This is a monologue I wrote about what I do/did at night.  Pretty regularly.  It’s in reference to the “Middle of the Night” episode of This American Life.  It’s pretty self-involved… as most monologues should be.

Certain names have been changed.  Hope no one is offended.

The night begins with coffee.  It is a ritual that I started years ago, back in undergrad.  Back then, we hardly slept.  About one hour after dinner, when I finally worked up the strength to be productive, there was a ritual that surrounded myself and the coffee pot in my room:

1. Rinse coffee pot.

2. Let the pot refill with water quickly, followed by slowly pouring the water into the machine.

3. Fill the machine with the proper amount of beans.  On an average evening, it’s a half-pot, so six scoops is enough.  Not-so-average evenings: 8 or 10 dependent upon both the amount of work that requires being done and the amount of hair-pulling you wish to subject yourself to.

4. Do not – I repeat – do not go back out into the living room.  Do not talk to anyone. Do not walk out to the bathroom, that can wait.  Do not answer your roommates when they ask you where all of the cream cheese went. You will risk getting sucked back into video games, alcohol, and the imitable other rituals: late-night pizza delivery, conversations about faux sexual experiences, and debates on such imperative topics as how to build a self-sustaining island out of 2-liter plastic bottles.  Do not leave the room.

5. Sit.

6. Breath.

7. Sip.

8. Work.

9. Repeat 5-8 until exhaustion.

This worked well because I had a unique setup.  The coffee machine wasn’t just in my room.  I owned a desk large enough that I could keep the coffee pot within reach at all times.  Computer; center.  Book I was reading; left.  Notes for homework; right.  Coffee pot and mug; far right.  Everything I needed was within arm’s reach: accessible, switched-on or held open with bookmarks or pens like paperweights.  Complete access, a microcosm.  Did I mention that the coffee pot was in my room?  Do not go into the living room.

There was also a soft scald of previously-spilt coffee on the hot plate.  It created a caffeinated stench that still reminds me more of morning-afters and watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with whoever had stayed over than its obvious meaning: at some point in the night, my hand had wavered.  I had missed.  There was so much missing that the smell became a part of the universe.

This worked well.  For a long time.  There were always assignments and things to look for meaning in.  If a story wasn’t due, a critique had to be written.  If a book didn’t have to be written about, it had to be read.  The weeknight provided time for all of the things that had nothing to do with the ball-kicking, girl-talking real world.

It was solace.  No matter how boring the work was.  No matter how frustrating.  No matter the caffeine-twitch.  It was solace.

Do not go into the living room.

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These nights have changed.  My roommates are now equally dependent upon caffeine (among other substances) and so the coffee pot must remain in the kitchen, ten paces from my sliding bedroom door.  We meet here, at the pot, and discuss the day.  Amanda, a red-haired Mormon girl who moved to the city two years back, explains how tired she has become of the café where she works.  Mike mentions a party that will be happening at the studio he works at later in the week.  He invites us, we accept, all three of us fully knowing that we may or may not be there, no guarantees.  Our daily lives have become too fragile – freelance jobs must be taken and completed no matter how short the deadline – there is an equal chance that we’ll be forced to stay indoors and work as there is we will have the opportunity to fill ourselves with cheap booze and overpriced joy.

The bedrooms we return to are no longer the palaces we kept in college.  We now do practical things like pay rent.  Vintage yellow lamps have been replaced by the perfectly-circular fluorescent light bulbs that cast sterile, hospital light across everything we own.  We have learned to live without.

The nights have become dense, too.  Those lavish and vapid openings that one could move about in freely before are crowded, crammed, squished like clowns in subway cars during rush hour.

There are still signs of childhood.  Nightly, before entering my room, my eyes cross paths with a stuffed figurine.  Made of purple yarn and stuffing with a tusk sticking out its front.  It is a narwhal, hand-crafted, a gift.  There is also a Bob Dylan figurine, again, hand-knit.  Plane ticket stubs litter the top of the desk, too.  Mostly to Chicago or back to New York.  The aberrations are the ones that clutter the most, though.  There is a return-flight stub from Paris to Chicago, a mark of a month of strange bewilderment and absolute wonder.  New York to Indianapolis, Indiana.  A 2-day trip to attend a funeral for a friend who passed at age 27.  And who can forget the trip to Las Vegas?  No trip could more properly define depression and profound excitement for life at the same time quite as well as a weekend in Vegas with a person you’ve just started dating who you know will leave you upon your return home.

