# Airbrush _(Howell Creek Radio address for March 16, 2013 -- )_ Daylight savings time hit us like a pillow in the face last Sunday morning. Now, not only do we get an extra hour of sun every day, but we also get a free use of an obvious scapegoat for the next week or so as a bonus. Whenever we feel tired, out of whack, or make poor spending decisions, we know where to lay the blame: Daylight Savings Time and that all-important lost hour of sleep, which for each and every one of us lies open like a wound, through which we are all hemorraging the last, vital pints of our motivation. Tolerance for Daylight Savings time does seem to correlate highly with how much cold winter darkness you've just come through when it hits (though of course all farmers despise it no matter where they live). One of the biggest differences I notice is in the evening drive home from work. In late fall, the day when DST _ends_ is the first day of the season when suddenly, everyone has to drive home in the dark. Traffic is always bad on that day. It's like collectively we're balking at having to put up with this ridiculous new darkness. Now, by the same token, suddenly it's still light out when we drive home from work. The roads have suddenly opened up, and there's room to breathe again. So I for one don't mind feeling sleepy for a bit. You're always a bit sleepy when you come out of hibernation anyways. * * * My boss and co-workers took me out for lunch on Thursday, my second-to-last day at the company after eight years. They asked me where I wanted to go. I remembered the last time I'd had a last day at work somewhere. It was in Michigan, working for East Lake Homes, a residential construction company. There was this nice buffet in town that we'd gone to, as a company, maybe once or twice, so I thought it'd be nice to go there. It turned out to be a horrible choice. It was a long drive away, for one thing -- maybe forty-five minutes? Gosh, I hope it wasn't that long. And it wasn't a cheap place either. We had a nice lunch, but the whole way home all I could think about was that my boss, whom I very much admired, had offered me this very generous farewell gift and I'd basically picked his pocket and wasted his whole Friday. This evil lapse of judgment has weighed so heavily on me that, more than once in the years since, I've actually sat down to write him a letter of apology; but I always gave up because of the sheer awkwardness involved. So, skipping ahead to the present-day situation, there was no way I was going to make the same mistake again. I picked a middle-of-the-pack restaurant about two minutes from the office. The last time I remember being at _this_ restaurant was the company Christmas dinner we held here five years ago, the one just after the stock market crash. We'd just had a great year and had no idea what lay ahead for us. Ten co-workers and their spouses or significant others sat at the long table just in front of the fireplace and joked and laughed and fed off the fat of the land. Of those faces, just three remained at today's lunch, and I'm on my way out the door. We talked about travel, weather, hiking, other local restaurants -- anything but the past. * * * Several years ago, during a nighttime drive up north to the cabin in the winter, I listened to an audiobook of a novel called _The Rule of Four_ by Ian Caldwell, and one bit stuck out to me. He wrote: > The thing that people like to say to victims is that time is a great healer. _The_ great healer is what they say, as if time were a doctor. But after six years of thinking on the subject, I have a different impression. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place...We're the paint in that analogy. Time is what disperses us. That resonated with me; as you look back on closed chapters in your life, one thing in particular stands out about the people in them: they're _dispersed_, geographically and in all other ways, too, not just from you but from each other. Everyone moves on. It's the ones who never move on that we always seem to pity the most. I don't know what it is that makes me so much more fixated on goodbyes than on hellos. I was telling Trixie the other day how the movies, TV shows and novels that I have the hardest time enjoying are the ones where things are going splendidly in the _middle_ of the story, instead of at the end where they should be. Because you just know it's too soon in the story arc for things to be _really_ OK; the bottom is going to have to drop out at some point, and all of this false success will be wiped out in a moment. In those cases I spend all my time worrying about when the shoe is going to drop, instead of sitting back and cozily observing the protagonists working their way out of the fixes they've got themselves into. Maybe it's that same tendency that drives me to look for sadness in goodbyes -- the comforting thought that maybe I really am suffering the common buffets and blows of the human experience rather than being ridiculously fortunate in finding a new job right when I did -- which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. Time disperses us, but there is no sadness in it, not really. With time, the sun comes up, the days get longer, the ground gets warmer, the recession ends, people spread out on the roads, start eating outside at lunch, and start driving up north to spend weekends at the lake again. Sure, we see a little less of each other. That's the whole point. * * * Howell Creek Radio is written and produced by me, Joel Dueck. Thanks for listening. It feels good to be back in our normal format again. I keep forgetting to mention: if you have an iTunes account, and you'd like this podcast to reach more people, there's a very simple way to help with that: just give the podcast a rating and a review on the iTunes store. Simply having a good number of reviews there helps immensely with reaching more listeners, just due to the way they run things over there. There will be a link for that on the website, or you can just search for us in the iTunes store. It'll take you about a minute and it'll help us out immensely. You can find the notes and music links for this episode on howellcreekradio.com, and get status updates @HowellCreek on Twitter, Facebook and _even_ Google+. The text of this episode is released under a Creative Commons license. Stay warm out there folks. Synopsis ------------ Radio address for Saturday, March 16, 2013. We all spread out a little bit more with the passing of time and the coming of extra daylight. Mention is made of the novel [_Rule of Four_][rof] by Ian Caldwell. I talk facetiously for a bit about how horrible Daylight Savings Time is, meaning to make the point, of course, that it isn't actually _that_ bad. All things considered, and taking one thing with another, I'm in favour of it for many of the same reasons given in [this blog post][dst]. But of course I can see how you might find it silly and annoying if you live further south where daylight isn't as precious. In connection with the theme of people spreading out over time, there's a short essay I wrote at my website, called [_Tables_][tjd]. I thought of adapting it for this podcast but ended up not having to; give it a read if you haven't already. We'll return to the normal cover art once the snow melts. Music is [_The Princess and the Puddings_][ppjh] by John Renbourn, [_Fading Glow_][fgjh] and [_Small Memory_][smjh] by Jon Hopkins. [rof]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385337124/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0385337124&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [dst]: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ [tjd]: http://jdueck.net/article/tables [ppjr]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016ULB2Y/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0016ULB2Y&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [fgjh]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003O6Q808/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003O6Q808&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [smjh]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0027J9Z26/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0027J9Z26&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20