The Oh-Shit-I-Need-To-Update Update

While rummaging through a notebook, I found this essay that I must have written a few months ago. Was going to dust if off and re-work it but I think it works pretty well on its own. Not the funniest thing I've ever written, but, hey, they can't all be winners.

Don't worry, I'm working on some more Embarrassing Tales of Rory's Shoulda-Been-Aborted Life. But for now hope this tides you over. Enjoy!

To study the nature of and purpose of alarm clocks is to study the nature of good and evil.

For starters, in the beginning, way back when when people were shitting their pants over basic machines like the Pulley and the Walkman, we have the inventor of the alarm clock. Let's call him Johnny Punctual. Under the assumption he was doing humanity a favor, Punctual creates a device, a relatively simple one, that allows its user to set it at any time said person chooses to. Which is great except that everyone does not choose when they wish to arise. Having interrupted their natural biorhythm and completely corrupting the accepted idea of REM Cycles, humans must now guess when they thing they will want to arise. They presuppose that since the sun rises, so will the body. This is a fallacious argument. However, since the alarm clock tells them it is time to wake up, they have no choice but to stumble, bleary-eyed and cranky, out of their warm position and to the nearest hot water and/or caffeine dispenser.

Recognizing the utter lack of choice and sheer idiocy of trying to guess when you will want to awake, along comes a man. Let's call him William Lethargy. Lethargy sees that the world has become totally dependent on alarm clocks. Without them no one would get to work "on time" (another completely man-made idea as it is merely an agreed upon hour at which things begin and could be changed if anybody dared to suggest such a thing) and business would not occur, traffic would lessen, secretaries would not be sexually harassed, and the economy would collapse more so than it already has. Yes, Lethargy sees the need for improvement and so he adds to the alarm clock a device that he creates with only the best of intentions and ideals; a device meant to allow the alarm clock user the option of reformulating his/her original "wake up time" hypothesis; a device meant to ease the suffering of cold bathroom floors and vitreous humor (also known as "eye boogers"): the snooze button.

Now, neither Punctual nor Lethargy were evil men. If anything, they thought they were helping humanity. And they did.

And yet, how many people curse their alarm clocks every morning. How many people feel robbed, angry, and annoyed by the klaxon-esque blaring that jostles them from their sleep? How many regard the neon-colored numbers that emanate from it as heralds of a morning that they do not want? How many consider alarm clocks to be purely and wholly and undeniably EVIL?

Which is ridiculous, of course. An alarm clock is just a machine: plastic, wires, simple mechanisms and programming that have no brains or blood or anima. We control them. If we don't want an alarm clock we don't get one or we just switch it off. But we don't.

Thus, people are evil. No, wait, sorry didn't build up to that enough. People are...

EVIL!!

Ahem. So people are evil. They are the ones capable of truly evil acts.

And since our cast of characters consists of two, let's decide which is to blame: Punctual or Lethargy.

The evidence against Punctual is, at first sight, the strongest. Punctual created the infernal machine and propagated it amongst an unsuspecting public. He should have warned us He should have warned us that these things, these machines, could and would end up controlling us, dictating us.

He is to blame, yes? Much more so than Lethargy who just wanted to improve on something that needed improving. Sort of like that guy who thought to create those rubber sticky things people put in showers so they don't slip -- a simple solution that probably saved lives.

No.

Punctual gave us a machine -- we could have controlled it but we didn't and that's on us. Our bad.

Lethargy gave us something worse: choice.

He gave us the absence of the absolute. Before him there was either awake or asleep. There was slumber or there was alert. There was black and white. He gave us the Gray Area.

Now we have: five more minutes, I'll do it later, I don't want to.

Lethargy gave us hope. The hope that maybe, just maybe, it will bedtime again soon.

Then again, I guess we could just wake up to the radio.