Do Leave Home Without It...Sometimes

1) I entered the Starbucks at Sutter and Powell, just down the hill (what would you expect?) from my San Francisco hotel. I stood on line and noticed that every customer in the place was staring into their mobile phone.

 Everyone except me that is; gadzooks, I had left my phone behind in my room! Suddenly, I had a premonition that I was in danger of being arrested, for, in San Francisco, one never knows which new proposition might reign at any given politically correct moment. I quickly concluded that jail was not in my immediate future, at least not for being a phone-truant; however, it did look as though I might have wandered onto a set from Zombies By The Bay III.

 I'll tell you a scary secret and hope that you can bare it: sometimes I leave home without my phone ON PURPOSE.

True. On Sunday, I went for a walk on the nearby High Street ( for you young ones, this does not refer in any way to reefers, but means a street with shops) with no phone upon my person. I did not expire in the street, was not hit by a $200,000 vehicle driven by a guy whose Viagra prescription had run-out, and did not feel the least restrained by my audacious act of telecom neglect.

Moreover, when I returned home and looked into my so-called smart phone, I had not received any dire warnings of imminent terror, found that none of my offspring had come to any harm worth mentioning, and that my spouse had cared so little about demons that might have descended upon me...that she had left her phone at home as well.  Scary, no?

 We have come to the point, Friends, when we think it's remarkable when we do not carry a phone with us. We are being trained to believe that our phones can nearly instantaneously cure our desires for a new pop song, our favorite Seinfeld episode we've seen 175 times, or rally our friends and neighbors to bring down the regime in Cairo, or Occupy to prop one up in Washington. We seem to do every damn thing on our phones, except make phone calls, and one wonders if we are really communicating more or just simply being herded into vast flocks of sheep grazing in fields marked Let's Make A Deal.

 I concluded long ago that a television was not much more than a vending machine, dispensing bits of entertainment, information and commercial messages. Perhaps the best thing about TV as a dominant player in our lives was that it was not very portable. If we could not bring ourselves to turn it off, we might just go to another  room without one or leave the house (this was before airports, banks, delis had TV's). We could hide from advertisers. This was a good thing.

 Our mobile phones are more about advertising than meaningful communication in the form of  calls, texts, emails, web pages, Tweets. Google does a lot of cool stuff, but, at the end of the day, and more importantly at the end of the quarter, they are in the advertising business.  Facebook? Advertising and Marketing Info. Groupon? Advertising. We're walking around with little billboards in our pockets, which is okay as long as we know it.

Sometimes it might be better to, as some ad almost said,  Leave Home Without It. Talk about risky!

 2) For those of you who have not abandoned me after that frightening confession above, here's another. Sometimes I drive my car ( more precisely my Jeep) without listening to the radio or a cd.

Amazingly, there are no long term Ill effects from listening to the engine run, the gears shift, and the tires hug the road. I have gone so far as to listen to the clicking sound traffic lights make when they change without having to go to an Emergency Room for immediate treatment. In fact, driving a car much like our grandparents did (in my case a ton and a half navy DeVille, license 3N8) might be healthy for us.

Who knew?