Another day, another essay. This would, of course, be number 7 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6):
The other day, I saw an ad in a magazine that said, “The future is here!” And I thought, oh crap, maybe I had better put on some pants.
As it turns out, the future isn’t here just yet. It is, as they sometimes say, yet to come. But while we’re on the subject, this week marks the end of Daylight Savings Time, invented long ago for reasons I could probably look up, but which, quite frankly, I find quite boring and therefore best left to people who never got any dates in high school. Not that I dated much myself — I spent most nights throughout high school happily chained to the radiator in my parents’ basement, begging for scraps and occasionally barking like a wild dog when company came over — but I think my underlying point, whatever it was, is still valid.
Whether or not Susie Jenkins, the homecoming queen, took a restraining order out against me our senior year is no longer strictly relevant, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by constantly dwelling on the past like that. My wife says that I’m just avoiding the issue and that my barking is starting to frighten the neighbors, but I’m a little confused as to what that has to do with Daylight Savings Time in the first place, and so I tell her she’s just being silly.
The upshot of all this, however, is that, because of Daylight Savings Time, you’ll be reading this column an hour earlier than you would have last week. If you think about it as much as I have — since, chained to a radiator, one has plenty of time to reflect — this is a little like time travel. Except of course it isn’t. With time travel, I’m sure there’d be flashing lights or glowing things or flying cars. There would be some sort of physics or weird-ass, complicated math out of a book or something, and it would probably involve more than just turning your clocks back an hour once a year. Call me crazy, but that’s just how it seems to me.
After all, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary on my desk defines time as “a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future”, so you can imagine that travel through it would be more than a little wacky. Probably not Three’s Company-style wacky, but pretty wacky nonetheless. Daylight Savings Time, on the other hand, is pretty boring stuff, but at least it means we get to sleep in an extra hour once a year after all those late nights of barking at the neighbors.
Oh, and Susie, if you’re out there — call me, okay?
It’s probably the only one of the lot that’s at least marginally topical, since it was first printed on Daylight Savings Time weekend. That doesn’t mean anything, but I just thought I’d point it out.
