Yesterday first day of the New Year I spent fifteen hours straight in a blue chair staring at three screens - one, playing Khauff, one playing Deus Ex 2, and one playing a steady stream of the steamy. I drank beer, I ate second-hand home-made tamales from my neighbor Oliver. I rubbed my sallow cheeks at 2.30am and wondered if I hadn't been acting out some kind of regressive fantasy, but then I decided it was an appropriate "day off" to pleasure myself. Media study, I thought, with a pale laugh.

I lay down to sleep and so much time in the cyberpunk first person shooter world of Deus Ex had dented my eyelids - I saw sketchy neon hallways moving fast towards me interspersed with pictures of naked women. Very strange. This prolonged closed-eye distortion made me realize that the study of the effects of video games on perception and cogitation is ever more relevant.

And that whole day made me wake up on this day more fired with purpose. I did fifty sit-ups, made a bowl of yogurt and granola, and commenced corresponding, editing and writing. Robin called, she and I have been sharing well over the phone for the last few weeks. I have a telephone headset which allows me to couple conversation with relatively mindless work. By the time Robin and I, and Souris and I, had spent two or three hours on the phone together, I had two trashcans filled with debris from my office, a freshly swept floor, and a new layout to the waking hours command center.

And I think - why didn't I clean out this room more years ago? And why don't I have a vacuum after the last one broke in 1999? All signs point to this era being the era of "learn to take care of yourself." ie, push back from the computer, look at your surroundings, evaluate your situation and desires and set that shit straight.

(I had been tempted to toss most of my papers in the trash, but I'd decided to dignify them with reading, sorting and filing. Reading "At Home with Richard Hell" (NYTimes.com) reminded me that hand-scribbled notes from friends are often the most valuable objects we own).

So I ate a single bowl of yogurt and granola for seven hours. I'm hungry, maybe undernourished. But I managed a shower and a neat room and I feel like a badass in that way.