Night Shift is the Path to Enlightenment
I’m standing in line at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription for a high-powered nasal spray (it helps me breath through a deviated septum owing to an old boxing injury) and unconsciously my eyes are drawn to the shelving lined with shiny bottles and boxes of lubricants, prophylactics, and lithium ion powered rechargeable sex toys, and I think, “what else I’m I missing out on?” And that’s what it feels like to be coming off night shift and stumbling back into daylight hours.
Night shift restricts access to brick-and-mortar consumerism. It’s difficult to go out and buy the things that the folks working and living in the daytime (let’s call them normies) naturally have access to thanks to their non-vampire schedules. I have to plan ahead to come off my sleep at the right hour so I can hit up the store before they close just to procure a couple cans of tropical breeze flavoured nicotine pouches.
Of course cell phones and the internet make it easy to access anything at any hour and have it delivered to wherever you want via the post office or brain synapses. Technology has co-opted the Las Vegas anything-you-want 24/7 business model. But, like the spinning reels of the slot machine, technology is just an electric window to an intangible dream manipulated by ones and zeros and an algorithm more complicated than the instructions for a vibrating cock ring with flashing LED lights. We think our existence is somehow heightened with technology and what it affords us access to: porn, prescriptions, or nouveau philistinism operating as franchise iced coffee. Sharing an Instagram post of an AI generated image of Boba Fett Fortnite dancing in the Sistine Chapel is the medium-is-the-message in a bottle the alien overlords studying humanity from deep space nine will cite in their dissertations.
It’s better to turn off our tech and stare at the walls in a neurotransmitter deficit than it is to see what the ones and zeros have concocted for us.
Most of my normie homies I exchange memes with are sleeping when I’m awake making the group chat several hours past the best-before-date when I snort the crumbs of the dopamine dump with a paper straw. I have to fire up the coal powered imagination of my mind just to get through my night-soaked existence when the notifications on my phone go cold. I still look at my phone more than I should, however.
But I should explain myself a bit more here. Though I work night shift, I can’t use my phone when I’m clocked in. I work in a position where there is a strict no phone policy, which is monitored and enforced to such a degree that it makes Orwell’s Big Brother look like a little cousin. It’s kinda weird: a heavy presence of technology to ensure other technologies are kept inert.
The nature of night shift excludes me from the daytime insanity of consumerism. Dovetail that with my infrequent use of my cell phone, I’m livin’ a starkly different reality than a normie stopping off at the drive thru before heading to the office to upper cut the clock. Surprisingly, I’ve started to think differently. Devoid of a blue light screen, the rawness of my surroundings leaves me no choice by to ponder on a tangent. Instead of plans for the weekend (a normie behaviour), I’m thinking about if the butt plug has become the spiritual third eye of my generation. Night shift has become a nicotine soaked yoga retreat for my mind.
I don’t think the path to Enlightenment is a stainless-steel anal apparatus. For the record, I fully endorse ass play. We need to unplug (not our buttholes) from technology and consumerism to look past the black mirror into the comatose corners of our minds. It’s impossible to think outside of reality when your steeped in subscriptions, sex, and tech.
I also don’t think it’s enough to delete Tinder, to avoid the drive thru, or to check our benefits for coverage for therapy. We need to completely disengage from our spending habits, masturbation proclivities, and tech patterns, at least long enough to let the stalled cylinders of the pre-frontal cortex to start turning again. Night shift is a good environment to let the darkness give us goose bumps and make us think, “what’s going on here?” Maybe then we can truly think outside the double corrugated cardboard box.
Tyler Durden never operated during the day. However, crushing beers and getting together to exchange punches with your pals isn’t the answer either. (I tried that to a much lesser degree than that of the Narrator.) We need a metaphysical road trip like when the main character departs from their existence, and it’s only when they return do they see their situation in a new light and everything changes. (Flying to Bali doesn’t count or maybe it does.) Try the night shift. You’ll stumble back into the daylight all looney tunes starving to write poetry.
