Thoughts travel further this time of night. Gas station attendant struggles with the language, but that’s alright. Price at the pump keeps going up, and nobody can explain why anyway. 
There’s a pick-up game of softball in the Wal-Mart parking lot, a camper trailer from Nebraska parked past centre field, and late-model imports flow by on the four-lane. Everyone is immune to it all.
Nightclubs are shutting down, last call a while ago. Someone is going home with somebody new, others are going home alone, or speed dialing a friend with benefits and hoping the benefits have not expired. The radio repeats the news that Philip Roth has left this earth, and at 2:27 all you can wonder is how many of his books you have read, and what someone else is thinking on a night where thoughts flow further, but you have no idea where they will end up.
 It used to be called insomnia.

j.g.l.