.....

Hello!

I'm a scanning addict. Yep. It's true.

A scanning addict. Do you know what that is? Do you want me to tell you? That's me there, in the scanning addict support group (every Monday 7PM), nursing a scalding-hot cup of
roasted beans; glance flitting from the floor to the government-issued cream clock. I shouldn't be here, I'm thinking. I don't really have this problem. I'm actually a pretty well-rounded, well-read guy: I know a bit about context.. I can read between the lines. I *understand* things. Hey, it's true! I understand things ALL THE TIME; I'm never confused by big words like "intent" or "hidden meaning". Nor am I dissuaged when it appears that I might just be in over my head a bit with what I'm reading. I mean, I'm reading all the time. How much time is it going to take me to understand.. well, everything I read? Because I'm ALWAYS reading. Always, and it's always crystal-clear. My brain is like a car compacter. A HUGE 32-page article, some really arduous and lengthy book (Ulysses was pretty big right? and the second half, I totally got. The dude was having a dream or something, case closed), I can consume and compact into some small corner of my brain, so that when some seven-headed literary critic association bears down on me when I die and demands a presentation of the pros and cons of totalitarian government as espoused (espoused? pretty good huh?) by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, I'll smile, lean back and give a THREE WORD ANSWER that will totally slay that beast. I have it covered! It's almost
like I don't have to read anything ever. Ever. Again. I might as well go back to finishing You magazine blockbusters and feeling smug about nailing that one about ant entomology (which I did NOT, by the way, look up on Wikipedia).

Ok. So what the H-E-double hockey sticks am I on about? It's about the way I read things. Usually internet articles: blogs, news stories, whatever.

I'm a scanner. A scanner is someone who reads things quickly and cannot, after a period of time following the reading, recall anything about the material other than a couple of factoids that were particularly interesting at the time. Not only am I a scanner, but I'm a PRETENTIOUS one. Meaning, I basically read things for the sake of reading them. In my mind, a body of text is potentially composed of interesting words or phrases that I might be able to glean and use for the sake of enlargening my mental capacity for annoying people by attempting to show off my mental capacity. Any context or the author's intent is discarded; it's just literary epicuranism. I'm picking apart a lasagne to suck up the bechamel sauce and leaving the mince in the dish.

I don't necessarily want to or need to understand what I'm reading.. to me, it's just an appraisal of the written word on the level of its aesthetic and how it could potentially inflate my written aesthetic potential (confounded by the fact that I hardly, you know, WRITE anything) OR a particularly delicious informative nugget that YOU probably do not know. It wasn't always like this for me: my greatest and loveliest joy in the past has been to ascertain a Meaning from a text, be it my own or the authors. Now, I don't want to know anything. I know what I know, and if you disagree with me in the written word, well by golly, be prepared to have your article
dissected for delicious phrases and little else. Forget about changing MY mind, ok!

I LOVE to scan. I can do it all day. I'll open about 6 tabs at a time in Firefox to just scan through quickly and close; I might daisy-chain a few articles if it has an interesting link. At the end of the day, I might know something about Aztec burial rituals and I might want to find an excuse to insert the word "occidental" into that big important novel I'm GOING to write someday (you know, give me time to beef up my literary chops and I'll totally start thinking about thinking about starting to maybe write a first chapter!).

There is no real independant thought involved in this kind of assimilation. It's the mental equivalent of a monkey figuring out how to fire a shotgun he couldn't possible design and construct himself.

This way I read and assess and store information on a day-to-day basis got me thinking about my spirituality (oh no, here we go..) and how I react to the Burning Truths of scripture. (You know, Scripture IS fire. You can't hear it without getting burned. When your brain is a great soggy sponge though, saturated with the non-spiritual liquid of the day-to-day, it's easy to let what you hear bounce right off. Just an aside.) When I hear a sermon, the stock response so often is "oh, that's good to know"; I might attempt to catalogue "key" (in my mind) parts as moral reactionary factoids which I will hold other people to (even though I myself might not even attempt to aspire to the stored biblical principles) until I eventually forget them.

There is no SUFFUSING of my mind and my being in the learned biblical truths. This is where I want to be; I want to mentally chew on and marinate my understanding in biblical knowledge, I want to be completely startled and joyously surprised by truths which I have read and intrinsically know on a continual basis; I DO NOT want to store them as grey cold data to trundle out when I want to assess someone's moral behaviour (rarely my own, as i've said).
If the Word is living, I want to live with it. If it is flaming, I want to be on fire with it, and let the
Eternal Flame purify my understanding and cure me of cynicism and dry, apathetic factual assimilation and recollection.

So what do I need to do? On the day-to-day level on which I'm just reading through stuff for the sake of reading through stuff, I need to divorce my brain from it's role as a sterile warehouse and turn it into a factory of thought. Time to produce, package and ship some opinions, fools. On the level of God's eternal truth, I need to stop nibbling on factoids and start devouring it like a pregnant woman at an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Also.. how is it that these two levels
(that need addressing) actually interact with one another? Well.. the more I squeeze the sponge of my day-to-day brain of useless information, the more room and space for the eternal truths to take hold and to grow. I think. This doesn't negate the factory element... a factory (well, the ideal factory) has a sparse warehouse.. a (number of) raw material(s) is(are) taken, processed, and leave(s) the factory as a product which serves some purpose (Too many ()'s in that sentence. Sigur Ros might be proud). Extraneous raw materials take up space, and serve no purpose until used, and eventually go stale. So it should be with the information we assimilate.

So does anyone else feel the same way? Am I highlighting a mental thought process which is actually kind of childish and, you know, a sort of you-may-have-thought-like-that-kind-of-when-you-were-seventeen-but-everyone-gets-out-of-that-
pattern-of-thought-with-maturation-and-age kind of thing? Is my struggle the struggle of EVERY MAN?? (delivered in booming baritone)

You know what? I don't even know ultimately where I was going with this. I think I'm going on with a lot of half-baked ideas here. Help me out a bit. My thinking is that my long time in thinking like this and assimilating information like this has left me with little to go with in the way of presenting a coherent train of thought through something like this article. So please be patient with me, but also let me know where I'm rambling on and on and on. I think I'm doing it now, so I'm going to stop. What do you think about all this?