1:14 AM

Is it just me, or is it a lot easier to be creative in the dead of night?

If it's just me, does that make me crazy?

The Right Lighting

On several rainy days over the last few years, an acquaintance of mine has asserted an unusual perspective about the world. He vastly prefers the way world is lit when the sun is hidden by the clouds.

Explaining himself, he goes on to say that it’s because the shadows are evened out. Everything is lit in balance. This way, he says, the world appears as it actually is. It seems more real. More honest.

My friend’s opinion leads me to think about light. Granted, it doesn’t take much to get me to think about things like light, or metaphysically about anything at all. But specifically, I think about what it means that the vast majority of humans rely so much on light.

Light is a wave/particle complex generated by objects which possess immense amounts of energy. We see because these particles bounce off the objects of the world. Some of these reach our eyes, and our brains interpret the stimuli in a complex series of impressions I find it impossible to describe.

What I mean to say is that when we see the world around us, we are only seeing what the light tells us is there. We trust a tiny particle to tell us about that chair two feet away, and we do it implicitly. If we don’t trust light to tell us how things are, we could darn well lose our minds.

The sunlight that reaches through our atmosphere has quite a golden hue. The sun gives off pure white light, but somewhere along the line, during the heat of the day, the light goes amber and so does our world.

When it rains, and the clouds undo that golden hue, it pales the light. Despite this, it’s not white light just because it’s no longer golden. I’m not even sure what I’m getting at anymore. I guess I just...

Wonder. About living in response to stimuli, and being, and how weird and complicated everything is. It’s tempting to think maybe we’re not being honest with ourselves about what we experience on some level deeper than we can know. Because apparently all our sights and smells and sounds are interpreted data.

What if it’s not data? What if it’s not noise?

I guess, for me at least, all that makes sense is music—poetry—art. Without it, it’s all just senseless data, and that doesn’t resonate.

Putter Putter

What do you do when you're sick and still have duties to perform?