On Turning Back Your Clock as Daylight Saving Time Ends

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Most people like the extra hour of sleep. Others relish having an extra hour of life to do one thing or another.

Turning back the clock to end daylight saving time has intrigued me ever since I was a young boy growing up in the small western New York hamlet of Niagara Falls. (It's actually not a hamlet.)

As a 38-year-old, I'll be as fascinated by it this weekend as I have ever been.

When I was a youngster, unable to stay up until two in the morning, I always thought something mysterious took place at 2:00 a.m. I just couldn't wrap my head around the notion of the one-o-clock hour going off twice. I used to say to my mother exactly what I say to my wife 30 years later: So it's one in the morning, but right when it hits two, it becomes one again. At some point in my pre-teen life, I stayed up until two, eyes focused on the television screen, to see if it would do a funky dance or self-destruct. Now, I'm enamored by the on-screen guide merely repeating the one-o-clock hour, but with a fresh slate of programming or infomercials. A year out of high school, I worked as a DJ at Q102, the Best Hits Without the Hard Rock and Rap, where, to avoid the obvious clash, I went by "Rich Pendola." I did weekend overnights. One year, on the night we had to turn back the clock, my program director, Rob Lucas, let me pick the music for that extra hour. The playlist went out the window, an oddity for what was, even back in 1993 or thereabouts, an over-programmed adult-contemporary radio station. The year after that, I spent the night we turn the clocks back as an underage drinker in the Allentown section of Buffalo at a famous watering hole called "Mulligan's Brick Bar." The place still exists, complete with a huge poster of Springsteen's The River album cover hanging on the wall. When the clock strikes two in Buffalo on this night, things get wild. At the Brick Bar, shots of Mad Dog 20/20 flowed for an extra hour till last call at four, which, because of the time switch was really five. Now, in my relative old age, I don't care much about the extra hour of sleep. I just like that it gets lighter faster and earlier on in the fall. It's actually light out when I wake up in the morning. Maybe it's my West Coast smug (I live in Santa Monica, just west of Los Angeles), but I relish darkness in the early evening hours. On LA's Westside, much like in my previous stomping grounds of San Francisco, there's just this cozy, cool feel that promotes a festive holiday mood. Of course, if you live on the East Coast or another place that experiences traditional winter you might go so far as feeling depressed when it's time to fall back. You prefer springing ahead, a sure sign that warmer weather is on the way. To each his/her own. In any event, just like there's no excuse for being an hour late to work or school on the Monday morning after we spring ahead, you'll look just as bad if you show up an hour too soon. With that in mind, whether you like or not, be sure to turn your clock back Sunday morning at 2:00 a.m. Follow @rocco_thestreet --Written by Rocco Pendola in New York City