The worst thing about Daylight Saving Time is that it was instituted at the turn of the century by Anglo governments, and that means it is devoid of the fantastic superstitious rituals and psychic rewards that fucking with time should afford us. We have no legends about spirits we entered in limbo when we sprang forward; we have no special candles to burn or poems to incant to call back our fall-back hour. We’ve got no elves or mammals to anthropomorphize. We’ve got no sexy-garter imperatives. We don’t even have steampunk power stories of time rapture or dinosaurs in heliocrafts or whatnot.
This DST thing is sorry-story bullshit.
We should sew tight the bottoms of our swimsuits and leave them on the line to be filled with what we’ve lost since finding eggs on Easter morning. We should wear costumes and meet in alleys to kiss stranger after stranger until the odd hour has passed. We should travel back in time and hold a wronged beloved’s face in our hands and say we’re sorry, so so sorry for all we lacked. We could sit in treehouse nests built for this hour/dance in circles or squares/ scour each other for ticks and moles/make fires to signal the aliens/stand in running water waiting for a vision/lick mushrooms until we’re at first absorption = we should do something, this hour pooling at our heads while we sleep, it’s the hour.
Taken/given hours. We should at least get presents.
Right now, rolling your clocks back has all of the same zero-level dervishness of waiting in line at Kmart for your layaway window air conditioner, finally paid off in October. Great, this is annoying, huh, what was I thinking, why is everything so hard, well this is a good thing to have, whatever. And then there will be a week of people complaining that their children are confused about when to wake up. Which, yes. But we don’t want hothouse flower children who can’t travel between time zones, do we?
In fact, for the children, we probably need to do this DST thing more often. If we aren’t going to have special parties and the promises of ghost visits or opening time portals, then why are we limiting ourselves to doing this twice a year, with all the perfect, annoying math of that? Let’s fuck with time at random. Let’s let the LOTTO ball people tell us how many hours we win or lose each Saturday night with a Powerball draw. That could keep it interesting. Spin the big wheel, Pat. Wake me up, Vanna. Tell me how many vowels I’ve got left.
Light a candle, make out for an hour, look for ghosts dancing in between the shadows of the numerals of your clock as your roll the hour back. Happy DST, babies!