Day 62 of the Light Phone

I invent the White Car Sprint training protocol

It’s not like my dumb phone doesn’t have music-playing capabilities. It could double as an mp3 player. The technology is there, I just haven’t found the time to upload any music onto it, and I have headphone despair anyways. Now that everyone at the gym is wearing those big dopey ones that scream, “I don’t want to hear you,” I just want to scream, “Listen to the sounds of the world!” I’ve gone through like six sets of Jabra earbuds, but won’t buy anymore because I have this fear that bluetooth earbuds are going to give me brain cancer or eardrum cancer, and before you label me a conspiracy theorist, think about all of the things that didn’t give us cancer before they did.

So now I run without music, without a podcast, metronome, phone calls or training cues. I invent this game where when I pass a white car, it triggers a sprint and when pass the next white car, I go back into an easy run. I don’t know how fast I’m going or how quick my turnover is. White Car Sprints have to get me across the finish line in under two hours for my half marathon in June. It feels like that craze when everyone started running barefoot or with minimal footwear, except I’m running bare-eared, and no one joins me, talks to me, notices or cares.

I wonder which sense I would give up the quickest. We curate the physical world with concrete walking slabs lined with rosebushes and cut stone, painted wood, trimmed trees, but that’s not enough. Cut the roses and bring the blooms inside to gussy up the place. Soundproof the windows but put in a stereo. Bring in the sounds of the players but not the musicians. I want them to fill the room with music, but not actually fill the room. No, shrink the speakers. Put them in my ears. I want it to fill my head. No, extract the oil from the rose and mix it with wax, run a string through it and light it on fire. I want to feel the warmth but smell the rose and light up the room.

Say I coat my tongue with something that makes everything taste like cake or coca cola or spicy homemade pickles. Say everything can be modified to be not what it is but the experience of what you want it to be. You curate your entire experience of being human, you filter all those senses.

You know who maybe wouldn’t have to filter their senses are the millionaires building homes on the bluffs in Montecito. You would want to take that all in wouldn’t you? The briny scent of the crashing waves. The turquoise days when the sun heats your skin. So gentle. Your chef makes tacos from the fish she caught off the Channel Islands. Slurp. Would I even strive for anything if I had it all?

Imagine a dog with the technology to create smells. They just press a button on their little smell device and out comes the odor of their favorite butthole or tree stump. They get lonely for their human and summon a whiff of their breath.

There’s this natural drive to be stimulated in the quickest and easiest way.

I’m in a room maybe by myself at home, maybe surrounded by others lit by fluorescent lights. Perhaps I’m at the DMV. I don’t want to be here. Take me away, phone. Take me away, booze. Take me away, you fucking big ole piece of cake. I don’t want to hear the world. I want to hear the flute, the waves, the crunch of a potato chip. Even something as benign as a book. We can all agree, can’t we, that reading a book is healthy, good, sanctioned, but even they can be addictive. Grandma would read her books at stoplights. She would get trapped at the parking lot of the gym after her workout in the car with a book in her hand, lost in another world. My aunt and mom bitch that these things took her away.

Then comes the alternate world that one enters with the phone it’s easier, takes less imagination, and is harder to put down. The programmers design it that way. Is our vision going to deteriorate faster than the previous generations? Grandma has macular degeneration. Mom used to say it was bad for my eyes to read in a dimly lit room. How is it for my eyes to stare at a word processor that’s made of blue light. Is writing these days akin to staring into the sun? Would I do it if my millionaire husband was building me a house in Montecito or would I just lay in a lounge chair like a lizard and let the warmth wash over me. Take in the blue sky. Be content with the trappings of the physical world.

I write about not having a smart phone like it’s my way of running barefoot like I’m feeling my connection to the earth while I run, which it kind of is. I’m going back to the early days of man when we held books in our hands and couldn’t show every picture we ever took. I have to get ink for my printer so I can carry portraits of my cats to show people who haven’t met them yet. It’s important to show people pictures of one’s cats. I guess I could carry my book of pictures that I’ve drawn of my cats. I could be a total fucking weirdo and draw up a quick picture of all three of my cats or just sit there and describe in detail what each one of them looks like, but that might be why people are even putting those big headphones on at the gym, right? It’s to protect themselves from people like me who would go on endlessly about whatever new thing my cat is doing or what meal I had or what training protocol I’m trying, or what macronutrient I’m cutting out.

The whole thing stems from both a need for control that has me gripping this life so tight, and a need for release because no one is strong enough to keep it all together all the time. I sneak my release in with the social media binges, the late night trips to the bakery section of Vons, followed by self admonishment and further tightening. I have to pull it all together and the older I get, the less time I have and the tighter my grip. This is what I’m worried about. I’m worried about losing the moments, I’m worried about looking down at my phone when I’m 43 and looking up to find that I’m fifty, and I spent 20% of my life watching reels and GIFs and memes.

I’m worried that it will be a waste of all my senses. They fade as you age. You take it for granted when you’re young that you’ll always be able to see the faces of your family. Where are they going? They’ll always be there. They won’t though, and my eyes, my optometrist told me at the last appointment that after 40 your vision can change from the beginning of one week to the end of the next. I was aghast, and now I can’t wear my glasses. Everything is fuzzy with and without my prescription.

Here is the thing that I rail against that keeps me up at night. That everything is temporary. That whatever building I find myself in will probably still be standing long after I’m gone, that the trees I have a bitch of a time keeping trimmed will keep growing tall long after my arms have lost the strength to hack at them. If I just let it all pass me by and live a homogenized curated online life with algorithm feeding me the most addictive aspects of the human experience when I could have been looking up and listening as my daughter tells me the story of what happened in art class or to hear my mom and her wife ask each other for the 765th time in their lives if the other had fed the dog yet, well I can’t think of anything more sad.