Do you ever wonder why the clock has twenty-four hours, hours being sixty minutes, minutes being sixty seconds? What I love about the way we tell time is that it is so arbitrary and so irrational it could be a paradigm for the human mind. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours? Could we have picked up a more odd-ball scheme of weird combinations and divisions. What is so utterly irrational about the way we measure time is that a day isn’t really twenty-four hours–it’s always a couple of second off. What is totally irrational about our time keeping system is how we imbue meaning with different hours of the day, when we eat, start work, get off work, when we get up, when we go to bed. It’s after midnight now, and I should be in bed, but I’m not. I’m not the only one who stays up late. The clock has little influence over me at night, but during the day it sure has me chasing my tail. Today was the perfect example of having to hit certain marks in order to avoid total chaos. I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of a slave to the clock, which is a feeling I definitely don’t like. Midnight is the witching hour, but that is only so much bunkum and huey. The actually meaning of the clock is zero, nothing. The hours and minutes which we so carefully count and measure have no intrinsic value other than periods of time, and even that idea is a strange one–time moves forward? We create all of these linguistic conventions which drive our thinking in certain directions, but who’s to say that time doesn’t really move backwards? I have no idea if that last idea makes any sense at all. Time moves in a direction? Can we prove this? Is time a thing? Or a construct derived from the linguistic patterns of our verb system–past, present and future? Wouldn’t it be great if we could make time stand still while we finished a particularly problematic task? Or do we bend under our metaphors and acquiese to the idea that time flows like a river, and all rivers lead to the ocean, which is death. The passage of time marks our own mortality, one way or the other, as we get older, count hours, days, weeks, years–our system just gets nuttier, no saner–we get closer and closer to that mortal tomb where someone, someday, will drop our bones. For some time is the enemy–plastic surgery, exercise, diets, hormones–for others it is a close friend. The minute before midnight, the last minute of the day is like an abandoned, rusty old car that sits out on the highway of time, lost in its own solitude. No one ever plans lunch for this hour, dates are mostly over by this time, for better or worse, nobody plans a meeting for 11:59 pm. It might be a good name for a dog or horse, but I’m afraid you would end up shortening it to “Elev,” which is rather unsatisfying. Our time system is crazy. Maybe we just need to get over it. It is so ingrained, however, in our collective psyche that it is impossible to change it. The disruption caused by trying to reform our current crazy cat system of base psycho would be so great that the world would probably stop. Wrist watches would be useless, especially the round analogue variety which are so popular with my generation. People using digital watches can go do whatever they want because the digital watch is a bit of a paradox anyway. Why digitize an essentially nutty and arbitrary system at all? The best part of our time keeping system? No one ever questions the irrational complexity of the system in the first place. Let’s just make up a new system–one day, ten hours, each hour is a hundred new minutes, each minute a hundred new seconds. Make it fit the rotation of the earth the best you can. Now that is completely arbitrary, but it’s rational arbitrary and much easier to understand–no a.m. or p.m.