Who’s bright idea was this Daylight Savings Time thing anyway? What, we just lose a whole hour? It just disappears? Who has the authority, and the gall, to make this happen? The government? Dark wizards? Monsanto? So many unanswerable questions. Well, anyway, you’re no doubt, like me, reeling from the sudden vanishing of this sixty minutes from your life. I mean, I’ll probably lose at least another hour just trying to comprehend this theft and get my life back on the rails. An hour may not seem like much when you’re just whiling it away with an episode of Intervention and a bag of margarita, but when you have one stolen from you, you begin to realize what you could have accomplished in it, had you not been callously denied the opportunity. It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of my truncated day thinking of what might have been.
In an hour I could have finally wrote the first chapter of that novel I’ve been meaning to get around to starting. Who knows when I’ll get another opportunity to sit down and really work out the themes and lay down the foundations for what will undoubtedly turn out to be my most sterling opus. Now it may never get started. I mean, that hour would have been perfect for it. I can’t do it any other hour today because I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do. So, essentially, Daylight Savings Time may very well have robbed us of not only an hour of our lives, but also one of the greatest works of erotic fiction this decade. Think about that next time you can’t find anything good to read, or the book your reading isn’t full of really rad descriptions of boobs.
I could have done something noble like some charity work or something. Like gone down to a mission to give out soup, or distribute clothing and shoes, or cleanse lepers, or whatever they do at missions. I would be doing a great service to my community and my fellow man. I could have taught some disadvantaged inner city youths how to play basketball, and in the process taught them some valuable life lessons that helped to make them believe in themselves. I don’t really know how to play basketball, but I’m pretty sure I could swing this. As long as I was just a little bit better at it than the kids, no one would be the wiser. And it would be easy to come off as knowing what I’m doing, because I’d be bigger than them and could just push them around a bit if they started getting too good at it. But no. Because someone Houdini-ed this hour out from under me those kid will never benefit from the unparalleled streetwise advice I could have dished out and will now most likely end up in gangs and people will die. So next time you get stabbed to death by some twelve-year-old street-tough maybe it’ll make you think a little bit about how much difference an hour can make.
With an hour I could have effectively and efficiently sexed a woman. Yeah, you heard me ladies, an hour.
The possibilities that have been quashed are virtually endless, really. I could have done my taxes finally, but I guess now they’ll have to wait yet another year. I could have cleaned up my apartment, but it looks like I’ll be continuing to weave my way through the towering, labyrinthine stacks of pizza boxes and cases of empty beer bottles. I could have taken my cat to get that operation that’s been so desperately needed these many months now, but nope, little Sneezy is going to have to keep taking one for the team. I could have went to my mother’s birthday party and given her the gift of having the family all together for once, but thanks again to Daylight Savings Time I’ll just remain estranged from her indefinitely. Heck, I could even have finished writing this article, but
Photo by Dave Stokes via Flickr
