Reveries of a Ruined Reveille

Author Unknown

I have to avoid posting song lyrics when I have nothing to write. It's a nasty habit I've picked up from that vagabond Q. That's not to say that a song can't summarize a sentiment, it's just that there's something nicer about the act of creating than the act of pasting. Paste. It sounds dirty. It's almost a four letter word. Paste.

Today I started my day off with everything in its right place, literally; Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place is my alarm tone. It has a powerful symbolic weight. And wait, too, since the alarm spends 24 hours a day in a state of suspended anticipation 5 days a week, sometimes 6, just waiting to fire. It's a kind of time-bomb that detonates my dreams, destroying my unconsciousness with screeching shrapnel sounds. They are a horrid thing, alarms. Unnatural. Always disturbing nature's rhythm, finding us when we're lost, even to ourselves.

Alarm-clocks are the only piece of machinery I've ever seen savagely destroyed by another human being, as though it were...another human being. Let's tell the tale:

The morning was dawning and the alarm clock was counting down the seconds before it would begin blaring. It was a Nickelodeon alarm clock that trumpeted with a militant resoluteness, in a rapid staccato. This particular morning I had been in a especially deep sleep; the kind of sleep where gunshots could be fired from your pillow and you wouldn't wake. The alarm, relentlessly playing fast brass - with a fiery ardor - finally roused me from my slumber. I woke weary, heavy and disoriented, the sound of a faint and maddened screaming whispered in from an adjacent room. A sound I was sure was the relic of a dream. Try as I might I was unable to get up and silence the alarm, so thorough was my exhaustion. Then, a rapid pounding of footsteps hard against the floor. My father, shirtless, wearing tube socks and tighty-whities, burst into the room bug-eyed, teeth gnashing.

"WHERE IS IT?!" he screamed, rage wrenching his voice into a falsetto.

His eyes darted around the room with a depraved desperation. Pivoting on his feet and looking frantically around the room he repeated his query, adding "GIMME IT!" Exhausted and amused I motioned toward the unwittingly truculent clock. He lunged for it with an animal ferocity and yanked it up off the floor, twisting his body with it in his arms like an athlete protecting an intercepted pass. The force of his movements caused the cord to spasm and kick violently - knocking down CDs, cards and empty bottles it came into contact with - but didn't actually free it from the wall-socket. With a rabid scream he hurled the clock down against the floor, shattering it to pieces. Looking at the broken clock, still not satisfied by its demise, he screamed the word "MOTHERFUCKER" at it; froth and spittle flaring from his lips as he sounded the F with clenched teeth. Without looking at me he turned toward the door revealing a muddy smudge in his underwear and calmly walked off.

They aren't entirely without the power of prophesy, alarms, but they're of a very self fulfilling kind. If only they knew which sound would be their last; the clash of a symbol or the crash to the floor.