Night Sights

The French call dusk, the time “Between dogs and wolves,” because dusk’s degree of light/dark makes it hard to tell if an approaching beast is a dog or a wolf – a friend or a threat, brings help or mayhem.

The various depths of night include many other unique time-zones of ambiguity – special periods when different arrangements of dark are conducive to magic, forgetting, insight, doubt and terror. Night is rich with questionable contexts when phenomena can self-fabricate.

To list some of the weird night occurrences that I’ve heard of, there are Monster Margins, Angel Shadows, Fire Fogs, The Sustained Karl, Mexico City Chocolate Hour, Pulse Heats, Apple Cats, Bird Dancing Time, Neon Thrusts and Paper-Made Alley Ways.

My years of driving at night has given me chances to witness some of these firsthand – namely Fire Fogs, Apple Cats, Paper-Made Alley Ways and The Sustained Karl (which occur when your headlights create a pattern on thick mist that is unmistakably Karl Marx’ head, and it goes on for different lengths of time. The image is sustained, thus the name. I once saw a Sustained Karl for about 15 minutes. Another guy said he saw The Sustained Karl for a whole hour. Those ones I listed are the most famous Night Sights. You can ask any night cabby about them. But, there are many more I’ve never seen.

Other night drivers have told me about other mysterious subtleties that the night can facilitate, calling them such names as:

Diamond Skin : (which is when a certain type of nighttime humidity combines with a certain flicker from a certain type of street light to cause a woman’s phone screen to make her skin shine like bright crystals),

or Radio Shades : (these usually happen in winter in areas where there are no street lights but the density of the darkness deepens enough to cause a noise that sounds like a distant radio playing),

another is Absent Corners: (these occur only in cities that have an excessive amount of traffic signals at intersections, but no street lights. Some kind of strobe frequency created by a certain combination of the traffic light colors causes the road surface to seemingly vanish when making a turn close to the curb. The road in front and beside the car just loses its surface. This phenomena also affects people walking and sometimes causes them to freak out when stepping off the curb. They lunge back like they suddenly find themselves walking off a cliff. Of course, the street is still there, but just can’t be seen, or it looks like it is missing. This supposedly usually happens about two hours before sunrise.).

A phenomena that I’ve seen and which is one of my favorites is called a Skeleton Moon. (It occurs on vividly crisp winter nights when there is a moon that is just past full, maybe about one day past full. Some light clouds need to be in the sky with a slight wind capable of moving them. At such a time, when I look up, it looks like I can see through moon, as though its lunar skin has been removed. And, when a cloud passes across the moon, the cloud appears to pass behind it. It feels like I can see the cloud floating by, through the bones of the moon.