"This Is How It Works" -- Midnight Magic

Posted to my facebook wall on March 12th, at roughly 6 o'clock in the morning.

Be warned: unlike the comic above, this post is not funny. Continue reading at your own risk.


To put it plainly, stuff happens. All day, every day. That might sound so obvious that it doesn't even need mentioning, but I think it does. And I think it does because human beings cannot comprehend all that created information, everything that's happening in the entire world. It's too much to handle, sensory overload, critical system failure.

Luckily for us, that practically never happens. People scale their respective worlds down to a comfortable size, and live within that. They do this out of necessity, because life demands such attention to detail and yet propels forward at such a rate that people cannot afford to expand their gaze beyond their immediate surroundings lest they overlook something and suffer for it. We live for ourselves because we must in order to survive. The daily information we glean is categorized and prioritized by its relevance to the situation at hand. Anything that isn't useful is often discarded or perhaps at best, briefly fancied.

I hate doing that.

I absolutely hate discarding interesting little tidbits just because I'm doing something more pressing and have no time for them. I'll sometimes try to package them away and label them, shove them into a dark corner of my mind in the hopes that they'll be rediscovered some day. That's the best I can do for those thoughts, because unfortunately they are almost never relevant to what I'm doing at the time.

When an idea or thought occurs to me, for a short moment I'll see it with absolute clarity. All I want to do is explore it, watch it evolve into another thought. Follow each iteration until I'm somewhere completely different. I have no idea where I could go, where my trains of thought will take me, and that's the allure. The problem is that unless I indulge right then and there, drop what I'm doing, I start to lose focus.

The structure of the thought will become more muddled and fuzzy as time goes by. The feeling I had at its creation, once intense and riveting, has now become a memory; just a part of the past I cannot resurrect. It's like trying to remember a dream, and it's a horrifying and tantalizing process to watch the bits and pieces of something that moved you so powerfully slip away, never to be fully seen again.

It's similar to watching a really great movie or reading a wonderful book for the very first time. You become completely absorbed by it, committed to the fiction, and it makes an impression on you as a person. It changes you. You might try to recapture that fleeting, timeless feeling you got by re-reading it or watching it again, but it's never the same. Never quite like the first time. Every time the experience is diminished just a little bit more. The magic is gone.

I desperately try to hold on to those thoughts, those feelings, because they make me feel. Feel enlightened, or awestruck, or depressed, or giddy, whatever. And feeling is what I define being alive as. It is so intangible, and precious. There are thousands of jobs I could pick up or drop if I wanted to, and money will always come and go. It's a manufactured resource. But raw emotion, an uncontrolled physiological response to a stimuli isn't quite so malleable. It's truly rare when something just gets to you; sneaks right by all your defenses and barriers and takes control.

That's what this comic is about -- it's about how much I love the night. It's because that's the time of day when nothing is going on, I have no responsibilities and nothing to worry about. Nobody is around so I don't feel obligated to interact with them. I drop my guard, sit and relax, and just be. I exist as the person that I truly am without the need for any auxiliary subroutines. No bullshit, no etiquette, no rules or regulations or laws or any of the things that shape my behavior during all other parts of the day. I am free.

When something interesting pops into my head, I can afford to entertain it. Let it take me where it will, jump from one point to another one and so on and so on. I can take the time to get lost in thought, relinquish control and go for a ride. I can joyfully paint the insides of my skull with the colors of every passing cogitation. I love to ramble and muse, and at night - when time is on my side - I can spend hours doing just that.

The reason there is a computer in the comic is because the internet is such fertile ground for interesting information, just teeming with inspiration waiting to be discovered. You can so easily connect to so many people and viewpoints you would otherwise not be able to. It's very difficult for me to look at just one Wikipedia article, browse /b/ for just a few minutes, listen to just one song or look at just one picture or read just one webcomic. It's a constant stream of interconnected stuff, and it's fucking awesome. I will soak up all that readily available information like a sponge, and fill my head with things from all walks of life. It's all incredible, all very educational.

The more sources I have to pull from, the more layered and intricate my little mental trips can become.

Now, all of this might sound very silly to some people. Or stupid. Or both. If that's the case for you, it's because you're just not there, not in the right state of mind to appreciate it. It's one of those things you have to see or do yourself to "get". I can't take a vacation for you, and you can't take one for me.

Everyone has their own preferences -- things they enjoy doing. Everyone reserves pieces of themselves for times when they're alone, fragile parts of their personality they keep hidden from scrutinizing eyes. Silly behaviors they wouldn't dare display to others. Everybody keeps secrets. What I've told about myself isn't a secret, but it's certainly not something I can do in the midst of a blazing day. It's not easy to let go and drift when there are others around tethering me to the "now". My life, like everyone else's, is busy. So when I get the chance to sit around and dream completely carefree, it's a real treat.

And on the rare occasion when I stumble across something truly moving, I hope the morning never comes.