Poor Clockface Bradbury

Bradbury said he didn’t need an alarm clock. I saw the phrase in passing without its context, so I’m left with this vision of a man machine with a clock face for a visage. A veritable clock tower face with bonging lower register bells coming out of speakers on the obverse side of the head. So head into fall with the idea of a Bradbury clock head sitting next to you at Starbucks; power washing his car next to yours at the d.i.y. car wash; trying on jeans at Walmart—because that’s America’s super store—because that’s where clock-faced clock heads do their denim best! Now, rack into focus on that jingoistic demoniacal guy by the tube socks—the one wearing the t-shirt that reads: your face makes me soft!—notice how he stares at clock head Bradbury. He doesn’t like his clock face, and wants to do him grievous bodily harm—because that’s the way he rolls in BIG SKY country. Watch him guesstimate and plannify in that dim fashion of his—how he’ll cook up revenge because he doesn’t like “thee other.” Yeah, somewhere in the parking lot, at the end of the quarter-mile line up of pick up trucks with them stickers that inveigle others to pray to an angry god. Yeah, there. Because America!

“And so I cement my semantics
I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country
After saying I love”

— Aria Aber / “America”