When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (ebook reader for surface pro txt) 📕

Appearances can be deceiving. Adorable dogs can turn into vicious beasts at the drop of a hat; children who look like cherubs can become holy terrors in the blink of an eye; and, technological advancements that were nothing less than pure genius brought to life with nuts and bolts or, keeping more in line with today’s world, bits and bytes, can morph into damnable contraptions that have the ability to drive us mad as quickly as a mouse trap can snap the necks of the vile vermin.

One such wretched device is, without a doubt, the alarm clock which many people might agree should more rightly be called ‘Satan’s little joy buzzer’ because it rouses us from our peaceful slumber every morning and reminds us that we are not beholden to man but rather to a wholly man-made concept...Time. A concept we devised because, in truth, the nature of man makes him desperate for order and structure. And what is more structured than ‘time’?

Yes, we rely on ‘time’ to do everything in our lives. Time to get up. Time to go to work. Time to change the oil in the car. Time to (insert task here)...

What’s more is that we are reminded of the constraints of time everywhere we look: wrist watches, cell phones, desk clocks, wall clocks, table clocks, car radio clocks, church tower clocks, and even oven clocks! For Pete’s sake, one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world, Big Ben, is nothing more than a really big clock with four faces which provide a constant reminder to the people below that their lives are tick, tick, ticking away.

In a universe where the laws of nature and motion cannot be broken without some seriously powerful intervention it follows that only a being of pure evil could be capable of orchestrating such a dreadful contraption as the alarm clock. Because God surely did not authorize the invention of such a device considering that He’d already come up with a fairly effective way for His creations to know when to wake up and when to go to sleep. After all when was the last time you saw a lion pop its head up at sunrise and say, ‘Damn! Where’s the snooze button on that thing? Seven minutes. Just seven more minutes, that’s all I need.’

But apparently aside from being sentient beings that learn from our mistakes, we humans are also a glutton for punishment because we will intentionally go out and spend our hard earned money to purchase alarm clocks. Some people even give them as gifts or maybe they simply want to share their misery. Honestly, the name alone, alarm clock, ought to trigger some warning system deep within us to avoid them at all costs because alarms are usually indicators of something gone awry: fire alarms, burglar alarms, tornado alarms, etc.

These are all things rational people try to steer clear of so why on Earth do we deliberately go out and spend money on something that we know is going to cause us a quick jolt of anxiety each and every morning? Maybe it’s because in actuality we are all crazy.

What’s even crazier is that if you are married, dating, living with someone, or so on an so forth, some of us have not just one but two alarm clocks that sit on either side of our beds just waiting to go off and scare the bajezzus out of us. For the most part they are the first thing we look at when our eyes open and typically they are the last thing we actually see before we shut off our bedside lamps. And sometimes for no reason at all we’ll wake in the night and look at our alarm clocks and become frantic to fall back to sleep once we realize we only have a couple more hours left before it screams at us to ‘GET OUT OF BED!’

Of course when you bought the dreadful thing it didn’t look like a piece of technology that was crafted in the lowest pits of Hell as it sat there so benignly on the shelf at the store. In fact, it looked quite innocent and useful. And you thought it was such an ingenious tool that would help you get forward in life. You brought it into your home of your own volition and now it has turned against you. Yes, your precious little alarm clock has become your worst enemy.

Oh how it taunts you with its bright numeric display and all those buttons...snooze, sleep, AM/FM radio, time set, alarm set... They seem to call out us ‘Press the buttons. Press them.’ It’s all a wicked trick. What loathsome creature could design a device that will lull you to sleep with music when you press the ‘sleep’ button only to rip you from your slumber hours later? And what of the ‘snooze’ button? Do those 7 to 9 ‘extra’ minutes of sleep really help?

What about people who press the button again and again and again? Wouldn’t it have been more logical to simply set the alarm for 7:30 instead of 7:00? Why would someone intentionally give up 30 uninterrupted minutes of sleep just so they can drift into a calm, peaceful place only to be yanked back to reality over and over again?

Personally, I think there is a darker force at work. And I believe the true purpose of the ‘snooze’ button is to wear us down, put us on edge and generally keep us a little bit off our game. But even though I feel...nay, I believe this to be true, I’ll never get rid of my alarm clock.

