Like it or not, Daylight Relocating Time is here

 The semi-annual avalanche of snide memes and loud lament held off almost entirely until the day of clock change arrived. Then the usual players emerged, like the one that supposedly quotes a Native American saying only white men would cut the top off a blanket and sew it to the bottom and think that they have a longer blanket. By deftly misinterpreting the process, the joke sets up its straw man for an easy takedown.

Daylight Saving Time suffers from a lot of problems, but it was never intended to make the day longer, only to reorient us relative to sunrise and sunset, because we had long ago given up living according to natural light fluctuations. You want scheduled things like public transportation and regular business hours? Something else has to move to accommodate the desire to have lighter evenings and not have sunrise at 4 a.m. when you don't need to get up until 6.

Of course any specific example will trigger specific rebuttals from debaters who then take a victory lap as if they have demolished the entire case for changing the clocks. Fortunately, this blog has such minuscule reach that I seldom if ever get buried in comments.

This year, it looks like the weather might cooperate with the earliest possible start to my bike commuting season. This is good, because being stuck in motor vehicle traffic was making me crazy. My time in transit to work can vary as much as 20 percent depending on what idiot I get stuck behind on the two-lane road with limited opportunities to pass. My time in transit on the bike never varies that much unless I have a flat tire or a mechanical issue. The most likely mechanical issue is a broken shift cable, which would make the ride more strenuous, but doesn't make me several minutes later. In bike season my primary cause of tardiness is that I'm easily distracted by things around the house that delay my departure, but I'm damn sure not going to drive just because of that.

Arriving a little off the mark at work, I usually work a little extra at the end. Sometimes I work even more to make sure that things are caught up before I take days off. Thus the late daylight becomes even more critical for a safe ride home.

Years ago, I put lights on my commuting bike, and upgraded them steadily to the present system with a very functional dynamo head and tail light system, augmented by assorted battery lights. I can see well on a dark road, and have a lot more then the minimal legal requirement for lights to make me visible to motorists. After many seasons I can tell you that these are completely inadequate, especially now that motor vehicles are equipped with blinding banks of blazing lights that completely obliterate the view of anything else when two such beasts approach each other in dusk and darkness. People pop those headlights on while the sun is still up, blinding or at least distracting each other well before actual nightfall. I gave up trying to claim space on the roads at night. On the dark stretches of open highway, if a single vehicle is overtaking, they can see me well enough. But as soon as vehicles are approaching from both directions, a cyclist disappears in the solid blackness and blinding glare. Add a bendy, hilly piece of road and it gets much worse.

Protected pathways would be nice until human predators realized that cyclists would make easy pickings thereon. This danger will vary from place to place, but there is no defense. Carjackings prove that the armored shell is no defense either, but a locked car in motion presents a much more difficult target than a cyclist who can be taken down with a trip wire or just kicked from a dark corner. 

If you ever want proof that humans are basically good, just look at all the potential mugging scenarios that don't happen.  There is a lot of easy meat walking and riding around out there. The vast majority of the time we get way with it. And that's as it should be. But I feel less vulnerable riding at a good steady pace on the roadway than I do on an isolated path in the woods where I'm illuminated and someone with bad intent would not be. I hate to have to think about it, but humans have been preying on each other since before we were humans. Because of this, I make the most of daylight while it lasts.

Bitch bitch bitch about the time change

Social media is full of the semiannual carping about all aspects of moving the clocks. Lots of people have no idea which is Daylight Saving Time and which is Standard Time, they just know that it's stupid and they hate it.

I never gave much thought to Daylight Relocating Time until I started riding a bike a lot. When I was training to race, I had to calculate whether I had enough daylight for a training ride after work. When I was commuting -- and I still do -- I have to decide whether to risk riding in dusk and darkness. The jet lag aspect didn't "dawn" on me until I was over 50.

Human time is an artificial grid laid over natural time. Plants and animals respond to light and darkness. Humans do too, which causes most of the friction between metered time in general, and mandated displacements of the schedule in particular. Since humans already have the constant stress of accommodating artificial time, which goes unnoticed because it has been normalized for generations, the extra squeeze of switching the clocks provokes whines and squeals. Especially now that the Internet can broadcast and magnify such things, it has become a spring and fall bitchfest that has even led to legislative proposals to stay sprung forward or hold back and make Standard Time the unalterable standard.

With so-called Standard Time only in effect from the first Sunday in November to the second week of March, the so-called Daylight Time has become the de facto standard, because it occupies more of the year. If we were to stay one way or the other, I would prefer the later sunset, although I have a lot of trouble waking up when it's still dark out. Who invented that anyway? And who was the sadistic bastard who came up with the alarm clock, to yank a person from blissful slumber when they are clearly not ready?

No doubt, hunters and gatherers who woke up and got themselves into position before the morning light were more successful than the ones who strolled out after brunch to see what might be available. This transferred to agricultural societies, and then to industrial ones. But there's no avoiding the change in daylight from winter to summer solstices. When we lived according to the daylight alone, how far you pushed into the darkness at either end was somewhat up to you. Now that we have to punch a clock, the discrepancies have more of an impact.

If we did not change to Daylight Relocating Time, first light in the peak of day length would begin at about 3 a.m., and sunrise would follow at about 4 a.m. in northern locations in the Lower 48 of the USA. Your local time depends on where you are in your time zone. The western edge can differ significantly from the eastern edge. The sunlight moves smoothly across the chunked-up human boundaries in which we try to corral time and domesticate it. Thing is, we can tag it with a number, but it always manages to escape.

If we stay on Daylight Relocating Time, sunrise in the dark months of November, December, and January would be pushing 9 a.m. in some places that are northerly and westerly in their zones, like Seattle. It would be solidly after 8 a.m. most places.

When the Bush administration pushed the start of Daylight Relocating Time well into March, I was initially lured into the general griping, because sunrise was finally coming early enough to bring a hopeful feeling of spring to the mornings. The clock change two weeks into March knocked our sunrise back to January, while turning the afternoons into detached pieces of April, brightly lit but still cold. It increased opportunities to exercise outdoors after work, but March being March the conditions out there weren't always very inviting. But as the winters have rapidly weakened overall, it's starting to turn into bike season. Just remember that cold weather can return, and big dumps of dense, clumpy snow can ruin everything. March snow, except at what passes for high elevations in New England, can be too sticky to ski on, but too persistent to ignore when trying to get out on the roads.

Even when the time change waited until April the saying was that there wasn't much to look at, but plenty of light to see it by.

Whatever the clock says, it's hard to see the light go, and a welcome sight when it returns. Most people can agree on that.