LIGHT AND DARK HUMOR

Save Yourself, Daylight, We’re Busy Napping Here

My cats and I live in real-time world, not fake-time world

Who decided daylight needed saving anyway? Daylight seems perfectly capable of saving itself.

It can burn human skin bright red, melt ice cream, fry eggs on sidewalks, kill germs. Doesn’t sound like a wimpy little light-wave in need of rescue to me.

No matter how many clocks I change, or that are changed by the magical mysterious internet and computer lightwaves while we’re sleeping, the cats know it’s not — in Real Time World — an hour later.

They see absolutely no reason for their human pet — that would be me — to serve them their breakfast an hour later than their inner clock demands, simply because a thousand years ago some farmers thought they needed “an extra hour of daylight.” For reasons that no other human who doesn’t get up at break of day — to do Lord of Darkness knows what to cows and plants — understands. Even though they don’t know how to prove it, cats are certain crops don’t stop growing after sunset.

Cats know, on a deep, feline mitochondrial wavelength, that only the great Mouse Catcher in the Sky can create daylight. There are 24 hours in a day. Some are daylight and some are not. Real Time World. Simple.

In the twisting strings of their DNA, they understand that when the sun comes up, that’s daylight. When it goes down, it isn’t daylight. Duh. Cats are very intuitive that way.

Remember Einstein? “Matter can be neither created nor destroyed?” The cats say, “NEITHER CAN DAYLIGHT!” They can’t understand how humans don’t comprehend such an obvious fact of light and darkness and life.

Daylight Savings Time is like cutting off the bottom of an apron and sewing it to the top in hopes of making the apron longer. Not that cats wear aprons, nor have mine ever seen me in one — but it’s their metaphor, not mine. Go with it.

My cats, Trixie the Minx, and Quila — short for tequila — do not understand why I don’t live my life by the vagaries of sunlight, instead of by the dictatorship of mechanical devices. They don’t approve of Fake Time World.

Just as Einstein’s cat, Tiger, didn’t understand the limitations of his human pet, Albert the genius, mine don’t understand why I, Carol the humorous therapist, can’t put an end to Daylight Savings Time. Or why I don’t simply ignore it, like they do.

Einstein is quoted as saying to Tiger, who was saddened and depressed by rain, “I know what’s wrong, dear fellow, but I don’t know how to turn it off.”

To cats, a watch is just a toy, and a phone is a thing to paw out of our hands so we can pet them. Preferably an hour earlier. Or an hour later if they’re not done sleeping.

Trixie the Minx is my last hold out of the two. She refuses to exchange her Real Time World for “my” Fake Time World.

Please excuse me now, as I try to convince Trixie that it’s not playtime, as her circadian rhythm says it is, requiring her to bring me balls of paper, toys, and random receipts to throw for her to fetch and return to me, to be thrown again and again and again— but is rather an hour “later” and therefore time for bed.

The cat that taught me — the human — how to play fetch, is not easily convinced that I know best. That’s okay. Neither am I.