Until the After: Day 298 (or Alt 9th,Zer0)

Dusting off the 8 days week Alternate universe calendar I’ve been working on since my days managing Fort Argle Bargle I was able to fine-tune a working year ZERO. Change your concept of time (today is 1/9/0) and you change a lot. I was able to preemptively make 2020 cease to exist days before the traditional calendar said its New Years’.  My Zero year is 9 months long. Each month is 40 days long. There are no named weekdays so there are never any Mondays. N0 weekdays have names, just two binary states which alternate every 4 days. The first state is “work” (usually dawn to dusk because that point of reference on this planet is a real thing) and the second state is “wander” or pretty much line of sight farting around.

So far so good.

But wait? Aren’t there 365 days in a year? My simple solution to troublesome math is a 5-6 day period at the end of the year called “Overwinter”. What do you do with the period at the end of a year? Stay in bed. Sleep, read, fast, pray, whatever it takes to clear your physical and emotional slush as you reset for the coming year. Instead of being a depressing letdown time of the year after traditional anxiety-producing holidays, it’s a respite to be anticipated for the coming months with great joy. It’s the Friday of all Fridays and it’s several days long. Whoopee!

The other day I explained all this to my friend Hope over a rousing game of Skipbo. She looked dead at me and said “It sure must be an interesting place in there.” She’s the only person who could say that and not be insulting. Change your mind, change everything. The discussion came up, just then, after I’d plotted the whole new calendar out over morning coffee because that afternoon she pulled out her bullet journal and wanted to show me her first attempt at making her own calendar. She confessed she’d accidentally marked out 8 days instead of 7. “Brilliant! It works perfectly for the calendar I drew up this morning.” I told her, “My weeks are 8 days long.” Great minds don’t actually think alike in our case, they think differently about similar things.

This was a good time to tell Hope she’d accidentally nailed the last gift she bought me. It was a journal made out of an encyclopedia. I hadn’t told her I’d started reading the Funk and Wagnalls last summer (Ma bought a new one for 99 cents every other shopping trip until she had the whole set) and what was really amazing was the journal opens to a printed page about the Balkans. The first entry was a picture of a place in Bulgaria. The Balkans!

“Did you look inside when you picked that out?” I asked her.

“I had 3 choices and that one was the least silly,” she told me.

Well, she gets me when she doesn’t even know she gets me.

This was a good thing.

She’d had a rough end of the year. On the birthday of the brother that died in November she goes out to feed the horses and her new pony was severely hurt. She and Ryan spent the last day of the year with the vet and it looked like curtains for the fuzzy little companion to the other horses. It would have been prohibitively expensive and a long shot that the critter would make it. A nakedly cruel end to 2020 so eff that year! The good news is someone stepped in and took over the creature who had better resources and know-how so little sweetness didn’t get put down but Hope still literally lost her pony on the last day of that awful year, as if a brother and some other family members haven’t been enough already. Seriously, put up with all the crummy things of that whole year and then the pony too. That’s twisted.

People have asked why anyone thinks just changing to a new year changes anything. Fair enough, it really doesn’t. Divorcing the calendar and getting a temporal name change, even a new address? Why the hell not?