This Time Tomorrow

This time today was yesterday when it was already yesterday. This morning in the wee, dark early hours, we fell back an hour (I've always liked how we keep that straight, 'spring ahead' and 'fall back' and that 'wander stupidly like a drunken lemur' I hear so often is, I guess, only used to describe me) all across the country.

I've never been clear how much of the rest of the world does this time-travel-but-standing-very still-stuff although daylight savings is utilized across significant portions of the earth's Northern Hemisphere. I've always wondered about hourly employees working overnight shifts when the clocks change directions....do they work seven and get paid for eight in the Spring and then work nine and get paid for eight in the fall? Is there a law or a workplace practice that covers this and why on earth is a fifty-eight year old guy, pecking away at a keyboard in Norwich, Connecticut, worrying about stuff like this? When you have no life, interest in the obscure becomes a crusade.

The why we move clocks forward and back is the part I will NEVER understand no matter how erudite the explanation. I know, 'how did you find the ONLY National Geographic in the history of the magazine without women with really big MA----'. Cool your jets, PF Sloan; none of us are in seventh grade or thirteen anymore. As a matter of fact, technically we'll all be an hour older when Sunday becomes Monday than when yesterday became today. Science makes my hair hurt. And that's another thing I don't understand.

We share the planet with a nearly infinite number of other life forms from single-celled amino acids to the full scale and scope of the abiogenesis catalog (now available for only three easy payments, and if use your credit card right now...), and none of them have watches much less the concern for time and its division and measurement that we, Homo sapiens, have.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way. And then we look up in surprise and dismay at the time and wonder where it's gone, when it hasn't gone anywhere. The end of a television program, a movie, a radio serial or other entertainment, a relationship with another person, or a business relationship or political alliance.

You don't have to be Richard to have misgivings about time and what we do with it. Merely being human will qualify. I'll leave the sun behind me and I'll watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by....I can see the world and it ain't so big at all. This time tomorrow.

-bill kenny