JumpingRabbit

Focus. You have to focus. If you are going to accomplish anything of value, you must be able to bring all of your resources to bear on it; your knowledge, your intellect, your passion. Some one said ” NOTHING ON EARTH CAN STAND AGAINST A DETERMINED WILL”. I believe that to be true. If you are determined that something should be so, you can make it so.

The problem is those damned rabbits.

Say you want to do some target shooting. You have a well made rifle. It is cleaned and oiled, the sights are precisely adjusted, a plentiful supply of new ammunition is on hand and a new target is hanging down range. You sit down at the firing table and place a couple of sandbags in position to support your weapon. Locked and loaded you settle yourself and your rifle into the sandbags, align the sights on the target and gently pull the slack out of the trigger. You take a deep breath, let half of it out, and will the trigger back. Just before the gun fires, a rabbit runs across in front of the target and your eyes instinctively follow it, and where your eyes go the rifle goes and you miss the target by a yard and the rabbit by two.

You have to find a way to deal with the rabbits.

At any given time I will be working on two dozen different drafts of articles on various and sundry subjects. If I have an idea for something about banks it will lead me to Siena,Italy, where the oldest operating bank is, and a rabbit will spring out and run towards Sicily where “The Leopard” is set and I’ll wonder why Sicilians wave goodbye with their palm towards their face, curling the fingers backwards as though they are calling you back, and another rabbit will pop up and head for Indonesia where holding your palm up and curling your index finger to call someone is an insult because that’s how they call a dog and they are probably calling him so they can eat him and if you have to eat your dog be sure not to eat the liver as it has an over – abundance of vitamin A and will give you Vitamin A poisoning which causes blindness, temporary or permanent as it did to the members of the Scott expedition to the South Pole which left behind a fully intact and perfectly preserved supply shack with cases of hundred year old Scotch whiskey which tastes the same as Sake to me because all I can taste is the alcohol because I burned my tongue once and probably damaged some of the taste buds which may account for the fact that I can’t tell the difference————-

By this time I have to stop because the keyboard is swarming with rabbits of every shape and color and its impossible to find the  one I was chasing first.

The real problem is that I like chasing rabbits. It never gets boring and you never know where you will end up.

But, if you chase rabbits, they are as likely to lead you away from your target as towards it and they eventually go into a hole which leaves you in the middle of nowhere with no finished article to post, no clear target in your mind, and no rabbit. Which is probably why I have  a dozen or so drafts in the air at any given time. Every time a rabbit pops up I start another one, get it going pretty good and out springs another damned rabbit and off I go. I wonder if I have written about the giant rabbit I saw one night on guard duty in V. Nam. It was the night I almost shot a guy for smoking dope. Not the way that sounds; the dope lead him to behaviour that almost got him shot, it had nothing to do with the rabbit, that was later the same night. Most strange things happen at night because you can’t see that well which is the reason banks seem to do strange things because we don’t see the workings behind their decisions which is why I was trying to write a story about banks in the first place which is why I was looking into Siena, Italy, which is a beautiful city south of Florence, where Michelangelo carved his “David’ that most people believe is the biblical David but one critic claims it isn’t because —

Did anybody see where that rabbit went —