Saving Time on Credit

Daylight Saving Time: a tired, time-worn joke on wasted hours spent resetting clocks back and forth twice every year to reflect time spent adding and subtracting hours. It amounts to losing and gaining an idea whose time has yet to come and goes just as quickly. Guess how many jellybeans are in the jar and win a timeshare. You can’t add or subtract time on a mechanical clock. It doesn’t add up. Unless you’re on some kind of crazy schedule or mundane routine running around in circles. Gears turning clock hands around, making future appointments, keeping meetings, making plans, and scheduling dates. That human construct keeps the illusion alive in a timeless sense. The irreversible flow of events from past events to the present now spirals into an unknown future, where time has yet to pass. We’re burning daylight, leaving a trail of scorched earth and smoky clouds of dust choking in the distant light that makes time stand still. In the foggy shadow of the night sky. Plan to use the daylight saved when the time’s right. You never know when you might run out of time or need a little more. Just a little taste to wet the beak of folly. The sun will shine again tomorrow.

Like a broken-down refrigerator, it used to be cool, but now it’s old, empty, and smells funny. That’s how it goes with Father Time. Nothing lasts forever in a life lived on credit. Your layaway plan isn’t working. Right on time for your monthly billing statement. Unalive as the new age rots. It’ll take an eternity to repay the piper. Let the cannibals feast on the baby back ribs of the low and slow pressure cooker timer. Just when you think it’s safe to let go with an Irish goodbye. What’s all the hubbub about this passage of time cavorting through the eye of a needle? Dancing on razor blades and looking for a shortcut to save some time. The old double-slit theory switcheroo. How can you be in two places at once when you’re really no place at all? Plan ahead. We’ve learned nothing from the past except how to repeat it. Live for today, forget about tomorrow, and pay the monthly minimum payment. This is buying the dream on a bait-and-switch layaway plan.

The official Doomsday Clock is currently set at 85 seconds until midnight. Do they reset it for Daylight Saving Time? If you set it forward one hour, then we’ll all go together in one glorious flash. Every precious moment it’s later than you think when you're just a shadow on the wall. A nanosecond in a vast microscopic universe. Cronus, the Greek god of time, is said to have devoured his children because he didn’t want them to replace his time. The Roman god Saturn, aka Janus, ruled the passage of time in the changing seasons of planting and harvest, celebrating Saturnalian customs. Today we use digital technology to track and trace time, and still there’s never enough time left to find the perfect balance between time and space to grow a decent tomato plant or build a house. Even the Christian god, the one who created everything, had to take a rest after manifesting the heavens and earth. Not too shabby for an old fart who sits on a fluffy cloud in the sky all day to make something out of nothing.

The point is that it’s pointless to believe being lazy is a sin. Apparently, if you do nothing all day long and then look for a reward for not doing anything, then you’ve spent your time doing something for no reason. There’s never enough or too much to go around the sundial of shadowy time. The sun casts a bright light on the horizon to make it appear like another day has come and gone. It’s futile to live on earth, stuck in time. A slave to the desperate hours that move slowly. That tick-tock heartbeat is a metronome of disappearing days, starting now. You can time it out yourself by watching the clock tick down to the next moment and then another. That’s how to keep track of the minutes going forward to hours mutating into days for years to come and go. The time is now, and later, most things come to pass eventually. Including us, when the time runs out. Cut it short; wait until the next time. It’ll be here any second. I can’t wait.