A weekend (that is to say Wednesday and Thursday) in Las Vegas, the service sector has turned our natural schedules on end. Circadian Rhythms are supposed to go from dark to light. The religious burden has determined that we have a Sabbath day off (even if there is some disagreement as to what day that should be.) The worker’s unions have fought for two days off a week, the second being conveniently paired with the Sabbath. The Victorian-like drive to leisure that infested the 1950s stretched the service industry by demanding the constant sating of their need for meat and gasoline. Neither God nor the Union could stop Commerce. Perhaps that is unfair. With a burgeoning population, it would be impossible to have everyone heading for work at the same time, even if people used public transportation and we killed anyone with an SUV. I have kept a mostly nocturnal lifestyle since graduating high school. I imagine I use more electricity that way, but I hope it’s nominal. In California, it is difficult to live at night. The bars close at 2 am. If one works a graveyard shift, you are forced to change the normal patterns of life, i.e. going for a beer after work or taking your children to the park. Here in Las Vegas, there is very little that requires day time hours. That makes keeping one’s cycle easier, but I am starting to wonder if God and Union had something going, that people have a need to wake with the sun and sleep with the stars. I wonder if the calendar is arbitrary. If everyone agreed to change what day Friday fell on, would it change anything? Do Saturday and Sunday have any importance beyond designations? On a side note, people here say “my Friday” before their two days off. It really bothers me when their “Friday” happens to be Tuesday. It’s not Friday, it’s Tuesday. The fact that you have the next day off doesn’t change the calendar. That rhythm is so fixed in people’s minds that co-opt language to make it fit their shallow world.
Anyway, speaking of rhythm, I need another beer. BBL.