Occasional clock shifts present other challenges.
I am very likely in an embattled and sleepy-eyed minority here, but I really love the end of daylights savings in the fall. You can spend the entire summer enjoying long, lazy, well-lit evenings that dip off imperceptibly into twilight sometime long after supper, where you bike around without lights in white pants rolled up to mid-calf until at least 9:30 pm, at which point you realize the day is very nearly over and you haven’t accomplished shit except drinking a lot of summer cocktails with lime garnish and exploring a dozen city blocks worth of south Minneapolis commercial architecture. Yes!
So it feels right that as bike-and-white-pants season comes to an end, you trade all of that in for darkness, enforced solitute and a re-committment to the sort of unwavering Nordic work ethic that gave America everything from The Boat of Longing to “The Toolmaster of Brainerd.” Time to hit the studio! Time to up your Netflix queue to four-at-a-time!
Here in Minneapolis, the sun will set at 4:55pm today, and then continue to set two-and-a-half minutes earlier with every passing day until Hippie Holiday Winter Solstice. By the end of November, the sun will have set completely at 4:30 in the afternoon. The entire state will be plunged into darkness by the time I leave work, in other words.
I still find that tremendously exciting for some reason. It makes you feel as if you are privy to the secrets of the North, as if you have a shared kinship with Canadians and Swedes and Russians and Alaskans and Finns that everyone in the rest of the hemisphere doesn’t get as they go on with their subtropical sweating and stinking well into November.
I will be sick of of all of it by late March, of course, but I’ll have gotten a tremendous amount of work done, and will be ready to jump back into warmth and light with a sweaty, white-pantsed fury.
