It doesn't augur well for a town when alarm clocks are so difficult to find. I did find one store, but it was a bedside, not a travel unit. Will check the outlying stores, but if not, I'll shift my focus to digital kitchen timers. Merely requires a bit of math at night.
Historically, I've been using the travel kindle (broken front panel, highly unattractive to thieves) for things like alarm clocks and showing transit tickets, but a smaller, simpler device seems wise.
Whenever I go to the theatre or a concert, the next morning, I have some clouds around me. Like a desert hermit the day after stopping into the local tavern for an evening of conversation with the locals. Clearing my mind of the less strong ways of thinking. Of course, the difficulty might also be a sign that I've been more strongly grounded in existence, and therefore feeling the headwinds a bit more. So, the wisest course seems to be continuing on with the occasional $6 play or concert, but getting as clear as I can the next morning. Labora et ora.
Plays and concerts are actually work for me, work in the true sense (despite not having been able to find such work in the city or the Midwest). If more people thought of them as a worthwhile social obligation rather than something guaranteed to entertain them, we might have more meaningful plays and concerts. People didn't go to the spring and winter theatre festivals in Athens for a good time, I think.
Those were had at the local tavern, with an an evening of conversation with the locals.
I'm being drawn back to the Inklings, edging back in with some Charles Williams, likely to return to Lewis's sci-fi trilogy for the umpteenth time soon. I think some of it comes from the fact that they would read chapters to each other at the pub, and you can kind of catch the tone of that, the occasional reference perhaps missed by the huddled masses reading the mass-market printing in outer Slough. Still plowing through the complete novels of Henry James, approaching the end of his second tone, with The Other House. Clearly a stage play of his own that he made into a novel, so it's a sometimes uncanny look into what an evening at the theatre was like then. The staginess of the characters is very different from the intimacy of his novels. Perhaps one day he was wandering through rehearsals, and then said he would take it back to the house to work on it. Perhaps the theatre folks then asked if he wanted a table and a light at the back of the auditorium. "No," he said... and then he had the title.