Insomniac Almanac -- Chapter Twelve

   Actually I'm not an insomniac.  I don't know what I am.  My routine this night was...

...slept one hour

...slept one hour

...slept one hour

...slept one hour

...got up and wrote in journal one hour

...slept two hours

...got up and wrote in journal, and here I am

    I got six hours of sleep.  You can't call that insomnia.  It is just that I got out of bed, into my wheel chair and back to bed six times during the night.  That's more peripatetic than insomniac.

   So here I am: UP.  And it is not even daylight yet.  It is too early to dress and go outside.  The street lights are still on. Carl's Jr will open in forty-five minutes, or there will even be coffee here at the old folks home.  In a couple of weeks we will shift back to Standard time. Fall back, remember. It will be daylight at this same hour.  The hour changes, not the daylight. We try  to stretch the useable daylight during the summer by fooling ourselves by changing the hour.  Mother nature does her thing without fail.

    Twice a year we upset our cycadian rhythmn by juggling the clock, and we do every year, even those years we juggle the calendar with leap day in February. Residents of Arizona steadfastly refuse to change their clocks with the rest of us clock jugglers.  Well, they are on the extreme west edge of their time zone, so they can afford to do it that way, don't you see.  But so are people in Nevada, and they go along with the rest of us.  Hail, Arizona, stand your ground. It is just a matter of who is the boss, the clock or us.

   If you call his tail a leg, how many legs has a jackass?  Five? No, Four.  Calling his tail a leg doesn't make it one. Calling Seven AM daybreak this month and Six AM datbreak next month doesn't fool anyone.  Well, yes it does, and if you forget to change your clocks you will show up for work an hour EARLY.  That is better than forgetting to change your clocks in the spring.  In that case you  show up an hour LATE and your pay check will be docked.

   I once used an entire journal entry explaining my proposed TEN HOUR clock.  The response was under-whelming. I won't do that again.