I stay up way too late at night, often. This is a bad habit, it incapacitates me: the older I get, the less well I tolerate it. Yet I persist. The date stamp of this entry serves as proof. One of the many lessons of becoming a father has been the sharp observation of the impact of insufficient sleep. For as long as I can remember (the era of pre-fatherhood having become a hazy recollection, possibly a myth I picked up in some strange dream or fantasy) managing my son’s sleeping has been a daily, serious endeavor. Good sleep, good naps equals a happier, calmer, better behaved child. I should learn from this but the lesson does not quite take. Here are a few lessons of intolerably late nights.
1. If you stay up late enough, noises (mostly) stop.
Living in the city is noisy. Cars, people, parties, airplanes, they go on all the time. Of course, the world is a ball and it is always daytime somewhere, but in the local atmosphere if you stay up seriously late the noises almost stop – there is a little engine noise, trucks and cars somewhere out there, but mostly, it becomes as truly quiet as the city ever is. If I ever succeed in giving up this last, most obstinate bad habit, that is something I will truly miss: being outside, no barrier or media between me and the air, and yet truly quiet. A legacy, maybe, of my childhood as a country boy: long ago and far away and lost seemingly forever, a time when quiet was a relatively ready commodity, wander into the little woods by my parents house, nothing but bugs, birds, perhaps a distant combine. This contrast is particularly apparent on the fourth of July: sometime after two, for a blessed interval, you can finally get a few minutes free from the snap crackle and pop of fireworks, the meaningless noise of supposed independence.
2. If you stay up even later, noise comes back
Birds. Birds are the masters of early risers, there is not even a distant second. Douglas Adams wrote:
He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learned birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.
I miss living in a universe that contains an alive Douglas Adams a million times more than I miss living in a universe that contains an alive Michael Jackson.
As soon as the slightest glimmer of daylight lurks at the lowest limit of the horizon birds start it up, saying stuff like “chereee chirup chirup twee chirup chirup” and “fwiip chee tee chee.” As well, somewhere between three and four in the ante meridiem, the odd fireworks boom returns. Who in the hell feels the sudden, inexplicable need to create a few random explosions at three thirty something ayem? Just another mystery of the city I will never fully comprehend.
3. At times, time loses it usual meanings.
The boring pat explanation I’d probably give for my persistent occasional forging into the wee hours is that it is the only time left me when there are no tasks, no responsibilities, no demands. I am just me. No one needs to be fed, helped, taught, entertained, served. No work must be done in these small hours. Doesn’t explain my persisting in this habit in days of yore (storied, possibly mythical, remembered but not fully believed in any more) when there was no partner, lover, job, child… Perhaps though I will always crave these hours where time is no longer tied to some schedule, some imposition I have apparently willingly adopted, the hours graced with blankness and nonentity by virtue of being given to that king of nonentity, sleep. Tomorrow (today) will be an ordeal, I will curse the fool who squandered hours meant for sleeping on weird meanderings through halls of crystal, numinous thought. But here, now, in the not day not night, in the endless now, I reign king of the hour that stretches, a kingdom of memory and desire, conscious but not constructed, hoping to attain a wiser pattern past some inadequate sop of sleep, transcendent, alive, present, awake.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 5, 2009 at 5:39 AM
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