I bought dozens and dozens of CDs and put them in a pile on top of my piano, never unwrapping them or even looking at them. I knew I would listen to them, but it would be months later and I wanted to forget what they were so I’d be surprised when I heard them.

I like listening to CDs without knowing what they are, and either identifying the music or guessing at what it might be.

I planned to quit my job in May or June and spend the rest of the year listening to those CDs, reading, practicing piano, and walking around New York taking pictures. I spent hundreds of dollars on 3-year subscriptions to literary journals from universities and independent publishers, and bought years-long subscriptions to several magazines and newspapers. This was to insure that I had new reading material in the event that I went completely broke and could not afford to buy books.

I was going to spend the summer thinking and breathing and decompressing from what would have been 7 years of corporate life. I was starting to wonder how I ever got involved so heavily with corporate life in the first place. I wanted to get back to being me. This was an exciting prospect because I have no idea what “me” is, so finding out could be fascinating.

I was going to cancel my Internet access and write with pen and paper and a typewriter the way I used to do in 1991 when I was living at the Parc Lincoln hotel.

In 1991 I couldn’t afford decent typing paper, so I stole rolls of paper towels from the shared bathroom down the hall. These paper towels really were more suitable for use in a typewriter than for drying hands or blowing noses. The surface of the paper was so smooth it was almost glossy, and the paper itself thick enough that I could type onto it and then write on it with a pen with little risk of ripping the paper or of the ink bleeding through to the other side.

The beauty of writing this way, I thought, was that it would free my mind from the subtle tyranny of the physical limits of the page. I believed (and still do believe) that while committing ideas to paper you subconsciously draw your thoughts to conclusion as you begin to run out of room on the paper. Not having to rip paper out of the typewriter, I thought, would save what I evidently believed were my extremely precious intellectual resources.

There was a paper towel holder in my room. I placed the roll of paper into the holder and set it so that the paper fed into my typewriter. I typed and typed and typed. One roll of paper lasted me the summer.

I envisioned a system where the roll of paper would feed into the typewriter and be collected and rolled up again by another receptacle.

I had the same packrat mentality then as I did in October when I bought all those CDs and magazine and newspaper subscriptions. While typing my days away at the Parc Lincoln I imagined a day when I would sit down and read it all. But that day was not anywhere in the near future. Then, as now, I never intended to read anything once I was done writing it. I only read my own writing when I’m drunk (that’s a fact).

I recently read some of what I wrote on those rolls of paper in 1991. I would characterize it as miserable intellectual constipation. Nothing in all those pages is worth reading or contemplating. (I never built the envisioned dispenser > typewriter > receptacle system, and I tore the paper off at increments would could reasonably be called pages)

I still have a roll of this paper which I never used. I stole it from the third floor bathroom at the Parc Lincoln, 166 West 75th Street, New York, NY 10023. I believe I also stole rolls of paper like this from the bathroom at the Cosmic Coffee Shop at Columbus Circle, but I can’t remember that with any certainty.

My memories of living at the Parc Lincoln are both dreary and golden. I was just out of college with no prospects whatsoever. The weight of the universe was going to crush me. On the other hand, it was time to myself. It was time to stay up all night in the city I always dreamed of living in and listen to a single Horowitz CD over and over. It was time to think and write and read and develop ideas and walk around. I regret not taking better advantage of the time and place, but as per usual I had no plan or goals, and to drive matters even further to distraction I had no money to speak of. I knew that this city could crush me, and I further knew that if and when it did I would stay here. I always wanted New York.

That was over 10 years ago but I still have dreams bordering on nightmares about living at the Parc Lincoln during the hot summer and sleeping in pools of sweat while shockingly fat pigeons flew right into my room and clucked in my terrified face.

I was able to leave my job sooner than expected, under terms much better than I had expected or even thought possible.

With all this free time to deal with I started thinking about how I could make the best use of it all. I became interested in alternate sleep patterns, in which people forego the traditional 8 hours a night in favor of other patterns. 4 hours awake/1 hour asleep was one idea. The point is to eliminate as much sleep time as possible from the nightly 8 hours without eliminating too much sleep. I never trusted the generally accepted practice of 7 or 8 consecutive hours of sleep a night.

I did a small amount of research into the matter and found that in some quarters the practice of catnapping is reasonably respected, although for an individual to sustain that type of routine for very long generally requires meditation and perhaps even altered states of mind.

The other idea, which I have already explored as far as I intend to, was to stay up as long as I possibly could, then sleep as long as I possibly could. The idea behind this was to simply be free of caring what time it was. Which in and of itself is a stupid idea, but I had time to try, and if nothing else I could use this experience to win a “Been There/Done That” contest somewhere in life.

The results of this experiment, which I conducted for about 3 weeks, were very much what I expected. I felt jet-lagged. I was nauseous a lot of the time and had an almost continuous headache. I forgot to eat. I probably should have planned ahead for that particular element (food is highly recommended by most health experts).

I should have devised a schedule whereby I would eat something after x number of hours awake, eat something else another x number of hours later, and so on. But it never happened like that. And even if I had made a schedule I don’t think it would have worked. My desire to not care what time it was was not strong enough, and I could not get accustomed to popping open a Budweiser at 11:00 in the morning (having been awake for 16 hours), or putting a porterhouse on the grill at 8:00 AM.

In the first week I covered my windows with blackout vinyl (the sort of thing photographers use to turn a room with windows into a darkroom) so I would not be woken up or distracted by the sunlight. I slept until 4pm one day, then stayed up until 12 noon the next day. I Woke up at 11:30 pm, and stayed up until 7:30 PM. Then I slept until about 3:00 AM, stayed up until 11 PM (long day), and at that I had gone full circle and landed back on a more typical schedule after less than a week. I continued this experiment to varying levels of intensity for a couple of more weeks, but lost interest and the physical capacity to carry on like that.

The whole month of March is almost a complete blank in my mind. After the first round of sleep experiments I endeavored to do absolutely nothing of any merit or meaning. This was harder than it sounds at first, but after a while my mind was free and some reflection of what personality I’ve been burying for the last few years is coming back.

Now it is the middle of April and I am restless to do something constructive.