Clockenspiel

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Okay, no matter where you are, and what time you think it is, while you’re reading this it’s Hammer Time.
No, not M.C. Hammer, - the guy with the harem pants who was secretly funded by the Ritalin Manufacturers of America, but instead, an actual hammer. A hammer with a wooden handle and a metal head to be gripped firmly and brought down like Thor’s Hammer on any and all clocks in the room, the house, the neighborhood.
In my personal time zone where I am writing this right now, the glass and plastic opaque faces of three alarm clocks are in pieces on the floor. In this region, 21 hands, representing seven analog timepieces – hours, minutes, seconds, have been broken off and piled like kindling in the fireplace. In each of three computers, the prying eyes of digital time have been banished from the screen.
I’ve had all I can take and I just can’t take it anymore.
While you’re reading this the moments that you are wasting cannot be catalogued under Eastern Standard or Rocky Mountain or Greenwich Mean or any government controlled time.
This is my time.
I’ve got all the time in the world.
This is my world.
And you are free now - while you read this, to count off the moments on your own. How long have you been reading this now? Sixty seconds? Are you beginning to feel a little skittish? Do you feel the pressure of Big Brother’s time, weighing on you?
Relax. If you are usually bound, which most of you usually are – like the White Rabbit by his Red Queen, know that here and now the Queen is dead.
If last Saturday night you dutifully switched all your clocks one hour forward or two hours back, or stood on your hands or your head, or barked at the moon because that’s what the weatherman said you should do, know that this is a duty free zone.
That sound you hear is not a bomb about to go off, or a race about to begin, or a life about to end. That sound is the ticking of your own heart. You can move to its beat, you know. You don’t need to jump up at the alarm, make a mad dash to fit the train schedule, eat your lunch within the time that other’s prescribe for you, or take your week’s vacation at the same time every year: is there even such a thing as the same time every year?
And God knows you don’t need to save any daylight.
The sad truth Chuckles, is that you can’t save any daylight: never could. It is a ruse, a game, a joke on you my friend. It was originally the Kaiser’s bright idea, don’t you know: a way for the Prussians to put one over on the French. They wanted a little extra time to blow each other into eternity (now that’s my idea of daylight savings time). Daylight Savings was and is an absurdity worthy of Dr. Seuss – like the Butter Battle game. And now, war or not, it is a joke played on you to demonstrate how gullible you are – and always will be.
They move the clock forward, they move the clock backward, and you go right along with it like the life-sized figures that dance under the Glockenspiel on the Munich Rathaus tower.
Today the Kaiser and his descendants are sitting up there in their Dirigible Pilots Men’s Club drawing room on the uppitiest floor of the emptiest building on Wall Street, clinking glasses and having a laugh at your expense.
And do you think for a moment that these Helium-voiced lords abide by the conventions of time that they have you dancing to? Of course not. They are floating on the ether, far above the clouds, eating bonbons and petit fours, drinking absinthe and peering out the window at the peons far below. The faster they make you run, the more time they have to kill.
But at least here, and now – within the white spaces between each word you are free to spend your time any way you choose. You don’t have to spend it all.
I personally prefer to use a stopwatch, letting out only as much time as I need for the things that I love.
My time is my own.
I will not, under any circumstances, bend my time to suit your schedule.
I will not rise a moment earlier or go to bed a moment later.
I refuse to save time, or Leap years, or celebrate any of their fabricated holidays.
I can spare only so much.
And guess what: your time is up.