Friday night at Starbucks

3:15 am, Friday night turning into Saturday morning. I again find myself at the only 24-hour Starbucks in Ann Arbor, a repeat of last night. I feel good and refreshed after working out tonight, like I could work on this damned review until sunrise. But that’d be like raising the white flag on any hopes of a normal schedule. There's a bonus tonight: I came after they'd closed out the register. Free coffee.

I’m again intrigued by my fellow customers and what they’re doing here at this time of night. A couple of fellows have passed out on the couch behind me. It does look comfortable, I guess. In front of me an Asian couple is sharing a seat, not a love seat, just a plain wooden chair. Actually, she’s sitting in his lap and it’s making me lovey-dovey ill. Gropers. Luckily tonight I’ve remembered my headphones, and Chemical Brothers are blaring through at unhealthy levels.

A dense pea soup descended on Ann Arbor this evening. Driving here tonight with the radio tuned to some esoteric minimalist crap being played on the radio was like descending into the underworld. I passed a minivan on the bridge over the Huron -- it was going 10 miles an hour. I wonder if there’s ever traffic on the Acheron. Is Charon’s boat a one-seat punt, and do the queues get long? I guess people can afford to wait by the time they get there. No sense rushing into Hades.

4:05 am, the gropers have finally left. A sense of calm comes over me. Energy level, still good.

4:25 am, I have a funny tingle in my legs and I feel my posture starting to give way. I give myself roughly half an hour before I start feeling some real ill effects. The morning shift has come in, and they’re helping the overnight shift ready things for the coming day. Boxes of muffins are brought in and unpacked. Fellows behind me, they’re still passed out on the couch.

4:50 am, the overnight shift has now departed. Being here with a different shift, realizing all the faces in the place have changed (not counting the passed out fellows), somehow makes me uneasy. I feel the sun tracking the rotation of the earth, ticking off the longitudes that were formerly in the dark. My head is spinning a bit, and I feel my lower half lilting to the left. Clearly the earth and I are both reaching our event horizons. It’s time to go. I could probably push on, but the drive home would become increasingly perilous.