The socially mediated life has felt too much lately, given the way in which my main remaining social network (Twitter) has felt even more sour since the acquisition. It’s led me to try to invest more effort in the spaces online that I ostensibly own, (er rent) but also to shift some things in my day to day life – For example – I’ve returned to wearing a wristwatch that gives me information instead of wearing one that I was constantly supplying with data. The benefits of the quantified life do not seem as clear to me: either I walk or I don’t either I get good sleep or I don’t. The measuring of these things isn’t giving me information that I use in anyway. Empty notches on my arm.

So why not something that sensually gives me pleasure and doesn’t chide me? Cheap wrist watches are one of those things that I binge purchase. I looked in a drawer and found about a dozen of them, all languishing with dead batteries. Most of them are at least twenty years old, vintage. This heap reminds me of my father’s dresser and the batches of rings and other accessories he would stash. I mourn the big open bins of knockoffs on Canal Street, the four degrees removed versions of fashionable watches that had stopped trying to fool the credulous and instead had mutated into their own baroque monstrosities.

So enough digitizing and tracking. Let my time and my paces be approximate and vanishing.