From My Time Zone, With Love

On the quiet joy of living in the wrong time zone — a letter from Galicia, Spain.

Photo by Oriel Mizrahi on Unsplash. My actual nightstand doesn’t have a clock. But it does have some empty bottles of La Milnueve and a utility knife.

When I smile and say ‘please, text or call anytime,’ here’s what I do not mean:

This is hereby an open invitation for you to wait several hours and then reply at 3:30 AM. When I'm asleep.

Now, this is a hypothetical example. I’m not so petty that I’d openly berate someone on the public internet who may have allegedly done this. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental and honestly? A suggestion to the contrary hurts my fee-fees. I’m a gentle, self-respecting indigo child. I would never, under any circumstances, resort to public shaming after having explained the time zone situation a mere several times, both before and after moving abroad.

I’m not unreasonable. If an event of biblical proportions occurred — an increasingly regular phenomenon — I’d be thrilled to be awakened during REM sleep, while dreaming of a Pure Land curiously devoid of inane bullshit, to deliver my knowledgeable commentary in a state of uncharacteristic manic delirium. I’d even make coffee.

How grand I’d feel if I got that call.

Is this Reese? Yeah, this is the President. President of the United States. And we won, by the way, in a landslide, everyone knows it except RADICAL LEFTISTS LIKE CRAZY NANCY PELOSI! Look, I have my people here in the War Room. Fantastic people, the best. They start wars. And they’re telling me, ‘Sir, we need Reese from Bebop Libre.’ Because we have a war. That’s why we have the War Room, they tell me. Very serious. A crisis. Some people say we caused it. I don't know, maybe we did. But that’s not important. What’s important is we’re on the precipice. The world, our nation, the whole thing. Not good. And we found you. We were surveilling blogs — very routine, totally legal — of people whose passports we’re going to revoke for political reasons, because we can do that now. And yours came up. Beautiful blog, really tremendous. And our AI… we have the best AI, by the way, it’s called ChatGPT, I came up with the idea for it — it said you’re the one, like Keanu Reeves from The Matrix. Have you seen that movie? Anyway, you’re uniquely qualified. Only person who can solve this. Except for me, but I'm working on a blog of my own. It's going to be huge. Better than yours, no offense.

Oh, to be recognized for my analytical skills by an individual of such unimpeachable credibility and moral character.

I’ve worked at different places where I’ve used such skills. Assignments included acting as a conduit between my employer and a consulting firm in exchange for Jimmy John’s sandwiches. One time, thirty minutes before I was to clock out one afternoon, I had also been assigned a dozen people I found most tender and amiable, based out of another country. Was I outsourcing my own job? This stirred ambivalence. Meanwhile, I modernized databases and their abstract interfaces. Amidst my usual coding duties, co-managing a “developer lab,” presentations, architecture reviews, and security audits, I entertained those around me with my trademark goblinry.

Why am I telling you this? A couple of reasons. One, I prefer injecting autobiographical notes into what ostensibly appears to be a joke post, because the only readers who deserve to know are the ones who tolerate my zest. Two, my work experience might indicate I know something about [drumroll] time zones. But it turns out one need not have ever been an overworked employee, coordinating with people around the country and world, to be vaguely aware of a global convention everyone uses every day. A vague awareness of when other people might be sleeping is achievable, I think, for the vast majority of the world population, but I’m not here to provide anything resembling help.

Instead, I shall address the peculiarity of my time zone here in Spain. It’s weird. Francisco Franco had something to do with it, because of course he did.

Since relocating to the northwestern autonomous community of Galicia, it’s been comparatively easier to reflect and think about time zones in a country with a government that’s not kidnapping and murdering as many people as possible. Au contraire, my host country has sent aid to the victims of genocide — rather than abruptly halting aid, dooming millions, and undoing a subsidized farming industry that voted for its own unlubricated assfucking. Now, I could comment on the implosion of a post-WWII international order that coincidentally favors Aleksandr Dugin’s notions in Foundations of Geopolitics, but that’s what everyone else is doing, whether they know it or not.

Time for your great-granpappy’s fascism.

Speaking of kidnapping, murder, and other activities preferred by xenophobia-certified theocratic nationalists supposedly beholden to the teachings of a refugee — who, to my recollection, advocated for something quite different than kicking your neighbors in the balls until they die — let’s segue to the past. When? Just before my antifa great-grandfathers deplorably fought in some world war for “freedom” and “rights.” Ha! Why would anyone want that? My ancestors were so unpatriotic and un-American. I’m truly ashamed. Like, can you imagine the sheer audacity of the idea that people who aren’t hurting anyone can enjoy their existence without being detained while conflicting commands are barked at them?

Anywho, in 1940, Franco’s regime aligned Spain’s time with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, adopting Central European Time (CET).

Today, that translates to Coordinated Universal Time plus one hour in winter (UTC+1), and UTC+2 in summer. For reference, Chicago is UTC-6 in winter, and UTC-5 in summer, but the ranges for the seasons are defined differently, just to add to your palpable confusion and fear. The time zones become even more annoying when you consider that Portugal is on Western European Time (WET), not Central — that’s UTC+0 in winter, and UTC+1 in summer.

World time zones map, in UTC, from Wikipedia. I will not be held liable for making your eyes bleed.

What does all of that mean? Honestly, I don’t know, lol.

You might be wondering, “Reese. Dude. You just spent the past five hours patronizing everyone by way of an unhinged folksy tirade with elements of a résumé, origin story, and call to action speech in a B movie. We internalized your entire disjointed traumatic technobabble dump for ‘I don’t know, lol?’”

Uhhhh... erm. Franco. Time zones. Portugal. Spain. Galicia!

[Rebooting...]

I live in Galicia, north of Portugal. Let’s say I take the train here in Santiago de Compostela south to Porto. As soon as I cross the border, you know what happens? I go back in time one hour. As soon as I come back from drinking all of the port vino from the Douro River Valley, I’ll be wasted like that one time with the rakia in Bulgaria — homemade by a man who fondly referred to himself in broken English as The Genius of Gintsi. I’ll be super messed up… and I’ll have travelled an hour in the future! No doubt I’ll botch a train switchover and run late with one million notifications on my phone from my wife.

“Blame Franco,” I’ll text her at 3:30 AM, to which she’ll assume I made a new friend whose parents are clearly Francoists.

Now that you know why the time in Madrid is the same as Paris, subscribe to Bebop Libre to show your appreciation for my world-class, concise pedagogy. Stay tuned for the next post about a phenomenon known as AMOC… it keeps our weather much more oceanic here in Galicia as compared to the rest of Spain. Well, until it collapses.