I saw Depeche Mode in Indianapolis years ago, the last show of their Songs of Faith and Devotion Tour. The concert ended with “A Question of Time,” a song as fantastic as it is pervy. David Gahan dove off the stage to end the show, broke some ribs, and I’m not sure if they’ve ever returned. Still, a song like this is worth a bruise or two. Listen and see:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/65977475″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]There was little glamor growing up in Indianapolis back when it was, albeit the largest American city not on a major waterway, known as Nap Town, and India-no-place. My obsession with place and identity is rooted in my rootless lack of identity with the place of my birth. But, the single point of pride I had in my hometown, far beyond my love for the Indy 500, was that Indianapolis didn’t participate in Daylight Savings Time.
Twice a year I would mark the idiocy of these clock changes—forward, back, forward, back—by happily doing nothing. Long after I moved away, Indianapolis went along with the spirit of the age and adopted daylight savings, but my antipathy for the practice has never abated (last year my protest was not resetting my watch and habituating myself to living in real and fake time). So it pleased me to be the 14,287th soul to sign this White House petition to abolish DST. Go and do likewise if you share my respect for time’s mystery and common sense.