2:27AM

2:27 AM.

I’m not up late, I’ve slept. 7PM to 2AM gives me 7 hours’ sleep, an hour more than I need. Normal hours for me. I think Lee gets disgusted when I fail to attend his plays at night. He doesn’t believe the excuse that I lose all connection with the conscious world at a time when most people are just getting started. But it works for me. Carla has a night shift at the hospital, so she’s not here anyway.

Sleeping through the early evening allows me to avoid the frenzy that so many eagerly dive into. That way I get several hours of quiet time before the first rumblings of service and delivery trucks demand attention. The 3AM freight train noisily snorts up the rails through town, a comforting kind of white noise in the distance, the engineer in sync with my own hours. By the time his last graffiti splashed car approaches the North end of the city, a pervasive quiet rolls back in, carrying its own identity. It isn’t so much the absence of clutter as it is a brief connection with an alternate reality. Like floating in space, an astronaut with no tether, a sleep deprivation chamber that covers everything, a giant cone of silence.

I own it all, the other daytime players are down. Humans, dogs, frogs, bees, birds… deep in a REM coma. It’s as if a crop duster sprayed a cloud of KO gas, an incapacitating agent, over the land. At least briefly, I’m immune. Only the plants and trees silently flex their muscles.

The dogs and I harness each other up, taking a long walk around the loop. A curving asphalt trail leads us to the rear of the Cold Cow Ice Cream store. Dumpsters vomit out what their stomachs can’t hold, spotlighted under security lights that appropriately paint the area jaundice yellow. Holding my breath in protest, we hurry past, breaking into a trot as the dark woods extend their arms to welcome us back into the natural world.

Home again, an early breakfast of pineapple with sausage, washed down by a brew of scalding black Columbian, jump starts my daylight hours, a transition of sorts.