Trying to sleep

[Verbal Mike]

I try to sleep, despite the light, despite the tweeting of birds without and hard-drives within. I try to think of it as "a bit like camping out", but it's been so long and that's hardly even a relevant metaphor anymore. Every couple of years I buy a useful piece of camping equipment -- hiking boots, a backpack -- imagining it will guilt me into getting up and camping again some time. It hasn't happened yet, but that's okay. The time, the place, the people need to be right anyway. It will come, because the urge to hike, to sleep in the desert or near some glorious hill, the urge is still there, and will likely never go away. Sure, it is often kicked back down by the urge to be online every waking second, never to abandon the network, the ubiquitous network... And a man is not an island... But a node that can't survive without the network is almost useless; the network has to get input from *somewhere*.... Not to mention, I need to get away from all this text if I'm ever to write again... How can I write with so much text in my ears and eyes? Hell, how can I even think!? There's always something, always a new message, new post, new tweet, new article -- something! But when you've become much more of a consumer than a producer of content, you ask yourself, or, well, I ask myself, where did I go wrong, why don't I write anymore? Coming right back to camping again, I used to think I should find some oasis in the desert and just spend a few days there, alone, hiking around in the afternoons and just relaxing and thinking the rest of the time, meditating, finding balance. But then, those are probably just an idealized concept... I would likely get bored, not to mention antsy, without my moving walls of text in front of me, without the constant distraction of music, networks and text. Nonetheless, lying there, I hear birds tweet and think of mornings in a sleeping bag, avoiding the summer sun and catching an extra hour of slumber before it gets too warm.