Middle of the night
Three nights ago I went to bed at 8:30pm, something I haven’t done since I was little. It was light outside.
As a child, I would stay up very late, usually reading. Often I’d wait until everyone else was asleep and wander downstairs to do nothing in particular. Sometimes I’d watch a movie.
Yesterday, I started listening to a This American Life podcast. The theme of the show was ‘Middle of the Night’. Ira Glass begins the podcast by describing a job he once had—one of the best jobs he ever had—as a temp typist working nights for a company in New York City. He worked from midnight until the early hours of the morning. He said something about this job that made me smile, because I think it’s partly why I gravitated to bar work as soon as I turned 18. He said that working while the rest of the world slept, and leaving work just when everyone else was waking up, made him feel like he was part of a secret society.
At my first bar job a few years ago, we finished up at about 4am—both too early and too late to sleep. We’d hang around the bar for a bit: some drinking, some smoking. Most people did both. Sometimes we’d order pizza from a place on Elizabeth Street. It was always soggy by the time it arrived. We’d often lock up and migrate to another bar.
I never liked the bars we went to, but I always went. For whatever reason, I was compelled to stay until daylight, at which point the society disbanded, stubbed out their cigarettes and slept it off.
Don’t the sleepers know what they’re missing out on? Maybe you like your sleep and I do too and it’s not always nice at night, but you should still try it.
Parks that don’t look quite real, and uprooted footpaths broken like the top of a cake. You writers of fake shopping lists stroll purposefully, only to walk past the supermarket because you don’t really need detergent. Who does, at this time of night? You just wanted to get out of the house.