They Can Take An Hour of Sleep Away! But They Can Never Take Away Our Zzzdom!
And other answers to unsolicited questions
“Daylight Saving Time is coming up this weekend! What can we do?” — Timeless Timothy
The Government is going to steal an hour of sleep from you this weekend. If this doesn’t make you open up your nuclear bunker and hide inside why do you even have a nuclear bunker? Thanks, Trump. And thanks, Obama, for not having put an end to this hideous tradition while we still had a sensible Executive Branch. Even though time is clearly an illusion, it’s a tough one to work around. Resist and you will probably lose your job for being late all the time. Comply and you’ll be just another one of the sheeple complaining about a lack of sleep next Sunday. There has to be a better way.
If you’re like me, you always take the week off before the clocks move ahead. I spend 5 vacation days completely rejiggering my internal clock. One night I’ll stay up till 6 a.m. watching all of Season One of “Twin Peaks.” Another day I’ll spend the whole time awake for an hour and then sleeping for an hour. By the time Sunday comes I’ll be so delirious I will barely notice that the clocks have moved ahead an hour. Because I will be a complete basket case.
Daylight Saving was invented so farmers could farm with the sun and little kids didn’t have to walk to school in complete darkness. But farmers should just get headlights for their tractors or something. And what school kid has to walk themselves to school? They are practically shackled to their parents whenever they aren’t at school. Kids do what we tell them. They can’t vote, they can’t drive cars and if they need flashlights to walk to school, so be it.
Kids these days already have a super-easy time of it. They never have to move out of their parents’ houses. They have phones and computers; when I was young all we had was Pong and Pac-man. And they live in a time when nerds have conquered popular culture! Movies and TV are no longer about popular kids. They’re about nerdy kids saving the world. Kids have plenty. They can walk to school by the light of the moon engulfed in flames, as far as I’m concerned. With all this global warming we’ve given them, they don’t even have to walk up hill in the snow for miles to get to school. So shut up and play with your tablets.
If you can’t take 5 work days off in a row, you can move the clocks ahead a little bit every day. 10 minutes here, fifteen minutes there. Build up to the future sunshiny crazy you’ll have to deal with at the end of the week. Mornings will be forced to be bright! Sleeping in will be practically impossible. I still believe that they only keep this Daylight Saving thing going because they use the extra hour in November to pull off some kind of worldwide money scam while the clocks are changing. I haven’t figured out exactly how they do it yet, but when I do it will be the main plot to the blockbuster movie I write about the entire thing, and the log line is, “THEY GAVE YOU AN HOUR AND TOOK AWAY YOUR SOUL.” I think Donald Glover might star in it.
If the government is truly supposed to stay out of your bedroom, why do they change the time when everyone is asleep instead of moving the clocks ahead an hour on a Friday afternoon when we all could have a long weekend? It’s because they’re laundering all your money in the middle of the night. Turning euros to pesos and then back to euros in some kind of super illegal one-hour-a-year global ripoff. It would make a great James Patterson book. One I’d be happy to write for him. He wouldn’t even have to read it.
Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.