Reference Time on Dashboard Load (and adjust to time change)

Hi, I was wondering how I can reference the time picker on load for a dashboard and make sure that it's the right format. I am currently using two separate time pickers to reference two time periods for a table. The idea is to compare two different time periods and see the differences. What I would like to do is have the human readable date as the column name so if I had two different columns x and y, it would look like x (10-05-2018 to 10-20-2018) | y (11-05-2018 to 11-20-2018) . The current issue I'm running into is the fact that the time can be in a couple different formats, either epoch time or the relative notation (-1d@d, now()). I'm probably just lacking knowledge about something but I'd love it to set a token that is human readable right on dashboard load and then update that human-readable token to be used in the queries everytime the user changes the timepicker. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!