Ain't It Funny How The Night Moves

The night doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t budge. It’s like it drops from out of nowhere, and all of a sudden I’m splayed in total darkness on the floor thinking about goats. And I know that it’s going to just squat there over me, to the point where I can’t move and can barely breath until the light makes its appearance.

I understand, believe me, that it’s a seriously disordered state of affairs.

Night falls, and I’m paralyzed, and once it rises up off me I’m for damn sure going to be trapped in a worthless stupor all day long. It’s what happens, I guess, when a man loses his grip on the planet and ends up on the floor.

That part of the whole thing is harder to understand, how something like that can happen to a man. It does, though. People let go, and no matter what anyone tries to tell you, gravity and the solid earth will only allow a man to fall so far.

If things were the way they should be, a man would fall not down, but up, and would drift right off the planet and into darkest space. As it is, though, they eventually have to dig a hole to allow you to go where life wouldn’t allow you to go except by way of manual labor or tired metaphor.

Or the better way: they put you in an oven and let you go up in smoke. Have you ever seen the smokestacks of a crematorium? That gray smoke rising into the sky is men falling up out of this world.