'Not this time'

As I write this, it's 9:30 Saturday night. I've spent the last nine hours nursing a hangover yesterday's rum and vodka induced. My thoughts are spacey at best. I think I hear my name being called softly from Kirkwood Avenue, but that could be my imagination.\nHeadaches are to writers what STDs are to the porn industry. I'm on deadline for tomorrow, but I'd rather be drinking the pain away. I'd like nothing more than to finish the rest of this column in a storm of periods, hop over to Nick's and time warp to tomorrow. Unfortunately, I need all the time I can get.\nI've been told to use time better. I'd like nothing more. Man has the ability to create all the time he wants. After all, time doesn't really exist -- the concept just leapt out of man's imagination.\nTime is not absolute, either. It is inconsistent and can be manipulated. Time moves faster and slower depending on where you are in the universe and how fast you are going. Put a clock in the bottom of a tall tower and another perfectly synchronized clock at the top, and in about a thousand years the two will have diverged almost a whole minute. Time dilation. Crazy. \nOur species could have plucked any kind of time concept from the temporal abyss -- unfortunately, some Stone Age dunce decided Earth should function based on the arbitrary rotation of a big blue space ball floating around a big yellow space ball. \nThis created the standard "day" -- 24 hours long. Definitely not enough time. Either we need to invent (non-alcohol-induced) time travel or it's time for time to change. \nDays should be twice as long. No more finishing work with only a few hours of "me" time before bed. If you get done at 18 o'clock a.m. (6 p.m. arbitrary-spinning-ball time), there's another 14 hours of fun to be had.\nWith all that extra time on our hands, we could do all the little things the 24-hour time crunch usually prevents -- spending time with friends and family, reading more, playing croquet, practicing the Kama Sutra or -- if you're sans a friend to "train" with -- engaging in a little extra Web research.\nWait -- then again, half as many days means life lasts half as long. Most people would die before they turned 40. I don't want to croak just when I'm finally accepting my shattered adolescent dreams and male pattern baldness.\nI want to get old someday. I want to gradually relinquish all of my earthly responsibilities. I want grandkids. I want to be able to take a poop in the middle of a busy street on a blistering hot day and chalk it up to senility. I want to meet my maker with no regrets.\nSo on second thought, halve the days. Then we could all live until we're 170 years old. Going in to work twice as often would be a drag at first, but the prospect of retiring at 60 and spending 110 years on vacation would be well worth the inconvenience. \nThen again, unless I'm the next Jack LaLanne, I'll probably have one foot in the grave every day after I turn 90. Who would want to spend the better part of a century at the mercy of a wheelchair, false teeth, prescription drugs and a catheter? \nDarn it. This is going nowhere. All this thinking about time is time wasted.\nTo heck with it. I'm making some time for myself right now. Maybe I'll even see you out tonight …