You don’t just suddenly get good at writing at 3 AM.

You know that, and you suppress wild thoughts of yourself as capable of doing so. Perhaps this will be the magic hour where your inner genius briefly comes up for air. It isn’t. You tell yourself it always could be but it won’t be. A number of ideas that come to you now will seem like a good idea in the early hours of the morning.

You at 3 AM pat yourself on the back for the strike of inspiration. Most people are sleeping right now but here you are, writing away, totally rejecting the system. The sleep system. But even during this magical time, you hit blank spots. You try to write something fresh and edgy because for some reason now is the time to do that and what you end up with is a bunch of confused nonsense. Or, what is basically a journal entry.

So you write more things. Just sentences you improvise until one sounds good and also doesn’t sound predictable or pretentious and then you roll with it.

This is because if you imagine something just right, any idea can seem good. It may even seem inspiring, relevant or relatable.

At 3 AM, the newspaper gets delivered. Every night at the same time, the newspaper man hurls the delivery into your front yard and you always hear the thud. Who else has this special relationship with their newspaper man? Who else is awake to always register the presence of this invisible figure of the night? What are his fears? You tell yourself that would just be the best thing to write about. You know that people don’t think about their delivery men. You do, because you’re progressive and spiritual or something. Wouldn’t it be interesting to take a dive into his head, to know the man who throws the news?

What can be a problem is that these kinds of things only seem interesting to you at 3 AM, because you need to go to sleep. But you keep going with them until you finish. You write them for an assumed reader, so they must pass your own self-imposed tests of worthiness. You don’t know what they prove or what they could prove but you keep doing it. You keep on writing at obscure hours, about obscure things. Some things don’t make it and you abandon them, leaving them to fester in the night. You do not think about whether or not they will be read. You’re crafting a testament to your devotion, sewing together Frankenstein paragraphs for a parade that may never come.