I know I've seen you — jogging along Diamond Head Road in the wee hours or changing your oil in the garage while the crickets chirp or maybe brooding over a plate of fried potatoes at Liliha Bakery as the graveyard shifters refill your cup.

Perhaps you've seen me, too, working out next to off-duty bartenders and strippers at the gym, grading papers by lamplight outside some closed coffee shop in Kaimuki, maybe scanning the discount bin for Steve McQueen DVDs at the 24/7 Pali Longs store.

If so, it's unlikely that we chitchatted much. After all, the first rule of night-owling is keep your yap shut and (apologies to Depeche Mode) enjoy the damn silence.

Because we live in an unsafe world in which many women do not feel comfortable walking or hanging out alone late at night, the late-night hours in many cities have become a sort of default guy time, a time when the streets and the store aisles clear, the cell phone quiets, and the demands of work or family or school are put to bed, leaving nothing but reassuring silence and solitude.

As much as men are social beings — so unshakably loyal to our tribes, our teams, our circles of friends — our gender also has been distinguished by its persistent need to maintain a sense of separation and self-reliance.

For some, it's enough to end the day making progress on the latest McCullough doorstop as the wife drifts into her own interior dream world. For others, peace comes in grabbing the newspaper as soon as it hits the newsstand and finding some clean, well-lighted place in which to do the crossword puzzle.

I prefer to walk, and it doesn't really matter where to or for how long. The same way that a stormy day can change the look and feel of a place, the simple transition from day to night provides the kind of derangement of the senses that allows for a different sort of relationship with one's surroundings. There isn't much I remember about my hurried daytime excursions in Mineralnye Vody, Russia, or Mendoza, Argentina, or Tuscaloosa, Ala., but I can vividly recall the way the streets and shops and homes of those towns looked on my early, early-morning walks.

To be sure, these sorts of impulses and experiences are not exclusive to men, nor do all men feel the same magnetic tug of an empty street at night. But there are many of us who do. As Tom Waits, whose romantic notions of the night have always been equal parts Edward Hopper and Charles Bukowski, once sang, "The night does funny things inside a man."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.