Glass Too Full

Do you remember when only crazy people talked to themselves on public streets?

I always was torn between the desire to give them a wide berth because they might be dangerously unstable and the temptation to draw closer to them because the conversation figured to be interesting, if bizarre. God or Jesus often was invoked (or channeled). But also oft-times represented, somewhat counterintuitively, were motherfuckers. The latter might well be emissaries of the government, or of quasi-governmental cabals who were conspiring to command our minds through radio-controlled squirrels, or perhaps to kill us all by mixing lead into the fluoride in our water.

Nowadays, of course, it’s impossible to get that sort of heads-up on the mentally unbalanced because everyone is talking to him- or herself on public streets. Well, not technically, but it can seem so to the ears of the overhearing listener. This is because everyone is on their damn phone, all the time—often via a headphone device, such that there isn’t even the visual giveaway of a cell phone cupped to the speaker’s ear.

These conversations never are interesting. They are to mundane banality as the deinstitutionalized motor-mouths’ monologues of old were to disturbing calliope. Let’s face it: “What’s up?” or “I’m at Safeway,” or “Jen’s boyfriend was so, like, drunk!” pales in comparison with shouted, profanity-laced biblical verses. I find myself wanting to give the cell-talkers a wide berth not because I worry about being jabbed with a sharp object or pummeled by a concealed hammer, but because I find their end of the conversation so boring and annoying and intrusive. I long for the days of phone booths, when people quite literally took it inside. But there simply is no giving the cell-talkers a wide berth, because they are everywhere. Skirt one of them and you just pull within range of another.

Actually, it’s not true that everyone is talking on the phone all the time. What is true, though, is that everyone is doing something on the phone all the time—texting, or Googling, or deploying one of their million apps to route their next run, or rate a restaurant, or see if there’s a CVS in the next block. To most people, this is progress. This is convenience. This is saving time that later can be spent doing these exact same things on their wired TV set inside their house or apartment. But this hyper-connectivity drives me crazy. Yes, crazy enough even to sometimes talk aloud to myself in public—although I’m neither up on my biblical verses nor sufficiently paranoid to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory. Crazy enough, though, to mutter under my breath things like “Shut up!” or “What’s so fucking important?” or “Dear God, can’t you just read the newspaper!”

I know, I know. It’s been the 21st century for many years now, and as disorienting and cacophonous as I find the death of my old world of turntables (or even CDs), road atlases, film cameras and wistful reminiscence, and its replacement by a new world in which nearly every moment is written about, remarked on, and photographed—and in which mystery, accordingly, seems all but lost—I need, to some extent, to get with the program. I do acknowledge this. I’ve been defiantly cell phone-less—let alone smartphone equipped—to this point, but I confess that being completely outside the technological loop hasn’t been fun. It’s made me extremely cranky (can you maybe tell?) and has deepened my innate fear that I’m at root stupid and incapable of understanding, let alone adapting to, modern technology. Never mind that every day I see little kids flipping among all those icons with their chubby fingers, tapping out texts, and downloading songs from some site called iTunes. The fact is, until I start trying to do some of those things myself, I will worry that I’m intellectually incapable of doing so. That’s part of my pathology, which predates this century and manifested itself in other ways before it ever had supercharged phones on which to fixate.

So, I give up. I give in. Rather, I concede to the need. Not the need to telephonically communicate from wherever I might be, just because I can—as I don’t expect my distaste for talking on the phone to change. Not the need to text constantly—as I don’t have that much to say, frankly, and one-finger typing will be considerably more laborious on a small screen. And not the need, either, to take a zillion photographs of unremarkable images that needn’t be shared. But, rather, the need to discontinue a self-segregation that in many ways ill-serves me. I can’t imagine I’ll ever embrace the smartphone with anything approaching the zeal of most people, but it will be convenient to be able to call Lynn if I’m running late. It will be nice to be able to text or e-mail a friend if something I see reminds me of him or her in a fun and affirming way. And, who knows, I might even, someday, want to start building a musical library I can carry in my pocket.

That’s why, sometime in the coming months, Lynn and I—after she’s done the research and pricing and other due diligence for which she’s famous—each will get smartphones. It will be a good thing, I think. It’s a necessary thing for me, I know.

And this concession will come none too soon, frankly, because the Next Big Thing, much in the news of late, is Google Glass—technology-enhanced spectacles that are being described as “augmented reality,” because God knows reality isn’t quite real enough by itself. The other day, I Googled—appropriately enough—this soon-to-be marketed product, and I found it described on the website techradar.com as “an attempt to free data from desktop computers and portable devices like phones and tablets, and place it right in front of your eyes.”

My feeling about this is, it’s about time that data was freed from the shackles of our fingertips and brought to eye level, saving humankind literally seconds that people now are wasting looking down at their phones. And won’t it be great when folks can look you directly in the eye without actually engaging you, because they’re reading data on their specs or taking a picture of something behind you? Surely, too, this will be a great boon to public safety—hardly distracting for drivers at all. And in no way does it figure to be a privacy or civil liberties concern. Ain’t technology grand!

In other words, it’s best that I conquer smartphone loathing before I even have the chance to get started on Google Glass contempt. Elsewise, I’m liable to lose it and become one of those old-school ranters, asking and answering my own crazy questions in the middle of the public square.