Ian’s mind had begun to run astray at a cocktail party four months ago. A girl from his wife’s work had been talking when he started to wonder how many flat double A batteries there were in the entire world. He followed this line of thought until it detoured into the number of spoons ever made, and then to how many pairs of chopsticks there would be in France, a country notorious for holding on to its own culture.
In the following weeks after the party his mind began to offer up more random thoughts, as though it was plucking them from some deep vault. Some thoughts he ignored, like wondering if people who wrote bad movies knew they were writing bad movies at the time, and some he followed, like the fantasy about owning a lawn-mowing business and solving local crimes.
Eventually Ian would think of nothing else but stray thoughts. Then another stray thought came: if all you think are stray thoughts then they are not stray. It’s just what you think.