An over-active imagination helps.

This is the kind of night when I'd really like to be at sea. It would be late at night, well after midnight; the boat would be a cargo vessel without the frivolity of holidaying passengers. I'd be on deck, well wrapped up and with a full hip flask of whiskey on me (not rum, even though rum is more commonly associated with the high seas) and the sky above would be like a bubbling cauldron with clouds surging and spilling in all directions, obscuring the moon and the stars. I'll have spent the evening in my cabin reading something deep and unsettling and the spray from the ocean will refresh my eyes without dissipating any of the melancholy that will have accumulated around my heart as plaque accumulates around improperly brushed teeth. I peer out through the mist and the spray knowing that there is nothing to see, knowing that the coast of Panama is still three days sailing away, but the smell of the land has already begun to arrive on currents of warm, wet air.