THE PRECISE MOMENT I BECAME A FOOL

Now, I have always been a voracious reader. Conversely, the number of books I would devour in a single week of my high school career rose in direct proportion to the new, mean low of pathetic sadness my social life could attain at any given moment. We'll call this: abject sorrow (a,s).
Try to understand; I had been enrolled in a boarding school located in the heart of Amish country just east of Buttfuck, Egypt, where I would languish for the next eight years until I graduated high school. The intricate mysteries of the opposite sex were like a Yiddish newspaper held up to a mirror, and I was hanging by my feet, desperately scanning the want ads. We'll name this one: poor bastard (pb).
Mathematically speaking, after first discounting variables like x = the middle-aged librarian who had a crush on me, which I'll name (Eew!), and y = the days the library was closed, one could plot such datum on a graph and note the following trends immediately: My visits to the library generated sudden peaks and vicious spikes in direct correlation to the dates on which social functions like Christmas dances and spring formals occurred. The pointed, sharp facts of the matter could, no doubt, fly suddenly from the surface of the spreadsheet of their own power, stab the unwary viewer repeatedly and painfully through the heart and ocular cavities! It did it to me, anyway, when I finally understood the Sad State of Affairs (SSA) I was in.
But one afternoon in the late Nineteen Eighties, I read something that grabbed my attention and shook it like an epileptic crackhead in the electric chair.
"There have been a handful of times in human history when the calendar year, month, and day falls neatly in step with the hour, minute, and second of the clock in a pattern, either rising or falling."
So, I tried to put one such date together, and came up with 1987, June 5th, 4:32:10. Yeah, I know I was fudging it a little by shaving off the 0 in 10. Sue me; it's a placeholder.
Simply by glancing at the numbers, you, the reader, can see that the vast majority of these strange occurrences will take place either in the George Jetson future, or will haven taken place in the far-flung past. Well, you can't research the future as easy as you can figure out the past, right? Nice try. The idealistic marriage of truth and accurate historical record keeping has long since been annulled by the "Powers That Be" and the price of tea in China.
The Julian calendar, introduced in 46 B.C., fell in the Roman year 709, but it was off by eleven minutes a year. So, by 1582, there was an accumulated error of ten days. That year, Pope Gregory the XIII decreed that the day following October 4th would be called October 15th, which meant no one was born in France, Italy, Spain, or Portugal for ten whole days. (Had this phenomenon been a naturally occurring one, it might have gone a long way toward signaling the end of the world. Though, many argued that event was supposed to happen on the 6th of June, 1666, 6 P.M., neatly sandwiched between The Great Fire of London and the Bubonic Plague.)
Anyway, the British didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752 when they lopped eleven days off of September, and, since this also applied to the American Colonies, again, no one was born from the 3rd of September to the 13th of September of that year-- except among certain indigenous races that had dwelled there in perfect harmony for thousands of years. New Year's Day was moved from the 25th of March to the 1st of January, which meant that March 24, 1750 was immediately followed by March 25, 1751. Which, if you're still with me, throws our present calendar so far the fuck off course, it's a wonder we weren't all born tomorrow. Still, it's the calendar followed by most in our Golden Ruled World.
Being an awkward geek with an even-numbered social life (-2) and an odd social life (-3), I had nothing better to do than to wonder if this glitch in the program really meant something. We'll call this: loser (l).
Could it, for instance, be translated into a set of coordinates using latitude and longitude? Out came the pencil and atlas; 109 degrees, 8 minutes, and 7 seconds north, by 65 degrees, 43 minutes, and 21 seconds west would place you,.. 240 miles northwest of Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Big fucking deal, right? Yeah.
Since the inverse of 12 degrees, 34 minutes, 56 seconds north, by 7 degrees, 8 minutes, and 9 seconds couldn’t physically exist (the degrees latitude must be a number greater than -60, and less than 78), I really thought I had something; a physical intersection of space and time. But I still didn't understand what I was looking at. I wondered how many other dates like this it would take to begin drawing lines around the globe, looking for patterns, pictures, or the blueprints for some great Aztec "sky chariot", described in the arcs between cities.
Eventually, I pried my nose out of a book long enough to take a break from the problem, and when I did, I couldn't help but notice the sparkling eyes and (insert "puppies in a burlap sack" analogy here) of the fairer sex which were falling from the sky like Laotian tree snakes in tight jeans. My laser-like concentration faltered.
"They're called girls," said one of the guys who was scoring like the goalie had been shot dead, "...and they don't like guys who think about dumb stuff. You gotta be cool."
And so, notions of secret codes and calendar conspiracies were placed on the back burner in favor of learning how to light a Zippo by snapping my fingers in its vicinity, and I blew the funds I had saved to construct a giant light-amplifying solar cannon out of wood, mirrors, magnifying lenses, and a camera motor, for some brand name duds that I hated. But I thought it might stack the odds in my favor, and I set off to conduct what I hoped would be a series of hands-on (but usually wound up being hands-off) biology experiments, which never quite measured up to the anthropological study in crazed, sweaty, primitive urges I envisioned they would be. I can only guess at the equally sorrowful conclusions reached by my numerous willing lab partners, and for this I apologize profusely.
For the rest of my life, I would awake in the night with an itch in my head, and the terrible sensation that someone, or something had been screaming at me as I slept, mouthing secret words I would never quite be able to understand, as if they were being shouted from a great distance.
Like Russia, for instance.