How Can I Think, With a Mind Full of Monkeys with Blue Faces?

I've never seen these jumping monkeys from Thera before, but I know them well. Thera was an island that exploded around 1600 BC, in a volcanic blast four or five times larger than Krakatoa. The Therans must have evacuated after a series of warning earthquakes-- no one's ever found any bodies or small possessions under the ash-- but the tsunamis would have followed them and probably wiped out the Minoan culture on Crete and the surrounding islands. Krakatoa produced tsunamis at least 100 feet high that killed more than 30,000 people, and I don't want to think about the wall of water after the explosion on Thera.

They call it Santorini nowadays, southeast of Greece and about 75 km north of Crete. Nine hundred years later, Plato describes the islands of Atlantis as a series of concentric circles, which fits the circular archipelago and caldera at Santorini today.

There's a phrase that plays in my head from Logan Pearsall Smith whenever I can't write, can't draw, and can't get anything done except pick and worry over my failures like a monkey looking for fleas. The mind is a monkey, as the Buddhists say, the monkey being "the animal with a thousand hands", always grabbing, never satisfied, and never accomplishing anything because of its short attention span.
"What do I think?" I evasively echoed, and then, carried away by the profound and melancholy interest of this question: "Think?" I queried, "do I ever really think? Is there anything inside me but cotton wool? How can I, with a mind full of grey monkeys with blue faces, call myself a Thinker?"
All Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith, 1902.