- Oh my, yes, please yes, open your giant purse or crack
your bitchin' briefcase and whip out that swell little silver Motorola
and pop in the earpiece and dial that bad boy right up.
-
- Because you know what I'd love right now, sitting here
right next to you right at this tedious never-ending airborne moment? Why,
I'd love nothing more than to listen to you whine for the next 137 minutes
to your husband about how your acid reflux has been acting up again and
you really think the goddamn Purple Pill ain't working and by the way how
are your hemorrhoids honey maybe you should try tying a little rubber band
around it to choke it off and oh sweet Jesus and we're still 10,000 feet
over Oregon, and I am here, paralyzed.
-
- I can't escape. It is physically impossible to slide
more than nine inches away from you and it's apparently illegal for me
to spend the entire flight in the three-square-foot airplane bathroom banging
my head against the wall, and there simply aren't enough little bottles
of Stoli in the in-flight drink cart to turn your conversation from brain-gnawingly
deadly to merely numbly sufferable.
-
- And despite how I am a writer and am therefore supposed
to love this kind of thing, I really do not care to imagine the life you
must lead that has led you to this moment wherein you find that you absolutely
goddamn must call your sister and discuss in infinite painstaking detail
just what, exactly, you should wear on your date with your rehabbed ex-husband
who is taking you to Red Lobster to try and compensate for the drunkenness
and the sloth and the diddling of the gum-snapping babysitter in the tract
home rec room last summer.
-
- I am not all about your hot stock deal. I am not caring
all that much to hear of your plans for cheap dinner somewhere "cheap,
but not cheapy." I am entirely, fiercely disinterested in your deeper
thoughts about the pitching lineup for the Diamondbacks. Speak fondly about
how much you love Bush and how this war on Iraq is making you feel patriotic
again despite the lobotomy and watch the blood drip from my ears.
-
- I'm sorry, I know this sounds rude. I know this sounds
callous. I know this sounds harsh and unbecoming but you must know that
these exact scenarios, and a million like them, they are about to happen.
To me. To you. To all of us.
-
- The People Who Regulate Such Things (a.k.a., the FAA)
are right now opening it up for discussion about whether to allow
cell phone use among passengers during commercial airline flights. And
the gods did say, oh holy hell.
-
- I mean, big deal, right? Far more important things tearing
up and spitting down on the known universe right now than worrying about
annoying people who insist on using their cell phones every goddamn waking
moment in every human public space imaginable, and hence the nonissue of
using them during flights all sounds innocuous enough until you sit there
and think about it for about eight seconds and then you stand up and throw
your coffee mug against the wall in a mad fury and scream oh my freaking
god, no. No, please no.
-
- It is already hard enough, this human-communication thing.
It is already chaotic enough and already convoluted enough and we are already
so insanely locked into technology's vicious beautiful grip, so desperate
to make ourselves available and to make ourselves heard at all times that
it's moved past silly and past baffling and way past gee-whiz how-do-they-do-that
and into the realms of painful and dangerous and spiritually debilitating
and hang-up-the-damn-phone-or-I-might-have-to-slap-you.
-
- This is the incredible thing about phones. They render
us invisible. No matter where we are, no matter the crowd immediately surrounding
us or the person in the seat next to us or standing in front of us in line,
we think we are in our own little personal bubble of cute isolation as
we yammer and we think no one can see us and no one can hear us and even
if they do, well, hey, screw them free country back off sucker.
-
- You thought it was bad when the Dockers-clad geek standing
in line at Starbucks stammered like a chipmunk on meth into his Nokia to
his buddy about the kick-ass pipeline throughput of the company's new server
clusters? Just wait until he's sitting right next to you on a four-hour
flight to New York and he can't stop saying the words "awesome CGI
firepower" over and over as he yammers into the phone and it's all
you can do to keep from jamming your copy of "Quiet Mind, Still Mind"
into his low-tech little mouth.
-
- Like it's already not bad enough on a plane right now,
awkward and tense and resigned, like flying hasn't already morphed from
a once semipleasant, relatively stress-free event where you could choose
to either tune everything out with headphones or a book, or maybe (heaven
forfend) actually meet someone new, strike up a genuinely interesting conversation
with an fascinating and funny and kind stranger, into this chattering maw
of stress and anxiety and homeland security where it actually feels like
you are discouraged from speaking to anyone in person and everyone is a
potential threat and every carry-on could be a weapon and goddammit give
me back my Zippo lighter because no, I do not intend to unfasten my seat
belt and leap down and try to light the seat cushions on fire really, really
slowly and demand we turn this plane around right now and fly it directly
into Laura Bush's creepy hair. Cell phone chatter will make that roughly
46.3 times worse.
-
- But that's not all. It gets uglier. More depressing.
-
- Because if people chattering away on their cells on the
bus or in the malls or in the supermarket or in restaurants has taught
us anything, it is that, by far the worst and most soul-numbing part of
having to listen to the intimate conversations of casual strangers is the,
how to put this gently, general mundane tedium of it all, the sheer unbridled
yawning monotony, the realization that, oh my God, we as a species are
just so wondrously, incredibly -- what do you call it? Oh yes: boring.
-
- It's true. And we do not need to be reminded, again and
again, just how very tiresome our thoughts can be, we beautiful and enlightened
creatures of Earth, and say what you will about the supposed thrill of
listening in on private conversations on those Radio Shack decoder things
geek voyeurs use to scour neighborhoods for wireless phone signals, there
just ain't that many cool sexy people having hot phone sex or cool screaming
fights or sharing juicy perverted details about what they want to do to
their best friend's boyfriend with a bottle of Creme de Menthe and some
clogs and a roll of Reynolds Wrap.
-
- This is the real reason we don't need cell phones on
planes. Air travel is already anesthetizing enough, trapped as we all are
in skinny shaky little aluminum tubes thousands of feet in the air with
nothing but stale peanuts and Nora Roberts and US Weekly and loud iPods
to get us through, without the constant reminder that we are, in truth
and when you peel it all back and strip it all away, just not all that
interesting, or deep, or utterly mandatory to the universe.
-
- In other words, people start chattering on their cell
phones on the plane, and it just might be the final straw. The thing that
Puts Us Over the Edge until we realize we are, despite all our meager protests
and delicate claims to the contrary, just barely beyond the amoeba stage,
barely above the quivering threshold of tolerable, just like the president
keeps trying to demonstrate, via his very existence. And who the hell wants
to be reminded of that?
-
- Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every
Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.
-
-
- http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/05/06/notes050605.DTL
- ©2005 SF Gate
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