This is the third day in a row I woke up thinking I’d buy a 7-day unlimited MetroCard and spend the week bolting all over town. I do this a few times a year.<\/p>\n
Today I planned to canvas parts of Throgs Neck and neighboring Bronx areas for (what else?) payphones. But minutes after setting out to do this I changed course, and came back home. I don’t need to accumulate content every single day, though that is exactly what I end up doing. I need more time here, at the desk, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and doing more than just laying it out to dry.<\/p>\n
Lately the accumulation comes in the form of bedcam videos. I’ve been using a WYZE CAM to record myself sleeping the past few nights, thinking there must be something I can learn from exploring this foreign part of my life. So far it’s inconclusive but I will say that claims I’ve heard from others that I sleep thrash seem to be true. I would think it’s even worse with someone else present, since I always found sleeping in the same bed with another person to be unnatural, and anxiety-producing.<\/p>\n
Why is it such a cultural bedrock that loving couples sleep in the same bed? I’ve read that it is a lingering effect of the Industrial Revolution, when people moved from rural areas to more crowded cities. Sharing a bed was a matter of saving space, not some kind of proof that you loved your spouse. I dated one woman who agreed, and we rarely shared a bed overnight. But most others I’ve known and known of consider sleeping separately a sign of dysfunction.<\/p>\n
I was the subject of a professional sleep study once but learned nothing from it. I simply could not get to sleep with a zillion sensors and wires affixed to my head and body, not to mention the fact that the place where this study occurred was noisy as hell.<\/p>\n
I had used the WYZE to record continuously but last night I tried the motion sensor approach, which I thought would only record my nocturnal movements. The goal was to lessen the seemingly endless increase of digital accumulation that floods my mind sometimes just thinking about what a squalid, miasmatic sprawl of stuff I’ve produced.<\/p>\n
Alas, the camera is not able to do that very effectively in night vision mode. From previous videos I know I move a lot more than got captured in motion detect mode. I don’t move constantly but I frequently twitch and gesticulate in ways that make it look like I am wide awake. WYZE did not catch very much of that, though its motion detection seems to work quite well in better lighting.<\/p>\n
In advance of thinking I’d be out and around, and with the weather quite a bit warmer than before, I hung up the disintegrating Columbia brand jacket I’ve worn for about 6 years and brought out the old Rothco Outback Vest someone gave me a long time ago. It has a billion pockets. The owner of a bar gave it to me after someone left it there and never came back to get it. People comment that’s it’s dorky but I’m no fashion statement, never was. I also disagree, finding it neither dorky nor beautiful, just some innocuous in-between.<\/p>\n