Got The Time? Are You Sure?
There appears to be a complete breakdown of time measurement in my room today.
Last evening I returned home, tired and hungry, from a cat sitting assignment that lasted a week. After eating I simply collapsed, waking at 3 a.m. to get out of my day clothes and into my night clothes. So it must have been then that the line was crossed between Time Understood and Time Out of Control.
This morning I woke to my bedside analog clock having so slowed down that it was three hours behind itself. (Although, the second hand keeps going around at approximately one-second intervals. Very confusing, that.)
My Bose digital clock told me that I awoke at 6:49 a.m. The Sun was up so I went out to greet it and do some Sun gazing. I then put away some of my traveling things and went upstairs for my morning tea and computer games.
At some point I looked at the time indicated on my computer’s clock and noticed it was about an hour out of alignment with the digital clock and, of course, with the bedside analog clock that was already tripping through it own personal Twilight Time Zone. The floor tilted under my feet. I could feel Reality shredding and collapsing around me! I was at the event horizon of a Time Distortion black hole! Help!!!
After some moments of confusion, I speculated that They have once again imposed so-called Daylight Savings Time on us. It’s only March 14th, for cripes sake! Why don’t They leave off and leave us alone with this Time thing? It’s confusing enough already, as our clock time isn’t Real Time, it’s Railroad Time. When the West was being ‘won’ by the intrusion of the railroads, the railroad They needed to have time schedules that made sense to RR employees and potential passengers, both. To that end, the government They mandated the four time districts across the U.S. and everyone gradually conformed to this imposed standard.
Gives a layered meaning to the question: “Do the trains run on time?”
Now we have imposed on us, once again, by probably the same They(s), this no-longer-apropos Daylight Savings Time. Originally intended to assist the farmers (since we then lived in an agrarian culture), and just as Summer ‘vacation’ from school was originally intended to free up farm children so they could work as unpaid labor in the fields and help get the crops in, we seem to have forgotten these motivations even as our culture left the agrarian model and now is Something Else. Cyber Culture, perhaps. International, in any case, and increasingly less and less local-clock-time-based.
Would it be such a terrible jolt to our collective psyches if we just set the clocks (in our respective time districts, of course) and left them alone? After all, we always have Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to calculate our way around the world, and local time so we can say to each other, “Meet you at 8, and don’t be late.”
What else do we need?
(And then there was War Time, about which I know absolutely nothing, except that a friend was born during this yet-another Time imposition, and so she has to include that in any calculations necessary to determine her correct horoscope.)
The Daylight Savings choice is up to individual States. Some of our States have more sense than to comply; Hawaii immediately comes to mind.
‘They’ seem to be doing this Time Manipulation just to jerk us around and interfere with us feeling grounded in our own time and place. Why are we putting up with it? Really, off with Their heads!
There appears to be a complete breakdown of time measurement in my room today.
Last evening I returned home, tired and hungry, from a cat sitting assignment that lasted a week. After eating I simply collapsed, waking at 3 a.m. to get out of my day clothes and into my night clothes. So it must have been then that the line was crossed between Time Understood and Time Out of Control.
This morning I woke to my bedside analog clock having so slowed down that it was three hours behind itself. (Although, the second hand keeps going around at approximately one-second intervals. Very confusing, that.)
My Bose digital clock told me that I awoke at 6:49 a.m. The Sun was up so I went out to greet it and do some Sun gazing. I then put away some of my traveling things and went upstairs for my morning tea and computer games.
At some point I looked at the time indicated on my computer’s clock and noticed it was about an hour out of alignment with the digital clock and, of course, with the bedside analog clock that was already tripping through it own personal Twilight Time Zone. The floor tilted under my feet. I could feel Reality shredding and collapsing around me! I was at the event horizon of a Time Distortion black hole! Help!!!
After some moments of confusion, I speculated that They have once again imposed so-called Daylight Savings Time on us. It’s only March 14th, for cripes sake! Why don’t They leave off and leave us alone with this Time thing? It’s confusing enough already, as our clock time isn’t Real Time, it’s Railroad Time. When the West was being ‘won’ by the intrusion of the railroads, the railroad They needed to have time schedules that made sense to RR employees and potential passengers, both. To that end, the government They mandated the four time districts across the U.S. and everyone gradually conformed to this imposed standard.
Gives a layered meaning to the question: “Do the trains run on time?”
Now we have imposed on us, once again, by probably the same They(s), this no-longer-apropos Daylight Savings Time. Originally intended to assist the farmers (since we then lived in an agrarian culture), and just as Summer ‘vacation’ from school was originally intended to free up farm children so they could work as unpaid labor in the fields and help get the crops in, we seem to have forgotten these motivations even as our culture left the agrarian model and now is Something Else. Cyber Culture, perhaps. International, in any case, and increasingly less and less local-clock-time-based.
Would it be such a terrible jolt to our collective psyches if we just set the clocks (in our respective time districts, of course) and left them alone? After all, we always have Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to calculate our way around the world, and local time so we can say to each other, “Meet you at 8, and don’t be late.”
What else do we need?
(And then there was War Time, about which I know absolutely nothing, except that a friend was born during this yet-another Time imposition, and so she has to include that in any calculations necessary to determine her correct horoscope.)
The Daylight Savings choice is up to individual States. Some of our States have more sense than to comply; Hawaii immediately comes to mind.
‘They’ seem to be doing this Time Manipulation just to jerk us around and interfere with us feeling grounded in our own time and place. Why are we putting up with it? Really, off with Their heads!