Nocturne
“I’m the screen, the blinding light;
I’m the screen, I work at night …”
- R.E.M.
The chill in the air this morning was hanging just below 32 degrees when I got home, almost as if evading a radar calibrated for anything above freezing. That was just before five.
I’ve spent the past several months adjusting to a new working reality, a different job with different hours, but at the same old place. I’ve just started to feel assimilated to the new routine, and now I wonder how the arrival of regularly frigid weather might affect that.
Nocturnal activity is nothing new for me; I can’t recall when my mental hamster wheel didn’t spin a little faster at night anyway. The biggest difference is that now I don’t get to dedicate those high energy stretches to something creative. And I think that’s what I miss. Now my thoughts in the wee hours are almost entirely stolen by work.
I find some decent thoughts sprouting every now and then, but usually when I’m too busy to note them properly, so most of them get misplaced. I’m frustrated that I can’t remember, but grateful at the same time, since my failure to recall them saves me from knowing how awe-inspiring (or ordinary) they really were. I’d tell myself if they were really such great ideas they’ll come back to me later, but I know that isn’t always the case.
It was a Bill Mallonee lyric that always seemed to say it best:
“And I distinguish a voice that I hear in the wind,
like a radio station not quite locked in.”
Of course I’ve always had what I think of as “firefly” moments, but now that my mind’s most fertile moments are wasted on work, the effect seems compounded. Maybe that’s why my creative output has been curtailed recently to just 17 syllables a day.
I’m just wondering if this is how I’m wired. If I’ve always been attuned to night thinking, is that just how it is? Is there a way to become a day thinker?
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