An Ode to Daylight Savings Time

Geneva! Please rally round my flag as we charge down the figurative hill in an emboldened attempt to throw off our temporal chains and rebel against the nefarious tyranny of “falling back.” They may take our alarm clocks, but they’ll never take our daylight.

Or, if I were to put it a little less poetically, this sucks! If I wanted an extra hour of sleep, I’d just stay in bed a little longer. No clock touching necessary.

Did I say this sucks?

And it starts with the sad realization that I’d just trained this not-so-finely-honed 54-year-old H20 addled runner’s body to wait until 6 a.m. to pee. But now it’s back to hazarding a dark and cold bathroom at 5 in the morning.

And I am not amused.

Then there’s the punctual Australian cattle dog who has an internal rhythm apparatus that would make pulsars and nuclear clocks envious everywhere.

She goes out at 6:30 a.m., breakfast at 7, walk at 7:45, midday Milkbone at 11:15, Frisbee at 4, dinner at 6 and so forth and so on. Now she’s staring at me like I can’t tell time.

Pray tell, how do you explain this series of events to a dog with the consistency of Sheldon Cooper? I’ve tried various approaches, but none of them work. I suppose the 5:30 a.m. bottom of the stairs whining doesn’t really matter when you have to get up to go to the bathroom anyway.

Not only that, but with the abject proliferation of electronic devices, setting each and every one of the heinous things back an hour is not unlike accounting for every last fallen leaf in your back yard.

And just when you think you’re done, you invariably get into your car only to furtively glance down at the dash and, stricken with a sudden and severe onset of perfect panic, you start doing 85 down Randall Road to make that appointment only to remember you forgot to set that clock back just in time to see the flashing red lights in your rearview mirror.

Ah, cruel and ironic fate!

Not to mention your foggy family members who proceed to march around the house like the cast of The Walking Dead. If they’re going to exhibit all the symptoms of severe jet lag, we should at least be able to enjoy the benefit of some exotic locale. I suppose there’s some solace in noting that the TSA wasn’t involved.

While not nearly as bad as the dog, life is much more fascinating when you get to observe your children make that all-too-slow time adjustment shift.

Then, to make matters much worse, there are all those oblivious people who, despite being subjected to the “fall back” media onslaught, fail to take heed and show up an hour late for church, the movie or the concert.

And rather than admit the error of their temporal ways, these tardy folks typically assume it’s some sort of vast conspiracy the rest of us to make them look like complete idiots.

C’mon! If God meant for it to get dark at 5 p.m. He would’ve installed headlights in our foreheads. It’s unnatural! (Getting dark early — not the headlights.) So what if the kids have to go to school in the dark! If they’re anything like me, most of ‘em sleep through their first period class anyway and that early morning gloom only makes that magnificent pastime that much easier.

There’s nothing like watching the sun come up over those bright green high school dumpsters.

So what if a few of the younger ones get run over on their way to school. Aren’t there too many third graders out there as it is? Isn’t there something to be said for natural selection and the thinning of the herd?

I’ll never forget the year I toiled in a forbidding windowless IT basement which meant going to and from work in the dark. I felt just like a B sci-fi movie mole person. You may as well start hibernating at that point.

Then there’s this! Do we really want to destroy what’s left of the late President Richard Nixon’s fading legacy? The only good thing that guy ever did was implement daylight savings time year round.

But the absolute worst thing about the time change is all the people who complain about the time change…wait a minute…we’ll issue a never mind on that one.

So rise up Genevans! Are we going to let our computers tell us what to do? Don’t fall for this bleeding heart liberal falling back conspiracy. Even Fox News is in on it! That rugged American individualism demands that you do exactly what I tell you to do. Set your clocks right back to where they were in July.

Give me daylight savings time or give me, oh hell, 10 bucks oughtta shut me up.