You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
A caveman living in modern times.
Imagine how he would react standing in a loin cloth, covered in woolly mammoth skins, staring at the bright lights of Times Square.
Would he throw a rock at the Good Morning America banner? Would he run from the blinding array of lights at Toys R Us? Or would he embrace it all and buy himself a new suit at Lord & Taylors?
My friend Schultzy called me the other day. He is this caveman. He is a technological throw back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and telephones were big and square and connected to a pole outside.
Schultzy is old school, a techno-phobe, who still reads the LA Times. He doesn’t own a computer. He doesn’t Tweet. He doesn’t facebook. He doesn’t have a linked in account. He has never Googled, or dot commed or surfed the web.
Lobotomized lobsters have logged more time on line than my buddy Schultzy.
If it ain’t in the L.A. Times or the Big Bear Gazette or on local news, Schultzy has never seen it.
So when he called me the other day, using a cell phone, I began making fun of him.
“Where’d you get a cell phone from?”
He laughed out loud.
He wants to talk and talk and talk and catch up on old times. I love the man, but who has 2 hours to talk on a phone in today’s rat race.
“If you had a computer, I could email you stuff,” I say. “Then when we spoke on the phone we wouldn’t have to catch up on 3 months of crap. You’d all ready know what was going on.”
He proceeds to tell me that he hates computers, like Eagles fans hate Santa Claus.
“Don’t trust them,” He says.
What don’t you trust about them I ask.
I can’t see him, but I imagine him whispering into his phone, looking nervously around his apartment, like spooks from the CIA are listening from a van in a nearby alley.
“I don’t like it”, he says. “I don’t know how to use it. I have been having a hell of a time even putting in job applications lately. I go into the store and ask for an application and they ask me if I all ready applied on line. I am embarrassed to tell them I don’t know what the hell they are talking about so I lie and then I don’t get the job. Then I go out and start drinking,” he says with a belly laugh.
Go on line? The only line Schultzy knows is the fine line between sanity and insanity.
I tell him about some pictures I found of him while cleaning out my garage.
“Remember that crazy weekend in Rosa Rita?” I say.
Send them to me he says.
I am exasperated.
“You mean, print them out, and put them in an envelope, and literally lick a damn stamp and mail them to you? Are you high?”
“Yes,” he chortles. “How else would you do it?”
“Well for starters, if you weren’t a cave denizen afraid of technology, I’d email them to you.”
“I don’t have email, i don’t need no computer,” he says in angry way.
“Yeah, I know, you’ve told me this before. That argument worked in 1986 when there was no damn Internet, but 3 year olds use the web now in pre school. You can’t stick your head in the technological sand any longer.”
I hear him guzzling a beer on the other end of the line disgusted with my thought process.
“What about your cell phone? It must get text messages right?”
“I don’t know. I got something once. But I’m not sure how it got on my screen.”
I feel like I am talking to the crew of the Nina Pinta and Santa Maria as we sail to the edge of the world, about to fall into oblivion.
“OK, let’s try something crazy,” I say as if I am some Native American Shaman about to conjure up spirits in the wind.
“I am going to text a picture to you from that Mexico trip we took. Let me know if you get it.”
He hims and haws and tells me how his phone wont do that.
“Whatever Nostradamus,” I say, telling him to pull his head out of the 80’s.
I hang up and proceed to text the photo to his cell.
Five minutes go by and suddenly my phone rings. It’s Schultzy.
“What now,” I exclaim preparing for another war and peace round of discussions.
“Yes Schultz.”
Suddenly my ear piece is filled with cackling laughter.
WOW. WOW. WOW.
He is giddy and all he says is Wow over and over again.
A smile comes to my face. A little technology from across the planet has brightened this dinosaur’s life.
“Wow!”
“You can thank me later Schultz,” I say. As I hang up, I hear him still cackling.
I don’t know anybody in the whole world who doesn’t own a computer. I don’t know anyone in the galaxy who has never sent an email or a text or gone onto facebook.
I imagine the joy Schultz must be feeling. He is suddenly looking at a picture from a Mexico trip decades ago. He is viewing it on a little cell phone screen the size of a book of matches.
I can only think of the prehistoric apes in 2001 A Space Odyssey as they touch the monolith and gain “realization” that there is more to life than fire and sticks.
I plan to send Schultz more texts. I will probably call him first and warn him so he doesn’t have a heart attack when his phone makes whatever sound it makes when it receives data.
It is good to be the 21st century Shaman of technological abundance.
And that is crazy.