MikeyOpp.com

An odd thing has been occurring, ever since I moved out to Iowa. What has been happening is that I will be sitting in my office, staring at a white page with black squiggles, doing my best to focus on my job; writing, when all of a sudden, all of my attempts to focus will become impossible due to the fact that this big, white clunky plastic thing, sitting in the corner of the room, well, this darn thing, it will start to “ring.”

The first time that this happened, my eyes quickly spun away from the black squiggles on the white page that I had been dutifully concentrating on, and over to the source of this disruption. Well, when I discovered the “ring” noise to be emanating from a “telephone,” I found myself chuckling, and thinking, “Why, it’s an old fashioned telephone. How quaint!” (Note: I don’t actually think to myself like a British person; I just wanted to use the word quaint…)

But now that I have acclimated myself to the distraction of the “telephone ring,” I have begun to thoroughly enjoy the presence of a fully functional “old fashioned telephone” in my office. Oftentimes, when the white plastic “telephone” rings, I will find myself transfixed; marveling at the fact that because of my six year love affair with my “cell phone,” I now find this “telephone” to be antiquated. Yet just fifteen years ago, this telephone was a top of the line symbol of prestige and modernity, featuring a “flash” button for call waiting, and the much revered “speaker phone” button.

When my “land line telephone” rings, it rings patiently, in even intervals, as opposed to playing an mp3 or mimicking what I can only imagine are the sounds we will all hear someday when alien robots from outer space invade us. So when my “telephone” pleasantly rings, instead of ignoring it, I find myself excitedly picking up the receiver to see who is calling.

For those of you reading this that were born in the 1990’s, “the receiver” is a separate hunk of plastic that is attached to the base of the “telephone” with a long spiraled cord.

My particular “telephone” has been in service for a long enough time now that its own cord has become irrevocably entangled in itself, the same way we humans become irrevocably entangled in our emotional baggage as we age—there’s nothing to be done about it, it’s just part of both the human and the telephone aging process, and you would go insane if you tried to straighten out a tangled telephone cord, in the same way that therapists slowly go insane, overtime, as they try to help their patients deal with the past.

I pick up the “telephone” and I speak into the mouth piece.

“Hello?” I sound excited, because I am. It’s a giant mystery. Anyone could be on the other line—anyone! It could be a relative, an old friend, a complete stranger, a solicitor, a wrong number, the pope the president your mom—I tell you, the possibilities are endless!

“Len?” The person on the other end asks.

Len is not some code word invented by “land line users” for identification purposes. No, Len is my father’s name. It’s short for Leonard, which, as a child, always reminded me of the iconoclastic Renaissance man, Leonardo Di Vinci, and then later, for a brief period of high school, it reminded me of “Lenny,” the retarded adult from the Steinbeck novel we had to read, “Of Mice and Men,” you know, the one who kept asking George to “tell [him] about the rabbits?”

But now, Len is a name that is safely stored in the slot in my brain next to the word Dad. And it’s a good fit, since they’re both three letters long, and consist of a vowel sandwiched between two consonants.

“No, this is his son, Mike.” I remain excited, for this caller and me are still knee deep in “phase one” of the “land line” telephone call process; discovering who is calling whom. Up next: phase two, “why whom is calling whom!”

***I have begun using a “land line” because I don’t get good cellular phone reception at “The Farm House,” here in Iowa. By “not good” I mean that in order to use my cellular phone I have to climb up to the north eastern most point of this house’s roof, Green Acres style, wearing a homemade suit of aluminum foil. Then, clutching the drain pipe of the roof with my left hand and the cellular phone in my right hand, I must hoist my body as far out above the ground as I can safely manage, all the while holding my body in a position that would make an enlightened Yoga Master lose his “Zen” with jealousy, and if I do this just right, well, then I can get a half bar of signal for 22.3 seconds, which is just enough time to send or receive one text message. Oh, and I can only do this during certain portions of an extremely complicated lunar cycle that I discovered after researching Vedic Astrology in a secret basement room in the Library of Alexandria…

I’m going to use my land line to call Sprint about this, sooner or later, but in the meantime, it’s been really nice using a “land line.”

It reminds me of simpler, calmer times. Times like the 1990’s, when our President was still a lying piece of shit, but he lied about ruining the economy, not about killing hundreds of thousands of people in the name of oil, and his Daddy.

Times when instead of being inspired to “hope” for “change” by a yokel on the left, we were instead distracted by a chunky, not-so-attractive, take-her-or-leave-her-last-call-three-beer-minimum white house intern and about four hundred soft synonyms for the word fellatio.

