This Weekend Is Your Chance To Make Drunken History

People are perpetually confused about daylight saving time (DST), which ends this weekend. Do we do it to reduce energy expenditure? Or is it for the farmers? Is it a prank? Or, as the popular children’s myth goes, do we “spring forward” an hour and “fall back” accordingly to appease our dark overlord, Vengeful Baby Jesus?

A recent poll revealed that 93% of Americans were “completely clueless” as to the point of DST, with the other 7% responding, “Time is meaningless, for every second of my life is pure agony.” For most people, it seems that DST is just mildly inconvenient, like filing your taxes or listening to a Bruno Mars song.

There was one year in college where I thought it might be of service to me. I went to school in Pennsylvania, where the bars inexplicably close at 2 a.m., right around the time you’re getting into the mood to lose a bar fight or piss on a jukebox. However, DST traditionally takes effect at 2 a.m. on Saturday night, rewinding the clock back to 1 a.m. In other words, as my friends and I eagerly misunderstood, we were headed for an extra hour of drinking!

“Yeah!” we exclaimed, awkwardly attempting to high-five, stymied by the fact that we had a beer in each hand. Gazing emptily at one another, our faces brutal masks of a most thundering confusion, we paused to wipe the drool streaming from our mouths with our shirtsleeves.

“Yeah!”

Alas, the bar did not honor DST hours, electing to close at its normal time. We considered filing a class-action lawsuit on the spot, but nobody had a pen and one guy had puked inside his own pants.

Farmers 1, Drunks 0.

Until this weekend, that is. This weekend, I present to you… Drunken Time Traveling. (And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call burying the lede.)

If you A) Attended college in the past 10 years and managed to remain cogent/ambulatory or B) Have an internet connection and what medical professionals refer to as a “dependency problem,” you might be familiar with Power Hours. If not, here’s a quick rundown: A Power Hour is when you take a shot of beer every minute for 60 minutes, while listening to a pre-made playlist of song clips (or, if you’re fancy, video clips). The signal for taking a shot is indicated by the playlist switching from one song to another (in other words, there is a 60 second snippet of each song, for a total of 60 shots). Depending on how big your shots are, by the end you will have consumed somewhere between five and seven beers.

It’s the ideal method for getting certifiably drunk in exactly one hour. It’s precise, quantifiable, almost mathematical. If Microsoft Excel wanted to get drunk, it would do a Power Hour – it’s the spreadsheet of drinking.

There’s something about the mix of socializing and music, the steady progression of intoxication, and the welcome distraction of a simple, repetitive task that makes the Power Hour an ideal pre-game for heading out to a bar, a house party, or your plac*e of employment. In a world of uncertainties, it’s something you can depend on.

As such, my recommendation to you for this weekend is as follows:

• I’m asking that for once in your sweaty, bibulous excuse for a life, you be sober at 12:59 a.m. on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. However, be ready with plenty of beer, a shot glass, and a Power Hour queued up. Other humans are optional.
• At 1:00 a.m., commence the Power Hour.
• As the clock strikes 2:00 a.m., take your last shot.
• Wait, psyche, it’s really 1:00 a.m. again. Except now you’re drunk. You’ve drunkenly time traveled, accomplishing instantly what usually takes you an hour.

**ATTN: Nobel Prize Foundation** Please contact me at tedpillow@gmail.com. For engraving purposes, please take note that my middle initial is V. and my favorite color is malachite.

Although you can get drunk quick even without the aid of DST, there is value here: enjoying something without giving anything up. Whenever I’m absolutely exhausted at work – in one of those moods where I’d gladly forsake half my salary for the chance to go home just this one freaking day and sleep for 10 hours – I ask myself, “If I could take a pill right now that would wipe away this exhaustion, would I?” The answer is always yes, but a surprisingly reluctant yes. The truth is that I don’t so much crave the benefits of sleep as much as I do the (in)action itself – I want the joy of sleeping. I want to close my eyes and embrace nothingness.

But what if the pill allowed you to step into an alternate universe, take an epic nap, and then resume your life like nothing ever happened? Sleep without sacrificing time…

It’s not the drunkenness I’m after, but the drinking. Ideally you could drink forever, constantly floating somewhere between sobriety and unconsciousness. This weekend is the closest you’re going to get – an hour of getting drunk that exists almost outside of time itself, a temporary escape pod from the slow crawl of progress.

The closest you’re gonna get until I invent the Leap Year Power Hour Marathon, that is.