Night-time screams out in yellow in my ears. "There is somethin' out here! You want to breathe this cold air!" A lot of nights I used to spend just walking around, with really nothing to do. All was right with the world, in a way that I fear I can never get back. I would trek around the byways of cities in which I lived, overground route-finding, zigging from zag to zag, looking for things going on. As a kid I always wondered what happened to the world after dark, where everything went, what went on in the places I recognized during the daytime. As an adult I have grown to learn that nothing happens anywhere, not even during the daytime. But especially not at night.

You learn the most about a city at night. During the day you can learn about what a city once was or wants to be, but all the cultural exhibits, streetside plaques, and brand-new buildings tell you nothing about what it means to be in the city from day to day. All I have ever known about any city I have known because of the streets at night. During the day you go to an art museum, you walk around and see everything plainly: here is the dock, there is the bridge, over there is something else entirely. What is it? Oh: only another bridge. Geography is garish and renders itself unnecessary when the sun is out. There is no need to worry. If you get lost, you can look a little harder, you can find a way to get to where you are going, even if you have to ask someone on the street. Look over there. There's the bridge we just crossed. It's pretty much the same as this bridge over here. Let's cross this one now, we can still see the bridge we just crossed anyway.

But at night, cities have a different feel. Liquid blackness fills the spaces that used to render themselves so clearly, so vividly. Now the bridge is a tunnel, a horizontal abyss dripping with oily darkness. These bridges all look the same: this isn't right. Was I just at this bridge? There's no one around to ask, and the streetside plaques are all tarnished and smeared with food and food grease. I just want to get home now. The art museum is lit up like a French whore, but it's not even open. There is no good art now, except the art of getting my ass home. You walk around and look into windows here and there, trying to discern what it is that people are doing with themselves. Trying to join them, if only for a moment. The whoosh of buses on wet pavement form the structure of the soundscape and yells, sharp metallic clicks and tire squeals, fill the framework with wordless terror. The night is constructing a cage for you, made of your own fear and loathing. You are here, you are separate from those people who live among the willing, the indoors are for them. You have somewhere to be, but where could it be?

What you learn about cities at night that you cannot learn during the day is what the city does with its leisure time. The city doesn't like work much. No one does. The city works because it has to pay rent, commutes and recoils in frustration at the amount of pollution in the air. The city has to do what the city has to do. All cities do this, and no one city's work is really substantially different from another's work. Some work in factories and some in offices, some have to smile when they sell you back your soul, and some only really need to be there to make sure you aren't going to steal anything, but every city shows up and suits up because it has to. But what cities do during their leisure time is different: it is everything.

Does the city have a penchant for strip clubs, prostitution, gambling, drinking, drugs? Does the city simply fall asleep in front of the latest Must See TV shows, only to wake up hours later to reruns of previous Must See TV shows, with a terrible taste of dead skin and bacteria in the mouth, to drag its sorry ass into bed with its clothing on? Does the city ever sleep?

Some cities are quiet, in the outskirts and suburbs almost all are. Some cities are so lively they practically punch you in the gut when you walk into the night air, dressed to kill. There is a time and place for all of this.