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The popularity of Twitter bothers me, not only because I wish I'd thought of it first, but because I periodically adopted the same style for some of my journal entries in times gone by. The second reason may seem like a restatement of the first, but it's not, because I tended to post entries consisting of lists of time-stamped minutiae when I was severely depressed or hung up in some obsessive-compulsive loop.
I restricted myself from doing it after I realized that the ironic heading of "Oh Hell Not This Again" that I used for one instance wasn't really very ironic, so the idea of a whole sub-medium devoted to this mode of expression seems problematic to me.
All of this is completely illusory, of course, but it's still alluring, and even thousands of demonstrations of just how little use it is to stay up late or get up unreasonably early for no good reason have done little to dull the glamour of seemingly stepping outside the universe where there's nothing to bother me. This Saturday, despite having passed out around 1 p.m. and come to at 8 p.m., by some accident I turned off the main bedroom light and lay down at 1 a.m. with some comfort reading. The comfort reading was MuZz, which I'm sure speaks volumes about me and none of it good, but it turns out to be very difficult to relax by reading something that I don't find relaxing, even if feel it ought to be. Or perhaps expecting Michael Swanwick to lull me to sleep is plain idiocy.
When the timer turned off the bedside light, I was tired enough to just lie there, but after a while I got restless and headed into the bathroom with some vague notion of flossing and brushing, only to find myself staring at some bookcase. After some puzzlement I started thinking seriously about why this would be, and judged by the bookcase's style and the presence of another one on the adjoining wall that it was the bookcase in my bedroom, at which point I realized that I was asleep with my eyes open once again, so I turned off the kitchen and living room lights and went back to bed and slept properly for a few hours.
On Sunday I felt foolhardy enough to indulge another of my useless temptations: I came into work on a weekend. I occasionally do this, but I so seldom get anything done that it's pretty much an empty ritual. Today I came in at the (for me) unspeakably early hour of 1:30 p.m., and spent essentially all of my time satisfying my morbid curiosity by reading the archives of Thomas M. Disch's livejournal upon learning that he'd killed himself. There are many things I might comment on, but as the narrator of Disch's amazing Camp Concentration says, they're sufficiently self-evident that it's of little relevance that I relate them, so I'll just go make dinner.