These things fill up the empty world that once was so comforting.  They are reminders of blonde-haired girls and late-night conversations about how to compost more efficiently in the city.  The thought of that conversation drives eyes over to the desk I currently work at.  There is a stack of envelopes, pieces of paper, notices of credit information, billing statements – far past overdue – loan repayment documentation, and an angrily-scrawled letter from my mother that somehow begins with, “You should be ashamed” and ends with, “Thank you for being our son.”

The desk is unmanageable, a sea of guilt and carbon-printed mistakes so work is done in bed.  A  pile of pillows against my back, my computer delicately balanced on my knees, half-scrunched to my chest.

When it becomes too much, when the cats outside scream out in heat, when all three of us in the apartment have decided enough, we congregate outside of our cluttered, tiny worlds, first in front of the coffee pot again, then eventually in the living room where the lights of the city skyline stream in across our three faces.

“It’s only 2,” Mike tells me.  “Yeah.  I just can’t work anymore.”

He knows the drill and Amanda does, too.  She returns from where the coffee pot is with a bottle of whiskey and three empty glasses and Mike has already cued up a TiVo’d episode of The Office.  The windows are wide open and the cats only scream louder.  This is too predictable a situation, too comforting, to leave.  My only other option is to return to the Amazon-like bedroom at night.  I do not wish to stare at billing statements from collectors and loved ones anymore.

And there is a process for this ritual, too:

1. Pour yourself a few ounces into one of the mugs that Amanda hands you.

2. Lean back on the couch, look at whoever is sitting across from you, and make conversation.

3. Disregard the TV’s picture and the sound of canned laughter coming from the other side of the room.

4. When an awkward pause occurs, comment on what has JUST been said on the TV.  This keeps everyone moving forward.

5. Always.  Always turn the conversation inward.  Change the subject constantly to your current situation.  While you wish to stay informed of everyone’s goings on, the truth is you are drinking.  You are worried about you.  You have escaped from the jungle of your bedroom and you are free but freezing out here without the warmth of affirmation from work being done.

It’s another nightly ritual, the drinking, the talking, the self-involvement.  We are selfish and hungry and our fingers tap the glass of the coffee table with a vehemence that cannot be described as nervous or angst-filled, but rather with surging talent.  Talent that cannot escape because we are, again, doing real things like paying our bills.  And it is this talent that seeps out of the cracks in conversation.  Mike recites lighting setups he’s worked with throughout the day in a language foreign to me.  A born-conversationalist, Amanda talks about coffee as if it is something so much more than stained water, and the way she does so has me convinced she’s right.  But with all of us turning the conversations inward, nothing gets discussed and nothing gets hammered out quite right.  When cups are emptied and we stand up to return to our own drywall-encased jungles, there is the feeling of half-crushed eggs beneath our feet.

We are children in the city.  Very large children.  Very grown up children.  The movement back to those tiny rooms, to prepare for bed, forces the last five years into sharp focus.  It is with a whiskey-soaked brain that I will decide to stay up, to watch cartoons on the internet while laying in bed.  While the usual effects of drunkenness, the lulling of my head, the steadily more sloping posture, are in full force, so is my awareness in this tiny universe.  Somehow, I realize that tomorrow I must go to work.  I must wake up, go to work, come home, and continue writing and working.  There is a commercial on in between cartoons, for Coke, that a girl and I once both decided was incredibly annoying.  And I realize that I have to keep working to prove that she shouldn’t have left.  I have to keep working so that all those thousands of dollars spent on plane tickets mean something.  I have to keep working so that my mother doesn’t have to start letters with “You should be ashamed” anymore.  It’s crowded in here.  Keep working.

Do not go into the living room.  Keep working.