try this experiment at home...

It is the warmest day thus far this year, and every window in the house is open. The breezes sieving through the rooms slam doors without warning, a promising summery sound. My life, recently contorted into a centerless torus of anxiety by the last stages of a website project, begins to reassume organic proportions. Few car alarms break the day. Everyone wants a nap.

I wake up at four o'clock in the morning, still in my clothes, realizing I've forgotten to turn off the computer. I can hear it humming, bored, from the base of the stairs. I had intended to go back up and work some more after midnight, but fell into oblivion while lying in bed as Susan fell asleep. I trudge upstairs to find on the screen a half-finished email to the proprietor of Brand X, the online journal index that has just accepted my product into their ranks. It is deleted for no other reason than that I don't want the woman to think I'm still up sending emails at godforgotten hours of the night. This is some form of unwritten social rule that I can't fully explain; I go to sleep after 2 a.m. at least half the nights of my life. I should be proud of the extra hours that I get to live awake because of this.

While I'm shutting down the computer, I hear one lone bird belting out song to the utter darkness outside. I have that feeling you get when see the first smoke of daylight after staying up all night -- the moment when the tides turn in your body and begin to recede from the need for sleep. I remember this feeling from the morning I first went dancing with then-friend Susan. We went to a club expecting to find other friends from our workplace, but the others never bothered to show up. Susan and I didn't know each other particularly well, and were both privately disquieted at the thought of the evening stretching on ahead of us in only the other's company.

Just before six in the morning, when I stumbled back to my apartment, I was still perplexed by what a riotously good time I'd had with this near-stranger. I had little desire to sleep, but decided to try for the sake of my few remaining brain cells. Unfortunately, I had no curtains, and daylight was fast flowing into the spaces between the buildings. So I went into my closet, shut the door, and surrendered awareness until sometime that afternoon.

There are more elegant places to wake up than in your dark closet, all twisted up in old laundry and profoundly hung over. Sometimes it's better not to sleep at all than risk waking up in such a place. But the disorder of that awakening, although I didn't remotely suspect it at the time, was only the messiness that accompanies the birth of any new living thing.

Today is a blue moon -- the second full moon of this month. This is the second blue moon of this year. I learn from the "You Can! with Beekman and Jax" cartoon in the Sunday paper that this is a rare event; the next double-blue moon year won't be for nearly two more decades. I continue to read Beekman and Jax, a weekly "science is fun!" strip, despite the fact that I think they frequently mix patronizingly basic concepts with needlessly complex explanations. I often find their home experiments to be tangential to the real theory being illustrated. I have little regard for shoddy science in the same way that I'm aggravated by people who loudly support political viewpoints similar to my own in an aggressively stupid, unthinking way. I would like to believe that the institutions I support are fundamentally different from those I do not. Evidence occasionally suggests that my fellow believers are the same amalgamation of followers, egocentric leaders, movable middlarians, crackpot extremists, and honest folk as comprise the institutions that I find unpalatable.

In contrast to Beekman and Jax, I have grown to like Bill Nye the Science Guy's science-for-kids show. It took some getting used to, like the future always does; I originally found it intensely irritating to my senses. In Senegal, sensory stimulation was a swim in the river, a ride through the desert on a motorcycle, or a BBC show fizzing through the shortwave radio late at night. My tolerance of ambient sensory stimulation adjusted to reflect a life without television and other inorganic "content providers." When I came home, shows like Bill Nye made me feel like I was going to have a seizure. Gradually my ability to accept, process, and enjoy multiple simultaneous sensory streams has expanded beyond what I once thought was healthy. Bill Nye is like science for people with extremely low attention spans -- a constant stream of uninterrupted stimulation, separate segments that all riff off a central topic. Sure, it deconstructs young people's ability to concentrate on mundane information for any period of time, but it trains them in what may be the most useful skill for the next age: compiling concepts from the static of an unrelenting information stream running endlessly around and through us.