That, Without Which Life is Unthinkable

Call me a Luddite, even a troglodyte but don’t call me on my cell phone. My number is like the Beverly Hills police department, unlisted. It rings so seldom I hardly know what it sounds like. Every time a garbage truck backs up I put the phone to my mouth and say, Hello.

I prefer to think of clouds as those pillowed-puffs overhead and tablets as the round things I swallow with orange juice that got me through childhood into pre-mature senility where I’ve been for many years; better known to non-pharmacists, as pills.

Granted, I may someday need a GPS to get from the bedroom to the kitchen however when I get there I probably wouldn’t remember why I bothered. True, if I take the wrong freeway coming home from the library and find myself in the outskirts of Bengazi I would certainly be thankful I have one. But the chances are the battery would be dead anyway. 

Not only is my cell phone not smart it’s at the bottom of the class. I picked it up at a Walgreen’s for $29.95 and I buy minutes. As is my habit the first thing I do is throw away the instruction book. All I know is that it has a lot of buttons and icons I shall never click, unless I sit on it.

Back in the day at least we knew who the crazies were, walking and talking to themselves on the sidewalk. Now I’m afraid I’ll be committed for not speaking into my little finger.

The only thing I enjoy about my dumb phone is losing it, then calling my number and following the ring which generally leads me under the car seat with a flashlight. Clearly it was an aborted attempt to escape like all those single socks which have made their way out of the drier and slinked around the neighborhood only to appear years later in someone’s garage sale.

After all this time why would I require a mobile phone, I ask you? True, it took Moses forty years to find the promised-land but he was never noted for his sense of direction anyway. Ovid didn’t have a GPS when he was banished by the Romans. Napoleon found his way around Europe without one. Even Waterloo. If I should ever again get to first base I’m sure I could find my way to 2^nd.

Imagine going through lunch with friends and not looking up who was the second banana to Gene Kelly in some MGM musical. Or the name of the general who said, Nuts, when asked to surrender at the Battle of the Bulge. Any more information in my head would drip on my Chinese chicken salad. It seems the more we know the less we know what to do with it.

Consider the bliss of being unreachable. You could listen to your inner voice and take dictation without any static. Commune with Nature like Thoreau at Walden. On second thought what could hurt if he got on his $29.95 toy and called Emerson to drop off an onion bagel on his way home, a quarter pound of lox sliced thin, a little cream cheese and a side of coleslaw? All right, hold the slaw.