes body work. And mind quieting. And waking up early…

You see? My thoughts are getting in the way of just setting an alarm and doing it.

That’s why all this’ll go brilliantly in my mental task manager Michio Kaku better be working on.

’cause I can already taste the effects with my brain tongue now:

PAYBILLS.EXE

“Ugh…Yeah. Taking up lotsa memory. But I’ll keep it running. Need to remember it later…”

ANXIETYABOUTLACKOFMONEYTOPAYBILLS.EXE

“End task? Psshhh. Gurl, BYE. End PROCESS.”

Come on.

Tell me you don’t feel like a sniper ending lives when you click that button.

Why are we not funding this?