GRAPPLING HOOK: BU-BOOM CHA — BOOM BOOM CHA

PRESS PLAY TO READ (written to music)

The planet shifted and the light slowly went out. There’s nothing magical about that: It is one of the few things that we know will happen with a nonchalant certainty. every. fucking. day. And it’s just particles. Or waves. (Depending on how you observe them.) Both, reflecting and bouncing back. And our eyes actually have different receptors for the night—it’s true. We don’t see colour when there isn’t enough light, which would explain the grayscale, oddly orange luminescence of a nighttime cityscape.

Rod cells give us night vision.

Evolution gets pinned with tons of things, but there might be something in this one: we have a primal, natural fear of the dark.

I love it. There’s something about walking at pace. Walking with nothing but the stars and your headphones and your breath. Throwing your feet down with every drum. Propelling forward like you’re headbutting the night. You get a rhythm going and you feel like you could go on forever, walking way back to a time when it was all trees. Skin pallid by the street light. Leaves shifting in a good, invisible wind.

I tried sitting and just taking it once: being alone in the woods at night. The forest was five minutes away so sneaking out was easy. I could barely make it up the pathway. The entrance begins with a wide, tree-lined road, that becomes thicketed with more foliage as it closes in on you, narrowing, the farther in you go. It’s terrifying and I heard there were baddies up there.

Everything in that blackness was on me. I could feel the trees touching my shoulders, the dogs stalking behind me, the man breathing down my neck. And it’s then you start to shiver. You tighten up. You twirl around to catch a glimpse, those cone receptors doing fucking nothing for you, since it’s all grayscale now. You won’t see colour again in this dark. The only shifting lines are the tree wardens, whose rustling obfuscates the night noise and orange fade. Evolution gives you fight or flight, which is rendered useless when you’ve malfunctioned—when you’re pinned by both —in an infinite revolution of bravery and fear. You’re swirling back on yourself again and again, endlessly stuck in a 360 to see who’s behind you. Like the maddening dog trying to escape its tail. Or the snake that eats itself. Or Peter Pan, sewn stuck and struck mad, accusing his shadow of murder.

1.58 — headphones mandatory. Cannot. Get over. The panning.