It has a name: the alarm clock. It’s the worst way of getting up. A taskmaster with a whip, the alarm clock destroys the natural rhythm of waking and cracks open the world in a most unsavory way. I surrender to its first note and for the rest of the day I’m a slave of time.
Sometimes my rebellious nature makes me turn the damn thing off and goes back to bed. Under the cover I drift back to sleep (at least half consciously). With enough time lapsed I can pretend that I have a will of my own before swinging my feet down onto the floor. Of course then everything is approached with a great rush.
I remember in college the alarm clocks went off at the dorm rooms starting at 5:30 in the morning. The cacophony of wake-me-ups wound up our little robotic brains as we went here and there and worked till we dropped, until the next morning.
Couldn’t agree more heartfully. It’s one more way the machines have taken us over. Not only by being the guilty mechanism that does the ringing, but also by being the all-day taskmasters that keep us keeping up with them. I protest! Of course, that’s easier now that I’m retired. Now, o marvelousness!, I do NOT set an alarm to wake up. Yes, the clock and the calendar run our lives. I wonder how it was before we had clocks. Did we sit around and stare at the sky? Did we wander around in circles? Did we say things like “I’ll meet you when the moon is full”? Or, “I’ll be there at the end of the morning, when the sun makes no shadow”? Did we sleep a lot in the winter when the days were short and the nights were long? If we did, did we realize that we were sleeping longer in the winter? How was it for the people living on the equator? Are the days and nights all the same length there? Never having been there and nobody ever talking about living on the Equator like they talk about living in Alaska in the summers when the nights get real short and the winters when they get real long and I wonder how they sleep then… So many questions, such a big world.
I have a spoof clock that my daughter brought back from Africa. It has a red second hand that keeps going around and around in presumably one-second jerks. I guess the minute or hour hands move but I never paid any attention to that, perhaps because the clock has no numbers but in their place it its face just says around the edges: “NOW NOW WHENEVER SHORTLY EVENTUALLY”; in the middle: “AFRICA TIME JUST NOW”.
It’s made out of the bottom of a shallow tin can, with some nuts and bolts for two legs and for the center mechanism (to turn the hands) attached to a little black box inside the can, with a little mechanical dial on it to turn the hands! plus a little port below it for a 1-1/2” Duracell battery that sits in it, keeping track of Africa time.
P.S. I love that painting or whatever you call it — the depiction of a sleeping person under the blankets in the bed under the moon in the window or is it a painting of a moon in a window? Curtains open, maybe blowing.