Quiet Desperation

A switch in time ain’t kind

Column by Craig Marshall Smith
Posted 10/22/19

Don’t forget to fall back. I would rather not fall back or spring forward, and every year others express the same thing at the time, and then we forget about it until it comes around again. It’s …

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Quiet Desperation

A switch in time ain’t kind

Posted

Don’t forget to fall back. I would rather not fall back or spring forward, and every year others express the same thing at the time, and then we forget about it until it comes around again.

It’s not as much of a nuisance as it once was, because many of our clocks do it on their own, even inexpensive ones, like my clock radio.

It’s all an entomologist’s fault. I’ll get to him.

Wikipedia says, “(Daylight saving time) clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns.”

Clocks are everywhere, and it’s why I don’t own a watch. A watch is one way to let others know what kind of watch you have.

Like that football player who wears a $191,000 watch. While he is playing. It’s another professional athlete absurdity.

I am never late.

Someone said, “If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.”

However, Evelyn Waugh said, “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

I think punctuality is very erotic, is what I think.

I have never been on an airplane at 2 a.m. when we are supposed to fall back or spring forward, but I have often wondered what happens.

I think if you are flying from the East Coast to the West Coast, you arrive before you left. Do your whiskers know that? Of course not, they keep growing as if it’s business as usual.

There’s one clock I never change. It’s the one in my car.

Jennifer says, “Your clock isn’t right.”

“It will be.”

Arizona and Hawaii don’t observe Daylight Savings Time, although Arizona Navajo observe it on tribal lands. If you were dancing back and forth across time zones in a Navajo dance hall that straddled tribal land and the rest of Arizona, wouldn’t it ruin your moves? It would ruin mine.

If you leave tribal lands at 7 a.m. for a flight that leaves Sky Harbor Airport at 9 a.m., how many Advil would you need?

That entomologist I mentioned was a man named George Vernon Hudson, who moved from England to New Zealand to study insects. He wanted an extra hour of sunlight in the summer to analyze gnats, and it’s because of him I have to get on a ladder twice a year.

If I could impose anything on the rest of the world, it wouldn’t have anything to do with what time it was.

I’d start with baseball. One game each season would have the complete prohibition of cellphones. “Non licit.” Confiscated at the gate. If smuggled in, you’d be fingerprinted, photographed, and then forced to read “The Red Badge of Courage” — and quizzed.

Repeat offenders would be strapped down in a theater that was showing a Doris Day film.

Oh, Doris. She was born Doris Mary Kappelhoff in Cincinnati. Alfred Hitchcock, who otherwise knew how to choose blondes, chose her for his remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” and he allowed her to sing “Que Sera Sera,” until it drove her son’s kidnappers out of their minds and they said, “Here. Here’s your boy. Just quit singing.”

The song is an example of what’s called “cheerful fatalism.”

I think it’s an example of torture.

By the way, Harry always knows what time it is. He’s a watch dog.

Craig Marshall Smith is an artist, educator and Highlands Ranch resident. He can be reached at craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net.

Craig Marshall Smith

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