Time Enough Already

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Daylight savings time. An extra hour of sunlight. Where? For what? What are you going to do with an hour? Personally, I don’t have any windows at my office, tethered in my cubicle. Who cares? Sunlight is a luxury left to the folly of the leisure class at best. Now I have an extra hour of darkness, I suppose, as I commute to work in the morning.

Ah, an hour. Suck it up. This is America.

Saturday into Sunday the clock struck 13.

Or was it 25?

Now it’s difficult to some losing an hour of so-called bar time. You do it get back, once a year, as then in fall, there’s an extra hour, to get wasted, talk loud, and fall off your barstool anyway. That’s fall. Of course, either way, you can sleep late and miss that extra hour of darkness.

Is that why there is a higher incidence of heart attack and stroke with the time change? I guess when your times up, time’s up. Makes sense in places like Wisconsin.

Now spring has sprung. Coincidence that the season premiere of NBC’s Timeless coincides with the time change? Or did they time it that way?

Who has the time for this?

What does time matter anyway if you have nowhere to go and nothing to do? You have all the time in the world. And why limit it to the world, when there’s an infinite universe of time? Having all the time of the universe. That however sounds too worldly.

Time allows us to be controlled by an unseen force from another dimension. The fourth. With confining parameters and demands that are far more constraining than a cell, a cubicle, the strapped in, look forward dictates of travel. Also measured in time.

It’s time for more time by narrowing it down to less.

The Chinese almost have it right.

The Chinese have just one time zone. They have one and it’s not because they are a small country. They introduced, rather rammed it down everyone’s throats, in 1949, (when their Communist Party consolidated control of the country,) one time instead of a half dozen that existed: for the purpose of national unity.

Where’s our national unity? Maybe one time zone would bring us together. Nothing else has. Daylight Savings Time at least starts a dialogue. You talk to someone on the East coast and they are two or three hours ahead. Ahead of what?

And make sure you get there, early, and on time. 5 Eastern, they go home, as support is only available until then. 5 what? What’s with this AM and PM? Is it not a 24 hour system? Just call it 1700 and you don’t have to bother with AM or PM. If you’re writing it out you don’t have to bother with a colon either. Confusing? Don’t like it because it sounds like Military time or hospitals? This is America. We always have some war going on anyway and everyone is in healthcare one way or another besides. As a patient or in some ways a provider. And why stop with the United States? Let’s make it worldwide.

Wartime, just like anytime, Universal Time, Universal Health Care, time? Does anybody really know what time it is? Or is it too late for that.

Some time ago, not too long ago, I flew from Sydney to Dallas and arrived in the US before I left Australia. Go figure. 700 miles an hour for around 17 hours. How? We really need one time zone and make it worldwide. Yes. You listen to an international broadcast, they say 1700 GMT and announce local time in Delhi or Dakkar. Why? One time, one world, one universe. Who cares what time the sun rises?

Just take your time.

Local? In the age of post-globalism? We are a space faring lot and should be looking to the stars; we should use UT, Universal Time not groveling in localist hands of a clock. UT, same as GMT but less provincial sounding. Used in science, software and way cooler sounding than Pacific Daylight Savings Time. At one time when Great Britain was the center of the universe, during its global conquest, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, came about as England chose its Royal National Observatory as the delineator for the mean solar time. Zero degrees longitude. Formerly known as International Civil Standard time. Solar Mean time: but who cares where the prime meridian is, zero degrees longitude as your GPS maps you on the globe automatically. That’s another topic of discussion, who cares what your address is when satellites can pin you down to latitude and longitude to twelve decimal places. There’s still altimeter. Above sea level? What if the sea rises? It will. It’s only a matter of time.

How about Right Ascension and Declination? Let’s map ourselves to the celestial center of the universe, not just our local post office or the edge of your county. This would take some time. I can envision a time when I get junk mail to toss into recycling, with my address as being latitude, longitude, right ascension declination – and zip code.

In any event, I set my clocks, the ones that didn’t set themselves. I really should have changed the batteries in my hardware store smoke detectors. An American tradition. I’m going to start a new one. I set my car’s clock to UTC. I’ll never have to remember how to set it again. It’s about time.

Time to go.