Happy Chronological New Year

It’s convenient that I start this blog today, the day in which the majority of American’s get a fresh start, when things are reset, set anew, re-adjusted and done so with just the slightest, most unnoticeable twist of the finger or push of a button, for much of us, even while we sleep!

It’s convenient that I start this blog on the modern American’s, capitalist’s, new year! The chronological apex (or dregs depending on where you are) of chronology – and again, most of you don’t even know it!

It is just inconvenient to me that I also start this blog on the only day of the year that has 23 hours!

I sound silly, I know. But I was horrified today when I awoke and realized that today I had one hour less to sleep, to make money (and we thought this was about capitalism), to stop and smell the roses, to live.

Isn’t life short enough – do we really have to rob ourselves of a whole hour in the spring? Of course detractors from my call for the abolition of the haughty idea that we humans can even control time, will say, in that twangy, whiny tone that will make me bow my head, feeling like an idiot, “Well, you gain it back next fall.” But what if I were to perish between now and next fall? What if I happened to be uploaded onto The Mother Ship only to be brought back next year at the same time, in the same time warp – not controlled or contrived by the mother ship from another planet – but by the evil, green, slimy-skinned, tentacled, alien force of the U.S. government that is liberal enough to believe that they are divine enough to actually control the hours of the day!!!!

 How fucking pretentious and conceited does one have to be to believe that even the fourth dimension can be controlled. 

Convenience, I suppose, is what the chronological New Year is really about. Man has yet to figure out a way to control the actual rising and setting of the sun – so we have settled on this – Day Light Savings Time.

DST was first conceived by one of the most free-thinking and innovative capitalists, Benjamin Franklin, when he saw a need to save expensive candles in the 18^th century. It was implemented during both World Wars, when that hour of energy saved – helped save the war effort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

But since then the practice of saving daylight has been played with by politicians (on both sides of isles to be sure) as a means of appeasing the more liberal thinking (and intellectually constrained) members of our society and their special interest groups – and, in so doing, they have also been playing with my sleep schedule – and I hate it.

Day Light Savings time was reinforced in 1966 by the Uniform Time Act, and has been reformed several times since and yet every year we American’s watch as this nonsense continues and another hour-plus of our time (you have to account for the time it takes to actually go around like a out-of-control, red-butted baboon with a really bad case of OCD and change all of the clocks in your home, car and office) goes down the proverbial drain!

 

The sun comes up and the sun goes down but our measure of time should not change! What next? Will we soon change the length of our yardsticks; there have been calls for the U.S. to adopt the metric system. Will we soon decide that humans need to measure their life spans in dog years? Or maybe we should just tell the dogs to start measuring their life spans in our years.

There is that old notion: if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it! And I agree. But there is also the common sense idea that effort wasted is a wasted effort. The effectiveness of DST has passed. We now live in a society that operates on a 24 hour schedule, a society that is open 24 hours a day, a society that uses energy 24 hours a day – and no attempts at changing our clocks is going to drive down oil prices, lower green-house gases, or save the polar bears that need to shed their fur in the artic. All it is going to do it help spiral those few of us Americans who happen to not have a sleep disorder into our doctor’s offices for a script of lunesta! This spiral perpetuates an overly-drugged population capable of working 24 hours a day who then need more drugs and who will come up with more inventive ways to save time – in order to spend that time investing further in the spiral that has no become perpetual!

Four 5 billion years the sun has rotated on its axis – and in just the last two hundred we have some how managed to find a way to regulate that. But in the end the earth still rotates and all DST has done is to make us humans feel better about our impact on the earth that will far out-live us anyway. All it has done is to make us feel more like God. This fresh start, this re-setting of the clocks has done nothing; it has changed nothing, not even how stupid we must look from above.