Daylight saving time brings new dangers

There is a certain aroma in the air during these fall holidays and celebrations. No, it wouldn’t be apple cider and gingersnaps. Nor is it the tantalizing smell of  apple pie with cinnamon baking in the oven. No, it’s more like the fetid odor of the gigantic, enormous, but you had to buy it pumpkin rotting on your front lawn.

At $80 a pound, it now has become a pulsating mass of protoplasm sending off disgusting gases into the atmosphere to the point where your property has been declared a no-fly zone; all flights are diverted to airports in the next county or state.  The good thing is that you are no longer in danger of the government ever considering your property in any kind of eminent domain action.

The other good news is that it is daylight saving time. It gets dark early enough that no one will notice this disgusting blob and hopefully with enough time and coaxing it will slither off onto your neighbor’s property.

I used to dread daylight saving time, which means turning the clocks backward, just for that very reason of night falling so quickly. It was like a black curtain descending. But as I got older, I realized I am in a perpetual state of daylight saving time year round.

Without my glasses and the sunlight, people are merely blobs and shadows. Well, let’s face it, even with glasses. I’ve often been caught speaking during my break at work to inanimate objects such as the coat rack, which is especially unnerving since I’ve very carefully outlined my solutions to such serious problems as how to fix the water cooler and the age-old question, is it  really worth it to use sprinkles on frozen yogurt?

Fortunately, I work at a newspaper where no one pays attention to my opinions anyway and people often hold meetings with inanimate objects. But this is a serious problem, because under normal circumstances I can’t tell the difference between someone with red hair and a building on fire a hundred yards away. However, with the advent of daylight saving time, my calls to 9-1-1 to report five-alarm fires have been the highlight of the firefighters’ office holiday party; the tapes get replayed over and over again.

I know the dispatchers have me on speaker phone because they have to hold their sides with both hands so they don’t bust their appendixes just because they can’t force the laughter out of their bodies fast enough.

It’s not that I have difficult vision, but with night blindness, peripheral vision loss, strabismus, cataracts, gigantic film that has covered my lenses and an eyelid that never blinks, you can understand my concern. The darkness only highlights these conditions. Especially difficult for me are the brake lights in front of my car when I am driving on Route One. This also occurs in my driveway, when the garage becomes a well-lit moving truck, but mostly it occurs on the highway.

To compound that, any structure a hundred yards off the highway, like a barn or silo, looks as if it is in front of me, so I am perpetually in a 3-D nightmare, slamming on brakes and jerking the steering wheel this way and that.

With the holiday season coming up, I have to shop at night also. Naturally, my car is a black SUV, the poster car for this area. Trying to find it in a parking lot is a little like looking up a government office in a phone book.

And these cars love hiding behind other black cars.  Daylight savings time does that to them; they think they can get away with anything! Sorry, it’s just that trying to get into a stranger’s car can fray your nerves, no matter how understanding the police become.

So, turn those clocks back and enjoy the new black; you’ll look beautiful.