Spring Forward - Fall Back

Day Light Savings Time is horrible on so many levels.  Most of the world doesn’t copy us in our bi-annual American tradition.  Every year the news stories tell us our politicians are trying to end it yet it never comes to pass.  It is a relic of trying to save energy during a World War.  The spring forward, fall back torture continues year after year forcing us to change clocks and deal with interrupted circadian rhythms.  It means I drive home in the dark.  In Alaska growing up it was worse.  In the dark of winter you only had 6 hours of daylight and changing the clocks meant decreasing the daylight window on both ends.  As a child I lived in dark.  I went to school in the dark.  I came home in the dark.  I might catch a glimpse of the sun through a school window if I was lucky.  Summers were the only respite when we lived on the excess light.  

These past few years have revealed what is likely the most diabolically evil reality of daylight savings that has proved to be more damaging than all the others.  It comes in the shape of a small dog that nestles up to my leg in bed every night.  I cannot profess to understand the motivations of a dog, I can only guess.  It is a mystery in life that to date I have found no reasonable explanation.  I thought for awhile it might be the sound of tweeting and chirping birds that would wake him but long after their departure his uncanny alarm clock remains.  For six months out of the year at exactly 5 am he wakes up and then wakes me.  At 5 am I suffer, it is only when the clocks fall back and 5 becomes 4 the pain truly commences.  What evil is this?  I know he has to pee but this can’t explain every day.  

I do have one theory that is more plausible than the rest.  It could be his stomach.  My little friend seems to be governed by his stomach.  Every day his schedule is uncanny as he makes exacting predictions through his actions on when it is time for a treat or his dinner.  How could this be any different for breakfast?  Still, why 4am!  No matter what I make him wait until the reasonable time of 5:30 to eat his bowl full of dried morsels.  My theory is if I did not, 4 am might become 3:30.    

His process of waking me is to first be annoying with movement and licking my hand.   Only after I have told him to be still he typically turns and climbs on top of me.  He has two tactics.  One is to sit on my stomach and stare at me.  Fifteen pounds of canine joy squeezing my full bladder, I typically wince.  

His second and more aggressive tactic is to lay on top of my body and shove his ass in my face.  Thank goodness he is not cursed with morning flatulence.  I am sad to say that there has never been a day he did not win.  My bearded pal knows this and while I beg him constantly to refrain I doubt he ever will.  

Albert Einstein teaches us that time is simply an invented concept.  He once wrote, people like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, in other words, he said, is an illusion.   This is derived from his Theory of Relativity that denies “any absolute, universal significance to the present moment.”  

Okay Albert, tell that to my dog.