As a child, a kid, much of your life seems like a failed attempt to stay up until
And despite the secret price you pay in bruises and twisted nipples, you still can’t stay up past bedtime. You’re kept apart, like the night is some holy mystery, a twisted trinity: you, the supplicating mendicant seeking to partake of the evening’s secret sacraments, your parents, the cowled priest and priestess intent on preserving the sanctity of the evening rites, and
How is it that thou canst change today into tomorrow? Move a month or year into another? Who, oh
And while we were never really thinking about our yearning for that pensive hour as some dark theology, it seems that some sort of religious energy should be manifest at the moment of
Nothing of the sort. One moment passes into the next. The continuous process that we strive to parse into parcels remains indivisible.
The first
And then
there
*
it
was.
And that was it.
If you weren’t watching with bated breath like we all were, you would have missed it. Well, you would have missed it anyway. We did. There was nothing there. Nothing changed but the clocks. One second was, then wasn’t, dying the little death of moments. And though we tried to seize, with all our cheering and jumping and kissing, that moment that is
This was what I had whined and gimmicked and fought for? This is what I had been chasing every night since I first felt the lure of the late evening. There was nothing. Nothing but Jay Leno and David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and two year old action flicks. Ice cream from the freezer and popcorn from the microwave. Ingredients for a general dulling of the mind and fattening of the body—feed for cattle self-confined to the stockyards.
And yet, something remains very attractive, very alluring, about the middle of night. For I still sacrifice to bring myself before that that time that is both latest and earliest, to worship again the dark moment. I give up the light of the morning, the rising sun, the slow tread of dawn just to taste the invisible instant that is the essence of night. Giving it up for what?
And this is, essentially, my complaint: that I (and most likely you) am looking for something in the hidden hours that doesn’t exist, something that I won’t seek in the day’s light. And isn’t all this just so sneaky and furtive? The imagery is all dim and dank back alleys, the corner behind the giant garbage can, up against the slimy and graffitied brick.
And yet, I still bring myself to worship at that dark moment that is both latest and earliest. I give up the light of the morning, the rising sun, the slow tread of dawn just to taste the invisible instant that is the essence of night.