tempus fugit

More and more I realize I’m becoming my own mother. This thought is prompted by the fact of Daylight Saving Time kicking in this Sunday. My mother never did buy into the whole concept of DST and, in yet another attempt at attaining elderly eccentricity, for years refused to change her clocks. She was right in her quirky way and I didn’t care really because it only took very minor math to know what time it was at her place.

Since its advent and as the decades passed, adjustments were made as to when DST starts and ends. I suppose I could do some research on this but I choose not to. It’s not my imagination but once a decade, or so, some bureaucrat decides to expand it, for a whole phalanx of rationales. As I’ve grown older, like my mother, I have started to doubt them and although I do change my clocks when I’m supposed to (my eccentricities lie elsewhere, and are less minor) I just know the whole thing is a ridiculous hoax.

Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is right on, that is, the passage of time is really a dreamscape and we shouldn’t fool with it. I have this idea that over the next 50 years, a decade at a time, DST will expand in about 10-day increments and will therefore eventually meet and fold into itself and we will come out the other end and we will never have to change our clocks again since it will forever more be Daylight Saving Time, and the reasons behind it will continue to be more bogus. However, the upshot might be that we will either lose one hour forever or we will have start over at square one by adding an hour each year, changing it to a spring-back-fall-forward mantra and further confusing generations to come because the reasons behind DST will have been lost in the missed of time.

One afterthought: the correct term is Daylight Saving Time; not Daylight Savings Time which has slowly entered into common usage. Eventually, in this electronic age, it will be known only as DST and no one will actually know what the acronym stands for (and no one will care). Not even the cranberry farmers who ostensibly benefit. Or the purveyors of fossil fuels. My mother could be right; ignoring DST might be the noble thing to do. It certainly says something for eccentricity, which can be an attractive and charming asset, even though sometimes annoying as hell.