As a nation, we were oh-so-innocent back then! Innocent of the economic havoc that Alan Greenspan was wreaking on our economy, innocent of our addiction to gasoline and electricity, innocent of our carbon footprints, and most of all, we were innocent to our impending addiction to the cell phone.

People! Stop and examine your life. When you leave a movie house (some call it a theater, but, I already used the word quaint, so why not go full on British?), at any rate, when you leave any place where you have reluctantly turned your cell phone ringer off, as soon as it’s safe to do so, do you find yourself fumbling around in your pocket or purse, like an addict looking for their cigarettes, in order to find your phone, to “see what calls and text messages you have missed?” I do.

This summer, I’ve been exploring the action that is quitting various habits of mine, just to see where it would take me. First, in March, I quit smoking pot. Then in April, I quit smoking cigarettes, and soon thereafter, I quit drinking, which of course was aided by a car accident and the ensuing prescription drugs that explicitly warned me of fatal liver damage if I drank. Then, I got real brave, and I decided to quit “society-as-I-know-it” and move to Iowa.

And now that I’m here, in Iowa, I have brief flashes in which I really, truly do seem to miss things like cigarettes, dope, alcohol, and most of all, my friends. But the one thing that I really do not miss is my cell phone addiction. I certainly miss having my own phone line, but I do NOT miss my cell phone addiction.

Oh sweet unintentional real-life situational irony! As I completed this last sentence, the very telephone that I described in the first paragraph of this column just rang. It was like a detective mystery. Me and a stranger, working together in an effort to figure out the who, what, when and where of it all—and this is why the “land line” suddenly fascinates me. It’s a relic from my past, and it takes me back to an era that only really exists in the nostalgia of my mind.

How well do you remember the late 1980’s and 1990’s? Sure, on paper, they weren’t that long ago, but think about it—think hard, back to, let’s say, twenty years ago; the year is now 1988.

In 1988 Top Gun was “all the rave,” because Tom Cruise was still considered cool, instead of being a zealously-psychotic-scientology-obsessed-cradle-robbing-brain-washing-egomaniac (Google “Tom Cruise” and “Oprah,” if you don’t believe me).

In 1988, the nation was trying to choose between electing a former head of C.I.A. Vice President, George Bush or the cock-sure “Massachusetts Miracle,” a Greco-American Governor from Massachusetts; named Michael Dukakis (I find it noteworthy that twenty years ago Dukakis won a primary with a field that included a black candidate, Jesse Jackson, and, of course, Al Gore).

In 1988, no one had heard of the internet, because Al Gore had not yet invented it, and if a car hit you, chances were that the driver simply wasn’t paying good attention, as opposed to now, where the chances are that an errant driver was focusing on sipping their Starbucks coffee while adjusting their in-car-DVD player and trying to use their cell phone, all at once.

Look, I’m not calling anyone out here, unless you count myself, because “Lord knows,” I’m one of the biggest cell phone addicts I know, but I’d have to be a total, blithering moron, as opposed to just a partially blithering moron (which I am), not to notice the juxtaposition of my cell phone dependency before and after I moved to Iowa.

And so I find it worth writing about. And ironically, my cell phone withdrawal has helped me to realize that we are a culture dangerously obsessed with finger pointing and name calling; all in the name of addiction.

I think addiction is a total buzzword, and we need to “lighten up.” I am just as stupid and self obsessed without my cell phone as I was before. I have just replaced chronically sending text messages with chronically reading and writing.

I see a modern addiction to the concept of addiction everywhere I turn these days. I see it on the television, I hear it on the radio, and I read about it in the newspapers; and this obsession is beginning to come to a roiling boil with increasing vagueness and an absurd inclination to buzzwords.

We now associate addictions with not just celebrities who abuse narcotics and designer drugs, but we are faced with “America’s Oil Dependency!” We have become “A Fast Food Nation!” And we are obsessed with our diets and technology; assuming and consuming a hierarchical and innate truth that means yielding to commercially driven notions like “Lo-Carb, no-Carb, Trans-Fat, De-Caf, Ultra-Lite, Wi-Fi-Hi-Fi-XM-Serius-Satelite-Tivo-DVR-Plasma-Hi-Def-Wy-Clef-J-Lo-Po-Mo-Oh-No-AAAAAAAAAAH!

Someone, please, take me back to 1999, where the only acronym I had to memorize was “Y2K,” and the most incredulous event I had to wrap my head around was figuring out how in the hell someone as untalented and stupid as “Kid Rock” had managed to cut an album that went Platinum seven times(!).

When I look at my “land line,” and I really think about where ten and twenty years of technology and social improvement have supposedly taken us, all I can think to say is, it sucks to be 2008.