Being Hip To Time

March 14, 2011: I'm a bit confused why no one told me they were spinning the clocks forward today -- not angry, just confused. Had I been in possession of that information, I like to think I would have warned the people around me -- close friends and family at least -- that life as we know it was about to change, and they had damn well better get prepared.

Of course, none of this helps me now. It's 1:15 in the morning and I'm wide awake. I've got no one to thank but myself for taking that two-hour nap this afternoon, but had I known I'd slept in to 10:30 and not 9:30, as my clock had claimed, I might not have devoted additional hours to finding my bliss (or at least more of my bliss) in dreamland.

Still, if anyone's equipped to handle the precarious, hallucinogen-like experience of a lonely sleepless night, it's me. I have a long history with late nights, and not because I've led some sort of romantic life of early-hour parties and spell-binding sunrises. Ever since an early age I was drawn to staying up late. I remember always wondering what it was like later and later into the night -- what it felt like and what went on in those mysterious small hours that one was strictly forbidden to visit. I think I was seven when I somehow ended up awake until 3:15 on a weird night of television and childish antics. By junior high I'd done my first all-nighter, and had found it uniquely invigorating for some stupid reason I still can't explain. In high school, I developed this strange compulsion of staying up all night on a regular basis and cleaning my room. I led such a disorganized life, it seemed that every couple of months I needed to stay up all night and reassemble everything (as if it really ever helped!). This, in turn, led to some confusing beliefs that I may have been meant to live by the moon cycle, which still kind of makes sense to me because the moon rises about 50 minutes later each night, and so one logically sleeps in another 50 minutes each morning until they work their way around the clock in 29 days ...

Which leads me to comment on the churlish construct of our whole narrow-minded conformist world, which requires (or seems to require) that we keep our timetable in strict alignment with Washington and the World Bank and all the other Right Wing institutions. (That's why they even have Daylight Savings Time; it's merely a method of testing our obedience to the arbitrary whims of the Power Elite (or P.E., as they're known).

It's unnatural is what it is, and when I finally realize some significant income from my book, cartoons and clown paintings, I'll start living right, smash my alarm clock (or my wife's alarm clock, since mine isn't even plugged in) and get back to the natural cycles as the Universe (or at least the moon) intended them.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to have killed a good 25 minutes on this entry -- now being that much closer to sleep, as well as my death. Ironically, the experience vividly reminds me of that great Peter Fonda line, as heard in that sketchily constructed classic movie "Easy Rider" -- "I'm hip to time."

Remember, all you readeres who thought you could escape that gruesome image and idea -- Naked Peter Fondas! We're all just Naked Peter Fondas trying to stay on schedule ...