Snooze!

I have this clock radio that wakes me up every day.

Okay... I have this clock radio that wakes me up most days. Not Saturdays. Or Sundays. Or many Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays...

I have this clock radio that occasionally wakes me up.

Or rather, I have this clock radio that fails to wake me up, which is the problem that has caused me to spring blog-ward tonight. See, I'm one of those lowest-rung human waste types that relies heavily on that most blessed invention, the snooze button. For those of you still sleeping on grass mats in caves (and yet managing to operate a computer and surf blogs... How industrious of you!) the snooze button is that little device that tells your screaming alarm clock to piss off for ten more minutes so you can... well... snooze.

I love the psychology behind this thing: You buy a machine for the express purpose of getting you out of bed at a specific time, and then you add a feature that allows you to remain asleep. This may just explain everything that is wrong with our society. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! "I absolutely have to wake up at 8am. It's imperative that I wake up at precisely 8am. I want you to wake me promptly at 8. Unless I change my mind and want to stay asleep. Wake me at 8, and if my eyes don't pop open, let me sleep. In fact, don't actually wake me at all. just come into the room and stare at me for 30 seconds and if I don't sense you there and spring from the bed, just leave me alone and let me sleep until... oh, say... Thursday. Can you do that for me?"

What if we took the idea of the snooze button and applied it to other aspects of life? Say the Supreme Court comes out with a verdict and you could press a magical button and say "I don't know about that one guys... Why don't you mull it over for a little while longer and try me again in an hour?"

Or what if you could give birth, get a good look at the baby, and then say "Doc, I don't really like the look of that one. Can you stick it back in for a few weeks and we'll see how it looks then?"

The only thing dumber than the snooze button? The snooze bar. This little gem is a snooze button that's grown ridiculously large so that you can find it without having to open your eyes at all. Just throw your hand in the general direction of the clock and you will probably hit the snooze bar. Why not get right down to brass tacks and invent a clock that just turns off the minute you start moving at all? In fact, let's just take this whole idea where it's really going and invent a clock that simply doesn't work at all. Isn't that what we all truly want anyway? Every night you can go through the motions of setting it, promising yourself that you will bound out of bed, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then when morning comes the clock does nothing at all. You wake up at the crack of noon, and a better person for it!

Okay, you may feel that I'm being a little hard on our friend the snooze button. But the fact is, I love the snooze button. I live by the snooze button! The snooze button allows me to be an absolute lazy shit while maintaining the illusion that I'm really trying to get out of bed! And that, my friends, is what America is all about!

Now, as Bill Cosby would say, I told you that story to tell you this one: My trouble is that my clock plays music at me in the morning. I hate hate hate the screeching alarm noise and opt for the slightly more pleasant sounds of the local "adult alternative" radio station. So on those mornings that I do employ my alarm, I am awakened by the music of Coldplay, or Cat Power, or some such.

Or rather, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I fail to be awakened by this music.

What happens instead, what has been happening to me for years now, is that I have recurring dreams in which a radio is playing and won't shut off. Nearly every morning I dream that some radio is going on and on and I can't get it to shut up. Because as I'm sure you understand, the real actual radio is beside my head, on the nightstand, and instead of reaching over and hitting that snooze button, I'm sound asleep. The music invades my dreams and there I am, on a boat to Topeka with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Dan Rather and I'm pulling apart this radio with my bare hands and screaming "Shut up shut up shut up WILL YOU BE SILENT????"

Every.

Freaking.

Morning.

One dream, I actually started trying to eat the radio in an attempt to get it to shut up. Another time I was throwing the radio out a window, only to turn around and find it had reappeared exactly where it had been before. As you can imagine, this is a very frustrating way to greet the day.

Eventually I do wake up. Usually just before I go certifiably insane from the madness of it all. I reach over and hit the snooze button, swearing that the next time I hear Tom Petty's "Freefalling" I'm going nuts right then and there.

What's really crazy, and telling about exactly the sort of person I am, is that I have been putting up with this for years. I'd rather bitch about it in this blog than do anything about it.

Years ago, I was walking along a dirt road with a buddy, when he noticed I was kind of limping. "Are you okay?" he asked. "I'm fine," I said, "I just have a rock in my shoe." "Do you want to stop and get the rock out?" he asked me. "No, I'm fine," I replied.

He just looked at me like I was the dumbest motherfucker in the world.