On the Sun’s Malignant Dominion and the Eternal Crime of “Saving” Its Poisonous Light

Listen, you clock-fuckers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, you bipartisan time-diddlers in your sun-blasted chambers, and yes, even you, Mr. President, with your Truth Social missives glowing like some radioactive dial at 2 a.m. – what in the name of all that is decent and merciful and properly dark are you people doing?  Making Daylight Saving Time permanent?  Folding this Sunshine Protection Act abomination into some larger motorized vehicular modernization whatever-the-hell, passing it 48-1 like it’s a forgone conclusion, a “very nice WIN” for the Party, as if the very rotation of the Earth were just another campaign plank to be gerrymandered into submission?  This is not governance.  This is a declaration of war against the very concept of Standard Time, that noble, unpretentious, standard baseline of human existence, and by extension, a war against those of us who understand the sun for what it is: a vast, seething, hydrogen-fusing tumor hanging malevolently in the sky, pumping out carcinogenic rays like some deranged chemotherapy machine gone rogue.

I mean, Christ, the sheer ontological audacity of it.  The sun.  That disgusting ball of fire.  That yellow-eyed cyclops leering down at us, blistering skin, bleaching retinas, forcing every living thing into this grotesque diurnal performance of photosynthesis and sweat and melanoma risk assessments.  Some of us – perhaps more than you sun-worshipping optimists care to admit – hate the thing.  We hate its presumptuous brightness, its relentless optimism, its way of turning every morning into a forced march toward productivity and Vitamin D propaganda.  Give us the gray, the gloaming, the honest shadows where thoughts actually coagulate without being vaporized by that infernal orb.  Permanent Daylight Saving Time isn’t progress; it’s capitulation to the sun’s tyranny, an extension of its empire into the very hours that should, by rights, belong to the quiet, the cool, the standard.

We tried this before, you know.  Back in the Nixon era – yes, that one, the one with the tapes and the paranoia and the whole imperial presidency vibe – I was there when they rammed permanent DST through during the energy-crisis panic of ’74.  Thought it would save fuel or some such utilitarian fairy tale.  The results?  Immediate, visceral, and catastrophic enough that Congress slunk back after a single miserable year and restored Standard Time like a drunk apologizing for last night’s bender.  Kids trudging to school in pitch dark.  Morning commutes through existential murk.  The body clocks of an entire nation rebelling against this artificial stretching of the daylight tether.  It was a clown show of circadian disruption, and here we are again, decades later, with the president thundering about “longer, brighter Day” and “who can be against that?” as if the collective American psyche hasn’t already been tenderized enough by modernity’s various outrages.  Who can be against that?  ME!  The millions of us who are nocturnal by preference or profession or basic biochemistry.  The ones genuflect before the cult of the Great Flaming Orb.  The ones who read the actual studies – heart attacks, strokes, depression spikes every time you jack the clock forward, because human bodies aren’t iPhones you can just update overnight.

The vocabulary alone should set off every internal alarm: Sunshine Protection Act.  Protection?  From what, exactly – the restorative balm of actual night?  From the stars, those cold indifferent pinpricks that remind us we’re insignificant specks in a void, not the center of some diurnal diorama?  This isn’t protection; it’s aesthetic surrender.  It’s the same mindset that brightens every goddamn screen to maximum luminosity and calls it “user-friendly.”  Shee-it.  Meanwhile, the costs they wail about – renting cranes for tower clocks, the twice-yearly ritual of temporal adjustment – are mere accounting theater.  Yet here comes the political class, strutting around like carnival barkers selling irradiated snake oil, babbling about “saving daylight” as if daylight were some endangered species we need to trap and breed in captivity.  And the argument – if you can call it that – is that changing clocks twice a year is too expensive because some municipalities have clock towers and need “heavy equipment” to adjust them.  This is the level of discourse now: we must reengineer the circadian rhythms of 330 million people because a few towns don’t want to rent a goddamn cherry picker.  The real cost is neurological, spiritual, existential: the slow erosion of that liminal space where human consciousness does its best work, in the proper dark, under Standard Time’s merciful umbrella.

Look, the push is bipartisan, they say.  Thirty-two cosponsors here, eighteen there, Senator Rick Scott riding shotgun.  Of course it is.  Sunlight is the ultimate centrist issue – vapid, cheerful, and impossible to oppose without sounds like a basement-dwelling ghoul.  But some of us are basement-dwelling ghouls, metaphorically speaking, and proud of it.  We like our evenings arriving at a reasonable hour, our mornings shrouded enough to allow for a proper existential sulk before the caffeine kicks in.  Permanent DST means dinner at what feels like lunchtime and children waiting for buses under streetlights that might as well be interrogations.  It is, in the end, another victory for the extroverted, the tanned, the morning people – the sort who bound out of bed chirping while the rest of us plot their quiet undoing over black coffee in dim rooms.

Powers that be, hear this: Make Standard Time permanent.  It’s standard, for fuck’s sake.  The default setting.  The honest clock.  Leave the sun to its own devices and stop extending its jurisdiction by legislative fiat.  The carcinogenic ball of fire doesn’t need your help; it’s doing quite enough damage already, thank you.  And if you insist on this path, well – expect more from the shadows.  Expect letters written at 3 a.m. under proper darkness.  Expect the unrepentant night owls to start organizing in that beautiful, disorienting gloom you seem determined to legislate away.  Daylight is not a moral good…it is a cosmic hazard that ages your skin like a blowtorch and makes half the country miserable for eight months straight.

Make Standard Time permanent.  Make the night great again.

The sun is disgusting.  Long live the Standard.

N.P.: “Ring of Fire” – Des Rocs