THE SICKNESS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

I’m not sick. Just to be clear. But it is the middle of the night and I do feel something.

Perhaps it’s oppression. The stifled world out there is deathly quiet, and of course, most of the people who matter to me are asleep. I watched the President land in Arizona, and climb out of his helicopter for a rally. A sea of red hats whooped and hollered, chanting “USA, USA, USA...” as he made his way through the hangar. The crowd reached fever pitch.

It hasn’t helped me sleep. With a gig tomorrow night and a full day on Sunday, I’m not sure how I’m going to make it. People should be asleep at 3 o’clock in the morning; I should be, and I’m not and I feel a bit sick about that.

I don’t have anything to eat. I can’t play the piano, and the Internet is dull, save for President Business whipping up a frenzy in an aircraft hangar in Arizona. He wants to put America first; I just want to go to sleep.

Perhaps it’s a sort of small-hours-loneliness. I’ll feel better about things tomorrow when there are people around and messages to reply to, when I can fill the air with music, or nip out to get some bread. Lying here in the dark is just plain boring, with a sprinkling of pale, weak, heartless sickliness.

Reading is making my eyes go funny and my brain hurt. I need darkness to sweep over me and the moon to sing me to slumber. I need to leave my thoughts behind. I need to stop writing.

“What do you hope he talks about?” asked the reporter before the rally. The large man in a baseball cap, pushed his hand over his sizeable chin and his eyes moved uncomfortably around the room as the microphone wobbled in his face.

“Oh, everythin’ important,” he said in a drawling Southern accent. The reporter smiled, unwilling to ask him to narrow that vapid response down to anything specific inside the known universe. I wonder sometimes whether large crowds of people are truly able to think critically at all, the same way that individuals or small groups can. Maybe that’s why politicians like large-scale, sweeping rallies. Perhaps the more people are around us, the safer we feel expressing our opinions. It’s alone in the dark where our deepest fears and thoughts try to get the better of us.

I really need to go to sleep now.