Vacation

It was bound to happen sooner or later - the phone jostled free of the worn holder on my belt and returned itself to the void where it had come from - the void where technology explorers found it and engineers copied it to sell other people imitations.

Or that is the fiction many believe. That said, the void is real. The phone could be stolen, dropped or disintegrated by aliens - it doesn't matter. It's gone. The details are only for emotional framing. It entered the void without bothering to make an excuse. That's not only a smart phone - it's a rational phone.

And so it was that I found myself without a phone on Saturday. I missed calling someone I really wanted to call the evening before - aside from that, there was no emergency. Everything could continue without me. The inertia of time and space is so great that one person falling out of touch is almost unnoticeable.

Meanwhile, I reacquainted myself with the elder world I lived in - a world that some younger people might consider alien. Certainly, technology makes communication better - but people themselves have not improved much since before smoke signals. The ability to utter sounds that spread like a virus across our existence seems extraordinary; propagating it beyond that only furthers the great depths of the evolution we have created in our own society.

I have devolved for 2 days. No ringing phone. No maintaining the charge on the battery. No disruptions. And while there are those who I wished to speak with, and there are those that I need to be able to get a hold of me, I wonder if the insane ringing should be turned off on weekends anyway.

It's a brief respite - and as rejuvenating as it is, I fear I must re-evolve myself again tomorrow. The inertia of time and space have swept me up; the black hole of finance must once again pull a mobile phone out of the void.