On a sea of desks.

Being in a news room at night is a strange feeling. The rest of the world sleeps. The rest of Newark is dark, except for a few boxes of light cast off from The Star-Ledger's gray concrete bulk.

Our newsroom is pretty large -- maybe 80 yards long. Not as big as the Philadelphia Inquirer's massive Ivory Tower of Truth, but still, pretty big. Nothing hammers the size home more than looking out at the sea of empty desks around midnight. As I'm writing this, there are only a handful of editors and paginators left here, burning the midnight oil so people can read their news -- in one form or another -- tomorrow morning.

It's a highly complex monster, a beautiful brute of a system. Somehow, someway, there's always a paper tomorrow morning, always more items in my RSS feed. I guess that's why the old timers call it the Daily Miracle.

It's a reassuring feeling to still be here -- to be with the people who are still here around this time each night. It's a constant reminder that life, at all hours of the day and night, moves around us at a frantic, chaotic pace. And there are a few people who try to make sense of that chaos.

Most nights, I drive home with my windows down, taking in the smoggy, balmy summer air. Soon it will be fall -- my favorite time of year. And on most nights, when I'm exiting 287 onto Route 23 north, I look over the side of the overpass, and I see a Star-Ledger delivery truck rocketing up the interstate toward Mawah, toward Ringwood, toward Paramus.