Fear

I am so very relieved; there has been no apparent backlash against my anti-poetry tirade of the other day. I keep whirling around, trenchcoat flapping, to make sure there are no mad poets skulking around as I go about my daily business. So far, so good! I'm not THAT worried, I have an idea that any poet worth his or her salt would really stand out here. They're all dirty, with long scraggly hair and ugly little mustaches, right? And that's just the women. Hyuk, hyuk. There is definitely no one like that around here, so I'm moving on with my life free of a pervasive fear of deadly poets.

It's a good thing, too, because I don't have the energy to be afraid. Last night, Shane was awake in the night for hours. From approximately 01:22:17 to 03:34:22. We don't leave him alone to scream, though I can certainly understand the temptation, and so Lloyd was in there with him. Until Lloyd had to go to work at 02:45 in the icy snow, on foot, at the behest of a person I will call, ummm, 'Dick Schmucky'. It wasn't one of our Osan Schmuckys, of course, as they are all kindhearted souls who hand out fine chocolates and big fat cigars instead of late night assignments, but rather one of the Schmuckys from elsewhere. Lloyd couldn't drive to work because our van is on the slow boat to America (I would be dying of envy, or stowed away, but I get very seasick) and he couldn't bike because it was snowing and he has a road bike with skinny tires. The alarm blared, Lloyd had to get up, and Shane was still awake. Eventually, he drifted off to sleep while I lay frozen in position, terrified to move for fear the noise would start again.

We knew in advance that he was going to have to go in and also that Shane was likely to wake up, so we had a plan: Lloyd was going to sleep in the boys' room hoping to get Shane right back to sleep, because it seems to work better for him than for me, while I slept in our room with the alarm clock. It would go off, wake me, and I would go wake Lloyd up. All these complicated logistical arrangements are necessary because the last time Lloyd had to get up in the night to go to work, the alarm woke up everyone in the house except for him and I had to get up and shake him awake after I tried to flush the clock down the toilet to silence its hateful shrieking. Seriously, the sound is otherworldly. In fact, I call the thing 'the hateful clock' because it is so heinous. And, to make it better, we have two of them. They are atomic clocks, similar to this one, given to us several Christmases ago by my in-laws. Two of them, do you get it? One each, so that we can both get up on time, up and at 'em from our twin beds, located several rooms apart, right?

You can tell we need a lot of things here, but a new alarm clock is at the top of my list. Only not a regular, noise making alarm clock. I need something revolutionary: it should utilize some sort of pinching, poking or biting system designed to instantly wake Lloyd while simultaneously silencing his screams and dampening his thrashing so as not to wake me or the boys. I asked my Facebook friends for help, but they didn't really get what I was going for. One of my them did have a useful idea involving a stun gun and a gag. That might work, but I was thinking more of a timer-operated leg-trap type device. Oh, and he could sleep inside a soundproofed isolation pod. The in-laws would like that, and it would be easy to clean up the blood. I'm a little sleep deprived so my scheme could probably use a little work. As always, input is welcome here at Stories from Korea.