Lateness

Being up at this time of the night is familiar. For many years I worked the midnight shift. First in the rubber mill, then the gas station, then the army, then the telephone company, then the taxi job. There is a certain peace to this time, perhaps because the Persons from Porlock are all asleep. I am not up late, I am up early. I laid down about four p.m. to read. Two pages and then came slumber. I have spent a large portion of my life blissfully unaware of what was going on around me but one thing I noticed. People who work the midnight shift get strange. Random thoughts, that usually just flit away for daytime people, get concentrated and assume an undue importance. I think that all activists and reformers see too much of the Moon. When they say that they have seen the light, it is Dawn.
I remember one in particular. I was taking a philosophy course and one lady went off on a tangent one night. She said that the organization she worked for discriminated against half black, half Cherokee women from Louisiana that were raised by Carthusian monks in Texas and that there was a glass ceiling where she worked so that no woman could become the head of the firm. I asked her who she worked for and she said "The Catholic Church.". I wondered, when she was applying for the job didn't she know the top spot was sort of restricted? I asked her what hours she worked and she said "Midnight to 8 a.m..". If you spend too much time absorbing the light of Luna you become a Luna___. Racing around in my mind now is the thought of a concept of a mystic that I recently read. Nothing exists. Well if nothing exists, then something exists: Nothing. If Nothing is something then Nothing exists and that is really something. I think I will pull the shades, the moonlight is glaring onto the computer screen and I should shave a few times.