On Being Without a Cell Phone For Almost a Full week

    

            

                     At first, of course, you feel liberated. That annoying appendage has been sheared off and once again you feel free, breezy, like a child tossing himself into the wind. (It was especially nice Not to have the phone jammed in my pocket during the MAN MAN show where I was in the middle throb of the gleeful yet borderline violent shoving and bouncing crowd.) (Incidentally, they are the best live band in America right now I think with maybe the exception of 'Of Montreal'.) So a few days pass and then one day you are walking in Greenpoint with an urge to call your best friend who lives in Portland. Shit. No phone. Or you're on the train here in Queens and you want to check in with the family back in Ohio-- Shit. No phone. But you move on with your day and its fine. The next day you wake and at some point you remember how lonely a person could feel back in the days before cell phones. You had totally forgotten. Back then, when you needed some ones attention, when you needed that human contact, you had no choice but to deal with it on your own. Does anyone remember this? And I don't just refer to the times before cell phones-- but to how utterly stuck with ourselves we once were. I certainly do not mean loneliness in general but that particular feeling is gone from our way of being these days for better or worse. So by the fifth day without a cell phone you begin craving it. Maybe not like a meth head yet. But maybe like a pothead. You begin picking yr. nails and wondering what people in your life who live far away are doing at various moments. Then the next day you wonder what the hell bullshit is UPS up to and why the fuck they have not delivered you your new phone  when it was supposed to have arrived three days ago.  You curse ashes and postcards. You see phantom brown UPS trucks with flames and clown faces painted on their sides. You hear squirrels out yr. window mocking you and your contemporary human need for such things. You read somewhere that Doctors now know cell phones may cause cancer. You don't care. And so you wait like a miserable fiend or a disgruntled child. Cars and trucks pass outside without stopping as you sit down at the computer and pray to the Gods of the Internet.