New York City’s mandated cell phone dark day, set for November 28th will be very interesting indeed. Why the Powers That Be set it for a Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, and no doubt one of the busiest shopping days on the calendar, is beyond me.
Of course, everyone will benefit from the upgrade of transmission lines and towers, and conversely, we’d have to all consider ourselves morally bankrupt if we protested otherwise, given the fire dangers outlined by the carriers themselves. But to say its inconvenient timing is to put it lightly, not that there would ever really be an ideal 24-hour period to shut down modern communication.
Oh, I’ll survive. I’m a 59-year old with 79 instagram followers, zero wife, zero kids, zero accountability. I’ll go for a walk on the West Side Highway, watch college football and treat myself to a nice dinner. I’ve never taken a selfie in my life. I ride Citibikes instead of Uber. I go to 7-Eleven for my coffee and Gatorade, as opposed to Door Dashing it. If I make plans with a friend, I’ll call them the night before and tell them where and when to meet. If they don’t show up, no biggie.
The youngsters are going to freak out but I’m not worried about them. I mean I don’t give a shit about them. I think it might actually do them a bit of good to know the wind still blows, the birds still chirp and fornication can still happen the old fashioned way: make the approach with a confident stride, a clever line, be a good listener, get sufficiently hammered, play a little tonsil hockey and bada-bing.
I fondly recall July of ’86 when Bob Dylan backed by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers opened up for the Grateful Dead at RFK Stadium (RIP) in Washington, DC. I called my college buddy Taylor at his dad’s farm in Staunton, VA the night before and told him my high school pal Mark and I were going to drive down to D.C. from Long Island and that we’d be “somewhere in the back, on the floor, where the Spinners do their thing. Come meet us!! It’s gonna to be sick!” The call was made on a land line, rotary phone, the cord stretched out of the kitchen and presumably earshot of my mother, so that she wouldn’t hear particulars about who would bring the shrooms, etc.
We didn’t have tickets. We didn’t have StubHub. We assumed the show was already sold out. We had a lot of charm, though, and rightful confidence that that would be enough to get us a couple “Miracles” as Deadheads fondly called concert tickets. Worst case scenario: we join the pre-party in the parking lot, get fucked up, and well, hang out and get more fucked up. Of course we got tickets, and sure enough, halfway, through the show, out of my mind on mushrooms, Taylor tapped me on the shoulder and we hugged with glee. Taylor wouldn’t be offended by my saying I may have only had a couple glancing thoughts earlier that day that it would be a bummer not to connect with him, but as the Dude says, “the universe provides.” It always provided exactly what you needed back then. That was the reward for being in the present. Sadly, it’s the most grossly insidious element the proliferation of cell phones has stripped away. Presence.
To be fair, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit I wasn’t exactly present at that Dead Show, or perhaps I was a little too present. The temperature that day was 96 degrees. We would later learn that the heat plunged Jerry Garcia into a diabetic coma. I lost my shoes and “lost” my shirt.
At the peak of my high, I decided that I wanted to be Jesus and literally shower the people. There were two men sitting on scaffolding platforms about 50’ in the air on each side of the stage, shooting a firehouse into the crowd who were soaking up the water with utter glee and gratitude. I wanted to command a hose.
As soon as I saw a couple of the guards turn away and gaze at the stage, I hopped over a barrier and immediately started spider-manning my way up the scaffolding. I got about halfway up when both the guards below, and the fireman with the hose and his team on the scaffolding took notice and tried to stop me in vain.
The fireman ended up handing me the hose and showed me how to maneuver it, just as the ominous, trance-like opening vamp of Terrapin Station kicked in. There I was, 50’ in the air, staring at 50,000 souls seemingly raising their arms at me as I rained down upon them with my holy hose.
After the song was over, a large security guard tapped me on my shoulder and said, “okay pal, you gotta go!”
I crawled my way down to the floor where I was met by a team of other security guards who disrobed me of my harness, one of them admonishing me by saying, “Kid, you’ve got some fucking balls … I’m going to let you go but you ever pull shit like that again…
I am grateful that I have friends who retain many of the memories of my exploits that I have forgotten, or better yet that I have yielded the hard drive space in my brain to other, more recent ones. These days, if a tree falls in a forest by the axe of a gym-body hunk who took his girlfriend to Vermont for a romantic weekend of leaf viewing that included a two-hour “man-woods-survival course” (her idea, her treat), and it wasn’t recorded and posted to Instagram and didn’t get at least 230 likes, did it happen?
The younger woman I’ve been dating—young in age, not just in spirit—didn’t grow up without mobile devices, yet she remains confident in our capacity to adapt. She’s not especially receptive to my oft-repeated theory that much of today’s anxiety stems from technology—and the resulting flood of information—accelerating faster than our central nervous systems can cope.
One of the books catching the zeitgeist and a ton of sales right now is Yesteryear which is about an influencer who projects faux domestic bliss in the form of organic, farm life with her “perfect family” but then wakes up one day in the same place but about 150 years earlier and has to live the hardscrabble reality of that projection. Like the recently frothing warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Yesteryear also indicts the de-humanizing effects of technology.
Ugh. I feel like Charlton Heston in the final scene of “The Planet of the Apes,” on hands and knees, pounding his fists after he sees the head of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand: “you finally really did it … you maniacs … you blew it up!”
Oh, about New York City’s mandated cell phone blackout day?
I was kidding, of course.
