Four Forty-Six AM

The time between waking at 3:30 in the morning and dawn is highly underrated, often shunned, much misunderstood. It's a graveyard-walking, spirits-talking kinda time. A small day of the dead celebration. I can hear all the voices of those who've gone before, might come back. And really, what I like best of all is ... I hear nothing.

New day. Blank canvas. Cold start. Warm empty silent room. Restart. Reset. There's a lot good about it. I have English Breakfast tea in a blue and white porcelain cup -- not an austere Chinese willows weeping vessel, but an Italian blue flowers happily dancing on white type ceramic curvy cup.

I can hear my own mind -- loud and clear -- and everyone else in the whole wide world might not exist for all I know and sometimes this is just the way I like it. Fellow citizens of this planet, take no offense, but sometimes I like to walk the flinty road on my own, on my lonesome, without you all. Without the noise of cars and kids and cash registers and even crusty bread, a knife sawing into it as if it were a thick tree with an unyielding bark.