What TIME is it!? No, seriously, what time is it really?

This Sunday is our bi-annual celebration of humanity’s unquestioned mastery over time and space. Daylight Savings Time begins at 2am Sunday morning, so when you’re late for something important, know that it’s not my fault.

I am Meow Meow Time King, lord of tick tock!
I am Meow Meow Time King, lord of tick tock!

But when you think about it, the fact that you make it anywhere on “time” is really an every day modern fucking miracle. And that we have Daylight Savings Time and Leap Years and all of the other nonsense just shows clearly how our entire system of time, like many of the other things that hold up our loosely assembled society, is based solely on the honor system. Take a look around your house. You’ve probably got a half dozen clocks and each of them has a different time on it. Which one’s right? Which ever one you think will most closely match whoever else you need to see around a specifically agreed upon time and place. But that cat with the crazy eyes is no more the end all be all of when it is in the universe than those god damned, over hyped Mayans. You heard me Mayans, eat one. They didn’t predict the end of the world, they just got lazy and died. Suck it Mayans! Suck it two times!

We live our entire lives on a wet rock almost 13,000 kilometers across, hurtling through the vast, unknowable void of space at 108,000 kilometers an hour. Most of the time we don’t think about the insane reality of the world that we live on because if we really took the time to think about it we would never be able to stop screaming, the knowledge of how incredibly impossible our entire existence is being far too much for our tiny minds to even begin to comprehend. We’d be like Juggalos at a science fair. And between the face paint and the incomprehensible shrieking, when would we ever get anything done?

A day isn’t 24 hours long and a year isn’t 365 days, but because you have to know when a train is supposed to show up, we need to give everyone a standardized system of measurement otherwise shit wouldn’t get anywhere, or when it got there, no one would be waiting for it. Every four years we get an extra day tacked on to the calendar. They just throw on an extra day and we just take it because what the hell else would we do, and we go on silently agreeing that right now it’s basically 3:24 pm on, what we’ll call Friday, for all intents and purposes March 11th of what is generally accepted in this part of the world as 2011. So if I need to see you in 45 minutes, we’ll both have to accept these as true or we can both go fuck ourselves.

Oh, it's so uncategorized, I will call you 6:42 pm DST!
Oh, it's so uncategorized, I will call you 6:42 pm DST!

The idea of dicking around with our made up system of time measurement has apparently been around for quite a while. But it was a selfish bug watching Kiwi who championed modern Daylight Savings Time because apparently he wanted some daylight to do human things with other humans after spending his 19th century days nosing around the grass looking for insects. While over in England around a similar time, an uppety Brit thought it was just a damned shame that too many people didn’t get to see the sun rise and that he didn’t like ending his rounds of golf when the sun went down. So now I get to lose an hour of sleep every spring because some funny talking busy bodies made it their mission in life to impose their long dead will on me because they couldn’t properly organize their fucking lives properly? That’s some bullshit and I don’t mind saying so.

So with everything else we have to worry about, between the planet we live on constantly screaming through the night sky at unimaginable speeds or our making up the rules of how we measure how long that takes, how can we honestly ever be expected to know what the hell is going on, or really care that much if someone gets to where ever you are a couple minutes after they said they’d be. With all of these things and so many more going against our every waking moment, the fact that any two people ever purposely wind up in the exact same place at the relatively same time is one of the single greatest feats of human ingenuity, right behind sun guided navigation and the hand job. So if anyone decides to give you shit for ever being late, not just this Sunday or Monday but any time, I give you full permission to punch them square in the dick and tell them to their face that they were right on time for being punched directly in the cock. See what they have to say about that bit of how do you do!

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