Time Zoned Out

 

Last Sunday after I poured myself a cup of coffee, I sat down to wait for the drugs to take effect.

I remembered we were supposed to set the clocks ahead one hour last night to adjust for daylight savings time, which officially changed at three AM.

For no real reason other than synchronicity, I suddenly imagined a test question not unlike many we have struggled with over the years, except that it tests a different sort of knowledge than SAT’s or ASVAB’s.

Although the math is elementary, it is a very tricky question (unless you have ever lived in Terre Haute, for instance).

For what it is worth, here is the conundrum:

A man who lives in Terre Haute, Indiana decides to travel to Chicago for the weekend.

He leaves at five PM Eastern Standard time.

The trip from door to door takes approximately four hours. His watch reads Friday, nine PM when he arrives.

Because the “Illiana’” border is the dividing line between the Eastern and Central time zones, he notices that local time is an hour earlier than his watch indicates.

Because he will be there all weekend, he decides to set his watch to Central Standard time.

On Saturday, at eleven o’clock PM Central Standard time, he departs Chicago to go back to Terre Haute.

After the crosses the border, he remembers to re-set his watch ahead one hour to adjust back to Eastern Standard time.

On the way home he listens to WGN, Chicago.

At three AM Central Standard time, the announcer reminds his listeners to set their clocks ahead one hour, as this is the official  time for changes from Standard to Daylight savings.

When he left Terre Haute on Friday, he was on Eastern Standard time.

When he arrived in Chicago, he adjusted his watch back one hour to adjust for Central Standard time.

On the way home, at approximately one AM Central Standard time, he remembered to set his watch ahead one hour to adjust back to Eastern Standard time, but two hours later, he was reminded to adjust his time ahead one hour to adjust for Daylight Savings time, which he does.

(This is were it starts to get tricky.)

When he arrives back in Terre Haute, his watch now reads five AM.

He stops to get breakfast at a truck stop just off Highway 41, and discovers that the clock above the grill reads four AM.

He assumes that the establishment has just neglected to set the clock to adjust for Daylight Savings time, but he is wrong; the official time in Terre Haute is in fact four AM.

The announcer in Chicago correctly announced at three AM Central time to adjust for Daylight Savings.

Granted, at three AM Central Standard time, it was in fact two AM Eastern Standard time, but that factor would not affect the eventual outcome of the time in either zone.

(After all, most people set their clocks ahead  an hour before they go to bed, but even if you waited until you got up, the worst thing that would happen might be that you missed church, which may be why they do it on Sunday.)

This is what we know:

The return trip took four hours, just like it did on Friday.

He had correctly remembered to re-set his watch ahead one hour shortly after he re-entered the Eastern time zone, and later followed the radio announcer’s correct instructions to move the time ahead an hour to adjust for Daylight Savings time.

Why was he wrong?

What was his error?

What is that awful smell?

Now I realize that it is highly unlikely that even one hundred people might read this post, but if you just did, and can figure out this problem, please respond.

Thanks.

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

03/17/2017

Casa Nostra

Casa Nostra

I died in your arms that night,

and buried myself deeply

between your thighs

as

we fucked like it was our last night on earth

even though I’ve lived like

I thought

I would never die.

Our life together

has been a moveable feast

I call

Casa Nostra.

In a lifetime of searching

I’ve found

Meaning in Love

and Purpose

in knowing

and sharing

whatever

I can experience,

learn,

and feel,

wherever

it all shall lead me.

And when it is finished,

scatter my ashes

over

The Villa Chez Dreamland

but keep Love alive en Casa Nostra.

(Our House).

As we hang suspended in time and space

(to-get-her)

in that one thin moment

as we dance upon the razor’s edge

our mortality suddenly seems so much less tragic

as

our infinite intimate synchronicity

washes over us

reminding us once again

of all that which is eternal in each of us

as well as both of us.

In My Perfect World.

Casa Nostra.

En Casa Nostra

we give without regard to what we get

but we take

to serve as vessels

for the giving

from those we love

as well as those

who cannot give back

so as to give to

the Universe,

that place where

even miracles are mundane.

En Casa Nostra

we are protected

by our fearlessness

because

We may feel pain.

We may share pain,

but we do not fear

being hurt

because we trust

and we believe

that this too will

give us the strength

we need

to follow our hearts

to the Palace of Wisodm

and be prepared

to receive

Enlightenment,

Epiphany,

and boundless Joy.

En Casa Nostra

we are protected.

Our enemies may hurt us

but they probably

can’t kill us,

but if they kill us

they probably

won’t eat us

but if they eat us

they make us one with

those who would

because

they cannot destroy us.

En Casa Nostra

we take no prisoners,

preferring instead

to accept the surrender

of willing hostages

as extended family.

Casa Nostra;

a mansion with no walls

large enough to hold

a universe

in a house as intimate

as two bodies

attempting to occupy

one space

or

to become as

one beating heart.

One Mind.

A place where

you can see yourself

reflected in the eyes

of your eternal beloved

as we Bow to the Divine

in each other

and as adults,

nurture the eternal child

in each of us

as our children teach us

the importance

of all the things we forgot

as we grew up

en Casa Nostra.

