An interesting piece (if I do say so, myself), composed during one of my late night shifts at the truckstop:

The night shift is a weird, unnatural and nearly indescribable thing. Time drags in a way that can't happen during the day with the sun overhead, moving across the sky. There is life in the daytime, a subtle him and vibration in the earth which lets you know things are happening. None of that on the night shift.

Watching the clock does you no good, no good at all. It only prolongs the agony, the desperate haze, forcing you to quantify every desolate moment of your empty existence. No, time keeping is insanity, pointless. Your brain refuses to process what the eyes see.

And there is the fundamental problem of working into the night. The primitive portion of our minds resents the fact you get up, work, and go back to bed with only a few hours of daylight at best. It's a recipe for depression, ricketts or both.

Even with those risks, perhaps this is a good thing. The primitive, reptilian side goes to sleep, freeing the higher brain to think what reality forbids. It is the purest altered state, requiring no drug or controlled substance to achieve. Only a radical shift in sleep is required. The cheapest of cheap buzzes.