From The Big Head To Canal Street

Thunderstorms; heavy downpours, Harold entrenched somewhere dry...

The uncluttered living room, which is where I spend all my time now, when I'm home; reminds me of a jail cell.

Some of my most content moments were spent while in solitary confinement in one county jai or another. All I needed was a good book and coffee and I would stay up all night, reading by whatever light filtered through the bars.

What has to happen is, a period of extreme boredom has to set in. 

Going from a busy lifestyle with all kinds of choices, and plenty of stimuli, on the outside to being thrown into an 8 foot by 9 foot cell with just a minimalist cot, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination, with 4 walls, a ceiling and floor with bors in ther front and a slit of a window in back can bring this about.

Pacing back and forth is an option, and looking out the window at whatever the view is, another.

One time, in Jacksonville, I was on the 6th floor with a window that faced west. The sunlight would beam through the window for a few hours each day, right before dusk. Using a pencil, I would track the beam by putting marks on the wall, showing, for example, exactly where it fell on the wall when the evening meal showed up, and was pushed through the bars.

Soon, I had a functional sundial, accurate to within a couple minutes.

With the changing of the seasons, the exact spot where the sun went down would shift (to the left, if it was fall) so that it would go down to the right of some tall skinny building on the horizon, perhaps, but would shift, a quarter degree or so, to the left (if it was fall) each day, and might disappear behind the tall skinny building for a few days, before starting to touch the horizon on the other side of it. This became like a calendar of sorts, and I was able to protract where the sun would sink on whatever day I was slated to get out.

 I always liked the solitary confinement situations, where I would only be let out for an hour each day. This is an arrangement that is used to punish inmates who break the law, somehow, while in there. They can't put you in jail for attacking or stealing from someone, because you are already in jail. So, they make it "worse" for those hapless souls by locking them in a special cell (called a "lockdown cell," by the unimaginative institution) by themselves for 23 hours a day. Most other inmates hated this, as they were the gregarious types that would pass time, like 8 hours a day of it, playing Spades in a groups of about a half dozen. They would loudly slam the cards they were playing onto the stainless steel table, accompanied by a gutteral vocal ejaculation, the way Karate guys do when they punch and kick and break pieces of lumber.

I guess the idea behind all that racket is to add an element of intimidation and underscore the power of whatever card they are slamming down, as if to say "Take That!!"

After each card is so presented, in the manner of a basketball being slam-dunked, it's greatness is then hailed through the barking out of a series of various gutteral groans and ejaculations. These are invariably delivered, at least by the black inmates, with as much "bass" being put into their voices as possible.
Because of the acoustics of a jail pod, these notes get really muddled and it sounds like a pack of dogs all barking at once. Things like: "What cha gonna do?! Huh? What cha gonna do?! I got this hand; I got this hand, you ain't got s***!"
The irony is that, a lot of times it is a fight that breaks out during a card game that gets one or more of them sent to lockdown.

Those types hate the solitary confinement. Another aspect of the punishment is that the lockdown cells are in an isolated part of the jail so, no talking half the night through the bars.
And, if the locked down inmate can't read, that's even worse.
But, I always enjoyed the peace that came with isolation.
     

I can't really tell which came first, the chicken, or the egg...

With the "chicken" being the uncluttered living room, and the eggs being the ideas.
It might be that I was ready to make a change, and decluttering the room was part of it. Or it might be that the spaciousness is helping me to keep my thoughts simple.
When all you have in a room is a couch, it's easy to sit on that couch and appreciate being alive and having air to breath. Then when I bring one item in from the other room, where I shoved everything. that item gets my full attention. That saves me from spending only 5 minutes on 25 different things and not getting very far into any of them. This gives me the chance to gradually add things to my environment. Just a guitar and one method book is enough to keep me busy. And it is a high quality of focus.
But, since the water from my bathroom sink comes out piping hot, but the tub's faucet is lukewarm, it just dawned on me that I can get some kind of attachment to connect a hose to the sink, and I can use that to fill the tub with hot water. I've had a lukewarm shower for about 2 years now, and only now did I think of that...

Then, I was thinking how nice it would be to have some kind of jogging application that uses GPS on my phone, so I can start jogging and not have to measure or guesstimate the distances I might be running.
Not long after having that thought, I accidentally clicked on the Google Playstore app and, front and center on their page was a jogging app that does just that.
So, with fun added to jogging, especially for a statistician like myself who loves pie charts and graphs, that was a fortuitous discovery and might help me realize one of my new year resolutions, which is to start a jogging program, so as to help phase out tobacco, which is another one of my resolutions....
Right now, I resolve to get some sleep.
These are novel ideas that are coming to me, connecting the dots between things that have been right in front of me, forever, but that I just never noticed.
Earlier I tried the app while slowly jogging from where there is a large bust of some historical figure's head in the park to Canal Street, finding it to be .42 miles. Eventually, I would like to be able to run that distance in 2 minutes.