When I was a young man, I suffered a young man’s distractions.

An example: the year is 1990. I’m driving my beater of a Ford cargo van through the parking lot of a Star Market in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s summertime. The van is an oven, even with the windows rolled down. I’m on my way to my plywood supplier to pick up some sheets of Baltic birch. Business is good. The birch plywood is for a kitchen’s-worth of cabinet drawers, part of a big order that’s carrying me through the summer.

Traffic is heavy in the parking lot, which everyone uses as a cut-through to avoid a particularly long traffic light. In fact, there’s a policeman up ahead, sorting through the cars and scolding the drivers who aren’t stopping for groceries.

Just as I roll up on the policeman, a long-legged goddess appears in the crosswalk in front of me. A trashy goddess with heavy makeup and huge hoop earrings, in short shorts and a Daisy-Duke style denim shirt, tied tightly under a heaving bosom, but a goddess, nonetheless.

The policeman’s face is red. He’s overheated, like the rest of us, and preparing to deliver his schoolmarmish lecture to the sweaty fellow in the cargo van. He beckons me with a sunburned hand.

I see his signal. Years of acculturation dictate my next steps: I’m to depress the brake pedal; lean out of the window in a non-threatening manner; listen politely to the policeman’s stern words; apologize; and move along.

But none of that happens. My eyes are locked on the quivering hips of the crosswalk goddess. The sleeping caveman in me has awakened.

Instead of coming to a stop, I creep forward, mesmerized. My arms turn the steering wheel, unbidden, drawn by the play of sunlight on the side of her neck.

I’m following her! I’m literally stalking a woman, in a crosswalk, with a van.

I’m quite close to the policeman now. He’s frantically waving his arms at me, trying to break the spell, but he can’t suppress a smile of recognition. He knows exactly what’s happening. Finally he catches my eye. I can’t hear him over the pounding in my ears, but I can read his lips. He’s saying, “Look at me, not her!”

Of course, I’m older now — still vulnerable to the charms of a goddess, trashy or otherwise, but less so. The illusion of attainability, the fuel that powers adolescent fantasies, has largely evaporated. What would I do with a goddess these days? More to the point, what would she do with me?

Nowadays, I suffer the distraction of middle age. All it takes to hijack my attention is a big fat housefly bashing against the windowpane next to my writing desk — sometimes, not even that. Lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to focus.

Part of this is temporary. I have a children’s picture book coming out in a few weeks, illustrated by my friend Sophie Blackall. It’s titled The Mighty Lalouche, and it’s the story of a humble Parisian postman, in late-19th-century France, who loses his job and takes up boxing to make ends meet. He’s a tiny fellow, this Lalouche, and rather bony, but for some mysterious reason he can’t be defeated in the ring.

So far, the reviews have been very kind. Sophie is a tremendous artist, and the book is largely riding on her shoulders. She has quite a following, and there’s every indication that The Mighty Lalouche will find a receptive audience.

Which is exactly why it’s so distracting! Every writer hungers for good news. It can be years — decades, even — between books. A story, even a humble picture book, is like a child you’ve dispatched to a cruel forest. The obsessive Googling, the counterproductive daydreaming about prizes and future royalties, all of it is a kind of defensive cocoon a writer wraps around his creation, the better to protect it — and himself — from the world’s harsh judgment.

Very distracting.

The common thread here is the harmful power of fantasy, or, more specifically, the power of the wrong kind of fantasy. Buddhists have this stuff pretty well figured out. They call desire for the unattainable woman, or for selfish publishing results, Upādāna, a Sanskrit word that means “clinging,” “attachment,” or “grabbing.” In the Buddhist worldview, the consequence of attaching oneself to the illusions of the world is simple: suffering.

I experience distraction as a form of suffering. Typing the title of one of my books into a search engine makes me feel small — petty even. I shouldn’t care what other people think. I shouldn’t even be surfing the Web. I should be working on a new story. Or a column.

Writing is what’s real. It’s what makes me feel invisible, enormous.