I’m big on traditions, and one annual tradition I have is grousing about daylight saving time.

I hate it. There’s really no other way to put it: I profoundly, passionately, palpably, gutturally, argumentatively, aggressively, gratuitously, viscerally and verbosely hate it.

I’m sorry to unleash such a torrent of adverbs upon you, but it simply makes no sense to me to monkey with the clock twice a year for no good reason. We “fall” back in November and “spring” forward in March – this weekend in fact – but we’re not actually saving time. We don’t get to say, “Hey, today’s a 25-hour day, whooo!”

No, daylight saving time simply shifts the time, so why don’t we call it daylight shifting time? I think daylight saving time was actually a marketing ploy in the first place to help the idea stick. If you tell people they’re saving something they’re prone to think it’s swell. If you’re simply shifting something, well, what’s the point, you know?

That’s my feeling: What good is it? Supposedly it gives us another hour of daylight to play with after work but that depends on who you’re talking to.

I, for instance, have become a long distance commuter in recent years, meaning I leave early and get home late. For about half the year, then, I drive to and from work in darkness. And since I work indoors, I’m essentially a vampire for five months, never seeing daylight. It can wear on a guy.

But then! Then March arrives and there’s a sliver of dawn on the horizon and I suddenly realize that, holy cow, I can see beyond the cone of my headlights, and I get all excited for the coming of spring and the renewal of life, and then the time changes, and I plunge back into darkness, once more to seek out the living and dine on their blood.

That’s depressing enough. But daylight saving time isn’t done with me yet. It not only steals spring from me for another month (that’s about how long it’ll take before I’m driving in the light once again), it makes me groggy and irritable for a week because my body doesn’t know what time it is.

Monday this will be me: I’ll go to bed at 10, expecting to get up at 5:30, as usual. But it’ll really be 6:30 – unless I set the alarm for 4:30, which, I’m sorry, just ain’t happening – meaning – ack! – I’m already behind an hour on a week that hasn’t even started yet! Thanks a lot, William Willett.

Willet, I recently learned, is the British twit considered to be the godfather of the daylight saving time idea. He was an early riser who enjoyed dawn horseback rides and figured everyone else should, too.

So he wrote a pamphlet called “The Waste of Daylight” and began pestering Parliament to authorize a time change. They eventually did but Willett died of influenza before it was enacted.

A death has seldom been so deserved.

Told you it made me grouchy.