The Work Journal of Artist John Amor

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I Know a Place…

This is the thing with me.  And it’s rung true (present perfect tense… what.) for as long as I’ve cared to notice — I do my best work at night.  Set my workstation up in a brightly lit room and I will get nothing done.  I don’t know how you weirdos do it.  I’m like a raccoon, I’m very easily attracted to and distracted by shiny things… so a well-lit area just leeches off my productivity.

I come alive in total darkness.  Oh yes.  Like Batman, minus a butler bringing me vichyssoise.  (What kind of idiot brings you cold soup when you’re working in a dank cave in the middle of the night anyway?) And as if I were in a cave, I like my work area to be illuminated by a singular light source, so that I am surrounded by darkness and thus almost shrouded in a cloak of indistractibility.

I don’t know if it’s an emo thing, or an eyestrain thing, or an ADD thing, or a headspace thing, or a body clock thing, or even a mixture of all of those eccentricities… but it is what it is.

And as I get ready for bed around half past four in the morning, I wait until that sliver of time between when the street lamps die and when the sun starts to rear its ugly head.  And for just long enough, I find myself in complete darkness… and it stops being a moment and starts being a place.  And it is a place no one can infect.  Because it is nowhere.  And here I revel in the lost silence of dreaming.

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Tags: insomnia, night owl, work ethic