Now, I say that thought is what I have in abundance; what I don’t have is kinds of thought. Sometimes what I had formerly (in abundance, sometimes) is gone, or fractured to the point of uselessness. For instance, math skills that used to be instant are now gone, so much so that I literally can’t remember how I did them. Those skills, I think, are dead. (Yes, I’ve heard of the redundancy of the brain.) Much worse is the part of the brain that used to come up with several ways of wording a thought, with many specific nuances, pretty much instantly, that now comes up with none half of the time.

The previous paragraph took me twenty minutes. And I’m not satisfied with it; it will have to do. Do you understand the difficulty with writing that will have to do, every paragraph I write? (By “you” I mean me: I don’t expect any person to struggle with it but me. Seriously, that keeps me going: that nobody has to read the thing.)