Approaching Ludditia

First there was the car. The new car. This would have been maybe two years ago, or nearly. I’d never had automatic windows before that, or automatic locks, I mean remote locks, or one of those digital speedometer things, you know, and my car tells me when the air in one of my tires is low.

These were all great big changes for me, from my old car, but nothing really changed. It was the way I got to work and to my parents’ house and to some other places too, sometimes, and from. I notice something and what I notice is three weeks is all it takes until the new things become routine and you stop noticing and that’s when the old things become the old days.

Except Jamie leaving. Jamie leaving takes longer.

In November, I got a smart phone. Before that, I had a dumb phone, which was fine, a dumb phone was just fine, except for the screen stopped working and then I couldn’t tell anymore who was calling me. I accidentally answered the phone for people I did not wish to talk to and so I had to buy a new one.

“Oh, Harry!” they said to me when I bought a smart phone. “It’s about time! It is going to change your life.”

But it did not change my life and they were very wrong. All of them. My life, driving my twenty-first century car, talking on my twenty-first century phone, it’s the same as my old life before, pretty much, but now I take more pictures and also I am able to read group texts. When I walk I take pictures of the buildings and sometimes the street and I’m trying to take a picture of that corner of my room that quivers in and out.

I read somewhere that a lot of us now define ourselves too much by advances in technology. You know, like “Rufus, what did you accomplish this year?” and Rufus says, “Oh, well, I’ve got a Fitbit now.”

There could be something to that.

I don’t know. I have to think about it some more.