Why?

Because there is a part of my brain that thinks I need it much the way people need a hit of caffeine to ‘get going’ first thing in the morning. Snooze, snooze, snooze...throw back some java. Coincidence?

I do not know. . . but this may go deeper than I ever thought.

A while back I was watching a reality style show called ‘Pitchmen’ which has been off the air now for a few years after the tragic death of one of the two hosts. The premise of the show was to offer struggling inventors (or those who just got really lucky with a darn good idea) who've dedicated months and sometimes even years into designing, creating, and branding inventions a platform to not only explain and 'sell' their product to the pitchment but also to allow the pitchmen to put the inventions through a series of rigorous real life tests. If the nifty new (or updated by better technology) devices prove to be worthy of 'pitching to the public' the master TV commercial salesmen would then agree to hawk the product using their loud, excited voices (though some might call it a 'snake-oil salesman-like method) to people of the world. The ultimate goal, of course, is not just for the inventor to benefit financially but for the salesmen (think of them as those 'working on commission' vaccum cleaner guys) to sell massive amounts of the product for a commission.

When I saw the first episode of the show, I was a bit skeptical . . . . on the one hand. BUT on the other hand, the one I'll simply call my 'holy cow, this is an awesome idea' appendage, all I could think was ‘GENIUS!' Here's a person who came up with an idea that capitalizes on the fact that we humans are amazingly industrious creatures; whatever we need, we find and if we cannot find it, we make it.

Take a moment to think back to all the times you’ve wished you had a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ to help you complete a task. Or all the times you came up with the next ‘I can’t live without it’ tool or toy in your mind . . . only you never had the gumption to follow through on bringing it to life. I'll bet there have been more than one or two.

And that's natural. Or at least that's what all the psychology books I've read say or allude to because we are an inventive species. When we come to a river, we could simply find a different - longer - way around it OR we could do something like build a bridge because looking for a quick solutions to time-laboroius problems is simply not the way humans are 'wired'. After all, we've thumbs for a reason and it isn't to make holding a stick easy. Those thumbs of ours and our impressive brains are designed to not only hold a stick but also to use it for things other than 'shaking a stick at' things.

'Shake a stick at...' An odd sort of colloquialism wouldn't you agree? Who actually shakes sticks at things? Is it proof that we're all 'magical at heart'? Or that we like to come up with phrases to confound people; throw them off topic like tossing a stick for a dog to retrieve for no real reason? It's one of those questions that will perplex man for eons to come... 

Where was I? Oh, yes finding solutions to problems.

But there is a strange paradox that goes along with our inventiveness because for all the immediate good that comes out of our desire to make our lives a bit less problematic, we sometimes end up having to deal with much greater problems farther down the road.

Take for instance the genius of Eli Whitney, Jr. (1765-1825). He was an American inventor and entrepreneur. Whitney has been credited with inventing the cotton gin, interchangeable parts, and the milling machine. Though ‘invented’ might be a bit of a stretch for the latter two. Let’s just say Mr. Whitney wasn’t above borrowing and capitalizing on other people’s ideas every now and again...which, in all honesty, only serves to further prove what a genius he was.

But why Eli Whitney? Because his is a name that the vast majority of people in the United States and most of the westernized world recognizes...if only to the extent of, ‘Eli Whitney, yes, the name rings a bell...’ Oh, sure I could talk about Othmar Zeidler an inventor of great merit, a scientist none the less. What? You don’t know who Zeidler is?

In 1874 he developed dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane but you probably know it as DDT. There was a time when DDT was considered one of the most important weapons in the war against malaria and typhus because it could wipe out the mosquitoes and lice that carried the deadly diseases. And when it was learned that DDT could also kill all those nasty little bugs that were gobbling up farmers’ crops, it rained down from the sky like powdered sugar on a Bundt cake.

That is, until sometime in the mid-1960s when it was discovered that aside from helping farmers grow big juicy fruits and vegetables, DDT was also killing off birds and bees and...more than likely...us. And by 1974...100 years after it was developed, DDT had become a scourge to our world and poor Othmar Zeidler