Time, more or less, has come today

While most people around much of the world and in the United States, except for Arizona and Hawaii, got an extra hour of sleep last night, I was up at 5 a.m.  Or was it 4?

Scooter, my 16-year-old dachshund (wiener dog to most) had to, uh, dash for the backdoor to do some serious business in the backyard.

Scootie, lovable, funny and loyal, knew exactly what time it was, and it had nothing to do with a clock.

But what about us humans?

Let's face it, we're clock suckers.  We toy with time like we can move it around, spring it forward or slow it down.

This just in from news central:  We can't save daylight or, for the glass-half-empty folks, escape the darkness.  The tick, tick, tick marches on without wavering despite our feeble efforts to manipulate it through so-called Daylight Saving Time.

Somewhere, Father Time is laughing at us as we needle nitpick with botox, get facelifts (I had my body lowered instead.), pay for expensive facials and subject ourselves to liposuction.  By the way, why do they call it "liposuction?" Shouldn't it be called something like gutosuction?  Fat from all of those oversized helpings of food, snacks and ice cream (yum) is sucked out of our midsections in a hose "in one easy session," as one ad says.

Many of us do just the opposite to our lips; injecting fat for that puffed-up, pouty look.  Who came up with that idea, some mad scientist and a marketing guru slouching around some bar way after happy hour?

In Karl Stevens' brilliant cartoon in the Nov. 4 New Yorker magazine, a brooding, drinking man looking a lot like the late Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca," pleads not to Sam, his loyal piano-playing friend and sidekick, but to Alexa, our modern-day, high tech pretend companion devoid of feelings, to play "As Time Goes By."

Time does go by and we can't stop it or slow it down.  We can embrace it, though, and cherish every minute, good or bad.

Sure, a good time may occasionally be had by all, but it's not likely.  There's the three-minute egg and we've all had time on our hands from time to time.  Even though time flies, which is a waste of time, only time will tell if we've lost track of time.  Gee, look at the time. 

Jim Croce knew that you can't save time in a bottle, and, sorry Mick Jagger, but time is not really on our side.  My favorite cliche about time, though, comes not from one of the great philosophers like Karl Marx, but from the late cigar-chewing comedian Groucho Marx in the film Go West in 1940:  "Time wounds all heels."

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Yep, Scootie does.  It's time to go outside and do some more business.