It starts and ends with our

Gang of Three.

Merely a Series of Unfortunate Coincidences? The Illusion of Synchronicity…Sorry for the Inconvenience…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At approximately ten PM on July the 16^th, my brother was pronounced dead in an Emergency Room approximately one thousand miles from my current home. He was two years younger than I.

In less than six years he managed to turn a five-bedroom French Colonial mansion into a landfill, starting with the second floor, which he occupied while my parents were still alive.

Alcoholism and poor judgment based on bad legal advice has rendered the entire estate uninhabitable and facing a sea of legal encumbrances that would prevent me from even taking my parents’ wedding album or my own high school yearbooks from the premises.

In less than seven months’ time since my mother passed away, the kitchen, dining room and front parlor will now require a hazmat team to clean up the mess he left, which in some places was knee-deep.

Power and water services have been disconnected. There is two feet of standing water in the basement.

We were forced to stay at a local motel.

After waiting nearly a week, I was still unable to make arrangements to have his ashes scattered over the graves of my parents, and was forced to leave to return to work.

My parents’ Lutheran minister seems to (correctly) suspect that my wife and I are Pagans, and insisted on being present to say a few words and prayers over my brother’s remains, although he was busy at a conference in St. Louis at the time.

It is my understanding that he still is in possession of his ashes.

My father died two years ago, and my mother passed away on December 30^th of 2013. While we were there, I installed two solar powered carriage lamps to light their gravesite at night.

On the way home, I was struck by the question “Who will see the lights?”

It takes somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-nine hours to drive to my parents’ home…and the same amount of time to return.

The only resting or sleeping done in either direction consisted of short naps at designated rest areas or while Suki was driving and one meal not eaten in the vehicle enroute.

Several hours after my first day back at work, I was diagnosed at a local ER with a DVT, or Deep Vein Thrombosis in my left leg. It is potentially life-threatening.

A new miracle oral drug called Xarelto has allowed me to convalesce at home without the customary four-day hospital admittance with intravenous drug therapy and frequent blood tests.

My healthcare insurance provider does not cover this medication, which can cost as much as four hundred dollars per month on average. My employer is a prescription drug plan administrator.

The irony of the fact that many of the plans my employer administers for other providers are much more generous in terms of the coverage, or cost of co-payments and premiums than the policy provided to company employees is not lost in moments like these.

Fortunately, the manufacturer is providing it for free for the first month, and only five dollars per month for the next two months I will need to take it. It would also appear that my annual salary is low enough to qualify me for hardship benefits…really? Really?!?! …Yeah, really.

After a week of bed rest under the skillful care of both my wife Suki and the lovely and talented Anastasia, I am slowly returning to full health.

If you absolutely have to get sick, plan on doing it under the care of a nurse, or better still, two of them…(especially if they are close friends with each other)…the right nurses can make almost anything better, and these two could turn a disaster into a block party.

“Sic hoc ergo propter hoc” means literally “after this, therefore because of this”. It represents what is regarded in the scientific community as one of the commonest flaws of logic, which is to assume that mere juxtaposition somehow implies a relationship between two or more possibly unrelated events.

Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung, who initially identified an “acausal relationship” between the simultaneous occurrence of two or more unrelated psycho-physic phenomena.

Jung and his associates later noted, however that our ability to perceive meaning, portent or omen in the simultaneity of the events allows us to “assimilate unconscious materials”, thereby encouraging us to experience a renewal and vitalization of our unilateral personality. In this way, our sentience enables us to construct order out of chaos.

This is a process well-known to both the Chinese (I Ching, Consulting the Oracle of Changes) and the aboriginal peoples of what is now called North America, whose shamanistic traditions divined meaning and direction from occurrences within the natural world.

As unfortunate and sad as the recent series of events are, they are hopefully merely a series of unfortunate coincidences. They were replete with enough foreshadowing and ominous portents to fill up any novel by Nathanial Hawthorne or Theodore Dreiser.

Were I so inclined, I could spend the rest of my life waiting for “the other shoe to drop” and in the process miss whatever joyous opportunities await, barring superstition and fear.

On the other hand, those of us who are inclined to believe in the in the interconnection between the finite physical world and the more elusive and occult ethereal worlds do have the opportunity to reflect, if you will, on the interconnection of all things, even in the midst of random chaos.

I have missed you all these past four weeks…although it would appear that nobody noticed I was gone….

As my heath returns, I will be doing my best to make up for lost time, despite the fact that the expression is in itself an oxymoron.

I have been told that some of my more charming attributes are my irreverence, glib facetiousness, and affectionate preoccupation with anarchy and the self-determinism of lawless disregard for other people’s rules, and this trip was no exception. It was in part a journey into the heartland of America (or the Heart of Darkness), as well as an opportunity to skylark in the midst of loss and sorrow.

Somewhere between the extremes, illumination awaits us.

You be the judge.

As soon as I consult my advisors as to how to tell the story without subjecting myself to incarceration for any number of possible felonies that might be construed as to having been committed, I will be sure to share it with you.

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.