Rick,

If it's a "condition" then I got it too. Total pain in the ass.....but it's why I took a few flatpicking lessons when a simple book would have sufficed.

I'm SOOOO interested in learning guitar but the books stack up and I can learn in one in-person-lesson more than I can read from the all the books (so it's not just the book content.

I know my weakness in this regard (how I approach tech reading) and have figgered out a few solutions. For instance,

When learning chord melodies I have to use guitar neck paper, and translate each chord to the paper "neck", then lay out the progression, in full, in front of me (on a BIG table.

.....nobody is more pathetic than I.