VERY NOT URGENT
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I spent a month in the Bay Area that felt like a year.
It was 2012 and I was well into a classic cross country road trip with my good friend. Let’s call him Don for the sake of the story.
Leaving my hometown in Pennslyvania we cruised down the Blue Ridge Parkway for a brief pit stop in Asheville, NC, before making a beeline for Don’s old stomping grounds in Albuquerque, NM where we spent a week or so reconnecting with his old friends and inspecting the local hot springs. From there we went to SoCal, specifically Ventura, where the car nearly keeled over on Christmas Eve. It cost all our financial reserves to get it fixed. I think the mechanic gave us a deal.
After working a couple weeks for a fella named Joe Tree, a local arborist who Don had met years ago while hitchhiking through the area, we had saved up enough money to make our getaway (different story) in some comfort. Don was a skater and wanted to check back in on some choice bowls in Berkeley, or Beserkly, as he called it.
Reaching the outskirts of Berkeley, Don warned me that the nickname, common among travelers, wasn’t for nothing.
Once in the belly of the beast we mostly car camped, using my old Macbook every few days to scrounge odd jobs off Craig’s List to support our various enterprises. Off the top of my head, within a month we:
Were swindled by a Jamaican con man in San Francisco
Bartended a party for a Russian trust fund baby
Broke up a vicious dog fight at People’s Park
Explored the nearby redwood forest
Got violently ill (food poisoning?)
Went to every skate park in Berkeley
Had a nighttime walkabout chanting with a traveling Hare Krishna
Got hired for a moving job by a polygamous throuple that was literally breaking up as we worked
Crashed at a dilapidated theater in an Oakland ghetto run by Burning Man organizers and artists
Got in a car accident
It was only after the car accident that, exhausted, we wised up and hightailed it out of the Bay (with an insurance check and only some cosmetic damage in hand).
During that time I genuinely don’t remember ever using my flip phone and my Macbook was only trotted out for maybe an hour or two every couple days to score a gig.
I can recall towards the end of our time in the Bay Area the growing sense that events which under relatively normal conditions would have been memorable or even astonishing began to take on a quality of an almost luxurious ephemerality. Oh, of course the wingnut is using a blow torch to “fix” his skateboard in the middle of the half-pipe.
Immersion in adventure seemed to stretch time, though looking back large swathes of our days were spent sitting in the car, figuring out what to eat next, walking from here to there, etc.
I used an extreme example from the not-too-distant past of my own life as a contrast to the extreme computer (phone) use that now passes as normal.
For my days have disappeared like smoke… —Psalm 101:4 LXX
As tempting as it soemtimes is to reach for a hammer when the phone rings, I’m no Luddite. That said I recommend Jean-Claude Larchet’s The New Media Epidemic as an excellent primer for understanding the costs of our new digitally mediated existence. Various technologies are not “neutral” as some would have you believe, only as good or bad as how one uses them. Different technologies lend different powers along with different possible pathologies. From Larchet’s chapter “Shrinking Distance and Time”:
The new media have changed the nature of time, removing its continuity to make it broken, piecemeal, and scattered. In days gone by, the continuity of time could be felt through the continuity of activities that required unbroken attention for some considerable duration. They had stability and coherence, giving a sense of the continuity of time. This continuity favored these activities. It encouraged concentration so that time could be used effectively and to the full. The results were good, and even if such a full use of time could be tiring, it avoided stress. When it was empty, there could be boredom, but there could also be meditation.
Connected man is sorely tried by today’s time, broken to pieces and shards. When he tries to concentrate on one activity, he cannot keep it up for long, but is constantly interrupted. He may then take on multiple activities at once, which results in a stream of incoherent and unrelated events.
I’m certainly guilty of this type of incoherent activity at times. You see it everywhere and it’s certainly not conducive to any sustained creative life. Harumph.
I have a handful of practices for mitigating my new media use but the most effective by far is just turning the blasted devices off and putting them where I can’t see them.
Wait.
I’m sorry this won’t do. I had originally planned a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between time and technology but just as the words “in-depth analysis” appear alongside “time and technology” within my mind I feel overtaken by what I can only describe as an extravagant sense of ennui mixed with loathing.
I think I’ll take a walk.
Amen, brother!! Perfect!