The mid-night after midnight

There is an easiness at the penultimate moments in the night, the brief kindness right before the incipient light refracts off the countless closed window-panes aligned like suburban dominoes. These hours are innocuous, they're forgiving, like a smiling tide that atones for its rancorous caprice with a swift, generous push back towards shore. Rabbinic lore maintains that pre-dawn is the time that God is, indeed, generous, and prayer is easy. Unfair as it may seem, the panes of time that the fewest see are the slits in which one can see the most: clarity, like all organisms, survives best when competition is the least, and the heart of the night offers no distractions to dissuade from focus, from attention. It is the only time that stands alone, whose hegemonic trait is not that it is work's domain, or some other endeavor's rightful host. It is a time which represents nothing more than itself; it is at least and at most exactly what it is: an epoch with certain volume, time, distance, and form. It is two hours, three hours, perhaps more, or, oftentimes, somewhere in between, in the crudely cut gaps between whole numbers. And what's most remarkable about that is that nobody cares; the time is as much as one makes it, as many units of time that one devotes to awake-ful nothingness. It is completely volitional, and that is what makes its utilization so rewarding. If one is not compelled to take action, in other words, yet acts nonetheless, that action is essentially pure, and the ascribed reward will be fittingly refreshing. To voluntarily confer meaning is to endow an otherwise empty vessel with a taste of infinity, with a spark of something so outrageously unnecessary that it is beyond this dimension to describe why one did it in the first place. That is untainted infinity, the presence of something created from nothing, ex nihilo, and improved forever by an unforced choice for improvement. That is the beauty of the night, and its easiness; for it is never more natural, more graceful, to accomplish infinity than at one of these crudely cut hours, in the wilderness between tired night and harried day.

Stay tranquil san diego,
MC melatonin