There’s magic in the dark solitude and quiet stillness after midnight

By David McElroy · February 25, 2021

I should be asleep now. It’s 1 a.m. and I’m exhausted. I slept only about four hours last night. Wednesday was a long and exhausting day, made longer by my lack of sleep.

But I’m sitting in the silent darkness of my front yard, watching clouds move across the night sky, creating endless patterns above the dark tree branches above me. One moment the sky is clear and the full moon is bright. The next moment, the clouds mute the light and diffuse its brightness like a giant sheet in the sky.

This is my favorite time of day. There are no people around. No ringing phones. Nobody who needs something from me. Everything seems clear. Life makes more sense.

In this peaceful stillness, I am the closest I come to being joyful and happy these days. My feelings and thoughts turn to a future which seems just barely out of reach. And I always think of her.

I don’t know anymore who she is. I used to be so certain. I can’t decide whether it was better to have blind faith in someone who bitterly disappointed me or to have no one in particular in my heart to have faith in.

There was pain in wanting someone who turned out not to be what I believed she was. But there is emptiness — an oddly different pain of nothingness — in having a need and not knowing who might fill the need.

My visions of the future still seem clear, but it’s almost like a wonderful movie in which the co-star has been cut out. And without the woman in this role, my vision of the future no longer makes sense.

My heart needs to think about these things, but the rumination seems to be most useful to me during the still hours after midnight. When it’s daylight and the rest of the world bustles around me, I have trouble seeing things through spiritual eyes. Instead, I see the world through the lens of pragmatism that comes from a culture which has different beliefs than my own.

In this way, I’m the most peaceful and happy in these hours, especially on a winter night when the temperature has fallen to only 60 degrees. The things I want — family, creation, community, love — seem so close. So possible. Just barely out of my reach — but almost here.

Lucy lies next to me on the steps of the porch, panting as she watches the world in front of us and then as she raises her ears to listen to a train in the distance. It’s a peaceful sort of existence which millions and millions of other men and women have experienced over the centuries of our civilization. It’s an introspective alone time when everything seems possible — and a person can believe that tomorrow might be very different from today.

Life will never be perfect. My life around others will probably always leave me feeling like an alien who’s looking for “my people.” But in the stillness such as what I feel right now, I can believe that my people exist. I can believe my family will exist. I can believe there’s still love and meaning for me.

The daylight will bring new problems — and a list of old problems which haven’t yet been solved — but in this quiet stillness, I can believe the world makes sense. I can believe that I’ll be happy and loved and satisfied. I can believe in her.

And that’s why I need this beautiful, dark time of the day. It’s the only time when everything I need seems just around the corner — and that allows me to have blind faith in things which I can’t yet see.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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