Alarms

3:45am – Only used for early Arsenal matches.
Plays “Theater is the Life of You” by the Minutemen.
Rarely ignored, grudgingly.

4:30am – Every day.
Plays “Just as the Day was Dawning” by Big Business.
The song opens with crashing guitar
ripping through the still morning
and a man screaming
“For weeks now, you run and you talked in your sleep
You shook me awake to announce, you’re never alone.”
And yet, somehow I have become inured
This alarm almost never works.
I snooze it.
Or sometimes simply sleep right through.

5:15am – Every week day
Plays “Fifty Things” by the Dead Milkmen.
The backup alarm,
usually wakes me up at the verse
“Chuck got up and made a cup of coffee
Stepped on a roach and went back to bed”.
Sometimes I sleep through this alarm, like today.
When I was having a particularly good dream
about a homeless family camping on my front porch.
They had cleaned the porch
spread out some blankets
A dad and two girls
and a little brown dog
with long tufts of ear hair.

6:45am – “This is serious”
Plays “Start Your Digging” by Big Business
“How many people are needed to turn on these lights?”
I’m usually up by now
Used to stop my writing
and tell me to wake up Aveline.

7:00am – “Aveline’s Alarm”
Plays “Another Beautiful Day in the Pacific Northwest.”
I leave the computer in her room
And take the dog for a walk.
She has to get herself up
Turn off the alarm
Make breakfast and lunch
Get dressed for school.
Once in a store she asked me
“Is that my alarm song?”

8:15am – “Time to go”
Plays “I’m Alright (Theme from “Caddyshack”)”
We are supposed to leave by 815
To get to school and work on time
Some days we brush our teeth together
and laugh about this song
Other days I get angry with myself
when the alarm is snoozed three times
and we are late.

Note: I don’t know how normal this is but I see metaphors in everything. So, “Alarms” is not just representative of my daily life, but rather how alarms of various types are ringing out all the time and how we eventually ignore them. It’s not just the physical alarms on our phones (how many notifications do you receive in a day?) but also the “alarm bells” of global warming, of the rise of the hard-right; alarms of gun violence, of growing homelessness, of problems with drug addiction; the alarms of human migration, poverty, misery; and the alarming number of people with short tempers who violently lash out at others. In the last two years, the alarms seem to have been ringing nonstop and we seem to no longer care, or at the very least we seem to care less. Episodes that before would have brought the nation together to mourn a national tragedy are briefly noticed, small services are held, some heads drop in “prayer” and we move on.
In the last seven days I had a random person hit my car with a bat, for driving down his block, I guess. He looked like Brittany Spears in a rage. I couldn’t believe he would hit my car. He did. And yesterday morning a woman came up to my door at 530am, rang my alarm, and asked me for money. I wasn’t nice. I regret that. After my walk, I noticed that someone broke the window out on my car. They didn’t steal anything. They just lashed out. Ironically, my car alarm didn’t go off.
I don’t have a solution. I only hear alarms.

Qq

16 comments

  1. All very true and it’s slowly terrifying me.

    Especially the alarms about human nature.

    We seem to ‘snooze’ them permanently. (snooze = ignore) in some ways we’ve become less sensitive to it all so it bothers us less. And to me that’s a slippery slope leading in only one direction.

  2. Well, midterm elections are almost upon us, and there are some reasons to be optimistic if you’re a Democrat, which I believe most readers here are. Most are predicting that Republicans will keep the Senate but lose the House and see a spike in R to D governor conversions as well. That’s something, no?

    1. Do you feel optimistic about the future of this country’s leadership, even if it’s in Democratic hands? It’ll be an improvement over what we have now but I am not holding my breath that the real issues confronting us in this century will be resolved or even meaningfully improved. To me the last 6.5 years of Obama proved that it’s possible to have a level-headed, courageous leader who wants to implement important domestic policies and that none of it will go anywhere because of the checks and balances of our system of government that was designed to prevent reckless lawmaking is actually being used to prevent any change from happening at all by the opposite party. I live in the bluest of blue states (ironically with a progressive Republican governor!) so I am sheltered from this stuff but I have virtually no optimism for the long term health of this country. It’s too big, first of all. They system of government is too clunky and too easy to shut down good ideas. But most of all, the people living here have grown too far apart in terms of how they feel about the same ideas and what they value. It’s not like this is a new thing, but it’s getting worse and I don’t think our system of government is equipped to deal with it, much less tackle the massively costly and long over-due reforms of educational, healthcare and infrastructure systems. It’s all a long winded way of saying I don’t have alarms in my head about politics. That’s too stressful. I have mostly only apathy and disgust, and I don’t see that changing even with a democratic house.

      1. I honestly think our system of government is outdated. Representative democracy, as conceived by the “Founding Fathers” (slave owners who saw the Roman Republic as the ideal), is sick and wrong.

        I also honestly think we are too far down a path toward income inequality (which seems unrelated but isn’t) that there is only one likely outcome: there are 7.5 billion people and less than 2200 billionaires. As one friend told me the other day, “redistribution is inevitable”. We are headed toward resource wars. The “caravan” from Honduras/El Salvador/Guatemala is largely driven by drought, poverty, and physical insecurity. This is going to accelerate. Desperate migration seems inevitable, unstoppable.

        1. Do you mean the idea of one person, one vote is wrong or the idea that elected officials get to vote on behalf of their constituents?

          Social science studies have concluded that apparently the ideal size of a human colony is less than 140 people. Beyond that we can’t remember each others names and stop caring as much about each other.

          1. America doesn’t really have a ‘true’ one person one vote situation though does it? At least in the sense that some votes (depending on the location) seem to count for more than others and you end up with a system where the candidate with less votes can be elected president.

            I’ve been told it’s to ensure the voices of people in less populated rural areas dont get drowned out. Is this true?

  3. The car alarm not going off after a list of alarms going off is terribly funny. Sorry, Tim. Not sure if it was meant as a punchline, but that’s some wonderful writing regardless. Great timing in a post about time. It also adds fuel to the speculation that your Subaru is indeed cursed. Or maybe you have an inflammatory political message plastered all over it?

    1. HA! True story, I used to have Democrat bumper stickers on my truck. But the Subaru has no political affiliation.

  4. On the last need to move comment, may I say that South East Asia is nice (more so if you are Caucasian) especially if you like rain😬

  5. There are reports in Spain that Barca is willing to listen to offers for Dembele, strangely now that he seems to be finding his feet. I hope we’ll go all-in on him, considering we’d probably not be the most attractive option on paper.

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