I’m not much of a night person, or maybe my sleeping mind is very much of a night persona. I love getting up too early too much. When I was 5 years old, I would wake with this great excitement, flush with the knowledge that “The Lone Ranger” would be on TV at 6 a.m. That vivid greed to join the day remains with me to this day; the chair which waits for me in the living room each morning is like a saddle my haunches leap for, straight up out of the depths of sleep like a breeching whale. Reaching for that gold coin in all certainty that it’s there, somewhere just above, ahead. I tucker out usually before 10 a.m., -- no duh, by then my day’s already had a long march. Maybe I’ve simply learned on which side of the night I belong. In my boozing years there was always a sense of violation in heading out for the night’s immrama through the bars; the breathing, seething darkness seemed stern and occluded, remote, sighing scornfully with each step I took further out the door. I hada passport but I was no citizen; my desires and needs were suspect, even criminal, and out there in the party vistas I always found myself trying to wedge or sandwich into, insinuate myself inside the borders of that noctal disdain. The later I stayed, the more foreign the bar’s milieu, watering hole morphing into spiritous bog and then downright drowning pool, my fellow revenants growing pelts and canines, yapping and tearing at each other in bloody joy. Nothing like a bar’s parking lot at 3 a.m., the building black and shuttered tight, only a few cars left in the lot -- ghostly remnants of the lucky or the taxi’d off, the barmaids soon to get off, me -- a few lightposts casting insomniac phosphor over me, the unsleeping eye, the eye which refuses to close while the world lies dead. Criminal, like the way an alcoholic thieves a life doing business with whiskey bottles. We’ve got it ass-backward, cart before the horse, runner’s buzz before the burn, noctal bliss before nuptial ring, triumphal will before actually doing anything worthwhile. We learn in reverse, bitch-slapped by errancy, taught the measure of evil by our boundless wallows in it. I’ve found for myself that the treasures of the night aren’t assaulted through midnight as welled from the first thoughts of 4 a.m.; maybe it’s just the difference between a searing and surrendered mind - both approach the altar, but the direction is fateful. *** So here I am, abed at 9:45 p.m. on New Year’s Night, the bedroom up on the second floor of this bungalow like the bridge of a schooner, my bed facing the sliding glass door which opens onto a balcony overlooking the sea some 30 yards away. Breezes are stiff but not really cold so I leave the glass door open and float off in this boat of a coffin of a boot of a bed, rocked by the rough orchestrals of the seaside night. I lay a good while before finally falling off, not sure what was clinging to wakefulness. When letting go proffers the purest relief. Why is it always a fight to the finish, reaching for booty which ends up falling through our hands like water? What fools we are, surficial, perambling territorial predators of the wide savannah, eking our mastery from the outsides of flints, cartographies of conquest, the feel of booty in the hand, pearly and gold, relishing the thieved satin of flesh. Up and down the shore money has heaped itself in time-share condos and mulitmillion-dollar getaways, like the gamblers we are, betting the house against the sea, greedy for Pluto’s abyssal treasures, the full measure of Poseidon’s gold palaces founded deep in the earth’s salt womb. Dayside enterprises -- our furious making -- are all cashiered in bronze and fire and shaped by blades and scythes, the brutal alchemy of rude stones stuffed back in the mother’s kiln in order to cook up some new homunculus of power -- steel, oil, radioactive cores, bytes. The bright tide towers, tsunamis, crests now, for better and ill -- what secret of nature cannot be penetrated and seeded and nurtured for our benefit? So asks the arrogant animal will of our species. But then there is the night. Lamp it as we try, it’s just too big. Ten feet away from the streetlights by the road night reassumes itself in a vaporous dense black breathing. It has an appetite for us that feeds on what nourishes us -- canines which take joy in the tearing of flesh and meat, the glut of blood. A deep carnal hellfire which augments the good graces of night. Or take the sea, whose surfaces we have fully sailed, whose perils have been drastically reduced by innovations of keel and sail, GPS and satellite weather. No matter how thick the steel underfoot, it’s always a raw balance of ballast spreading wings over water and drowning depths pressing up from below. Each wave carries both a threat and promise in its caul, like a two-faced Janus, nightmarish of the rogue and dreamy of Tahitian satieties. Outside the opened glass door, it’s blow and wave-crash in a low ostinato with a few honks and blatts from the sax player next door mixed ink, with further riffs added by that couple arguing yet again. All of it out there, just beyond my closed eyelids, like a big pair of hands clasped around my head, fingers over my eyes, thumbs gently rolling around and around my temples, a deep voice whispering Release ...
Or is it Farewell
or Darling
or Down the hatch
or Daddy
Fading at last, my thoughts loosen into the murk and dissemble, show the last traces of me sinking in the last shape I assumed before disappearing altogether, darkness reaching for me like a falling gold coin.
