I leave my coat and day’s events behind me
But Worry wriggles past the bedroom doors
He settles in my mind to stay ‘till morning
And so I leave my mind to enter yours
What happened last when you and I connected?
Was there some cryptic lead or smoking gun?
Or were you just as listless in the evenings
Uncertain where your torments had begun?
The truth we bear is what we hold in common:
Why obligation haunts the hearts of men
I hope we learn to navigate the darkness
And rescue our serenity again
Mark Knopfler’s lyrics can be unconventionally inspired—after all, the lyrics for “Money for Nothing” are literally from a brief conversation Knopfler had with a guy working in a hardware department—but I think he did well with this one:
“It's a mystery to me
the game commences
For the usual fee
plus expenses
Confidential information
is in a diary
This is my investigation
it's not a public inquiry…”
My title above, and likely the inspiration for the poem, came from this song. It’s nice he bothered to establish an alternating rhyme scheme; it’s not often you find that sort of thing in the pop charts.
Knopfler was big into Raymond Chandler when he wrote this. Previously, I had never been a Raymond Chandler fan. Nothing against him—I just wasn’t into crime, mysteries or cop procedurals.
I also wasn’t an insomniac.
Middle age is surreal. You comb through huge patches of grey hair and wonder what, if anything, you have in common with the 14-year-old you who checked his mirror for pimples. You find yourself caring more about birds and taking much longer to “get ready to go outside.” And late at night, waiting for the melatonin to hit, you follow along with Michael Connolly, Robert B. Parker and Don Winslow characters and wonder when this weird new habit even started.
Crime is of course an expansive genre that arguably keeps the whole of mainstream podcasting alive. Some folks enjoy exploring the crimes, in a weird sort of narrative version of slummin’ it. Others of the Columbo fandom variety enjoy watching successful suburbanites get taken down a peg or two.
I’m not really interested in any of that. Rather, there’s a line in Conolly’s Bosch series in which an FBI agent tells him that he’s in awe of the clarity of his mission: “somebody’s dead and somebody did it.” I think that’s what hooks me the most. There’s a clear sense of purpose and a devotion to the rightness of things that’s very difficult to find out there among the grey of daily living. Maybe that’s why I listen to these stories.
But then of course, with modern life comes another kind of private investigation.
I don’t just listen to crime fiction. As I said, I listen at night, while I’m waiting for the melatonin to kick in. Which I now take regularly because sleep has become elusive.
Were you to look it up, you’d find that “emotional flooding” is an overwhelming emotional response, often sharing symptoms with heavy anxiety: racing heart, high blood pressure, sweaty palms, or shaking. It’s happening to more and more people in early evening, right when they lie down.
The cause for a lot of them is “a perceived threat or a high-stress situation.” I’d deny this applies to me, but even as I type this, the job market is weighing AI against not only the skills I’ve acquired these past twenty years, but also whether human creativity will continue to mean anything to anyone.
For thousands of years, mankind enjoyed an interdependent relationship with horses. It took us a decade or two after the invention of the first horseless carriage to give them up. Not just them, but all the open ranchers, the farriers, the blacksmiths, the cavalry and countless other industries that catered to this relationship. Thousands of years forgotten about in twenty. I think about such things at 3 AM now. I just can’t help it.
I can’t say I’ve found any answers as a result of these inquiries. I think it's because there aren’t any—it’s something yet to happen, not something to discover. As Bosch says about his own cases, I suppose it goes where it goes.
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