Bleep Day: An Ode of Celebration

 Today is, perhaps, one of my favorite religious holidays! (Notice the exclamation point, denoting the emotion often called "excitement." It is not an emotion that I visit often, so I wanted to point that out.) 

To repeat, today is, perhaps, one of my favorite religious holidays! (Again, exclamation, and this time a repetition. Wow. I must be stoked.) 

The reason I use the caveat "perhaps" is not because I doubt my own favoritisms of this day. It is because I am unaware of whether the PCUSA, NCC, RCC, DOC, AB, SBC, UMC, AG, PH, ECO, COE, COG, COGIC, or or any of the other acronymical religious bodies in the world have formally declared today to be a religious holiday. And, believe me, if the annual calendar we publish is any kind of witness, the Presbyterian Church (aforementioned PCUSA) seems anxious to grant every day some kind of religious significance.

Nonetheless, I think today - in its very essence - is a religious observation. Think of it, every four years, we dedicate a whole day to acknowledge that we don't really know what we're doing.

We use phrases like, "It's clear as day" and yet, what is a "day," exactly? We criticize people with the dismissive, "They don't know the time of day," and yet we can't find a way of making an annual calendar without having to add a once-in-every-four-years "day" to correct us and get us back on course. I'm convinced that the only reason we continue to arrogate the inane practice of "Daylight Savings Time" is to pretend that we are, somehow, the manufacturers of time itself, able to "change" it simply by pushing our clocks back or forth. Today is the antidote to such arrogance. For all of our pushing and pulling, for all of our so-called "Greenwich Mean Time," for all of our observatories and atomic clocks and nanosecond technologies - we have to dedicate a whole day, every four years, to correct ourselves. 

Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care? (I have long presumed that the answer to these two questions is "25 or 6 to 4" but there we go, making up numbers and pretending that they mean something again.) 

So, today, in solemn jubilation, I invite you to join me for a celebration of Bleep Day! It is a day when we correct the inadvertencies of life, the unintended consequences of our limited abilities, the 'oopsies', the 'dang its', and the 'whatevers!' Bring your slip ups, your oversights, and other raw human frailties and let's simply confess them together, laughing at how righteously we try to sally forth despite them, and and then let them slip away like the scapegoat from the village. 

Happy Bleep Day, you Bleepin' Bleepers