Geographic Footsteps

Geographic footsteps, a new age phrase if I have ever heard one. This one has been adopted by the financial services industry as verbiage that is supposed to be cerebrally catchy. It simply means that the world has lost it’s borders between nations and the  demarcation lines have been erased except for the nationalistic ones that exist in our own individual pride.

Crackberry

In the instantaneous world of the 21st century, I can see and speak to someone clear across the globe with the clarity that is only to be surpassed by their physical presence next to me. In a 1948 movie entitled: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Lon ChaneyJr., says to the operator that: I know how long it takes for a phone call to reach from London to the States, but please hurry! Would we even sit still for millisecond if someone told us that now.  In a movie from 1984: Starman, starring Charles Martin Smith he is heard to  say to his government superior, that we are the ancients when it comes to technology. I think of the progress technologically we have made in the sixties, seventies and eighties, only to see it double and triple over the last two decades.  

Point being? There are times that the wizardry cripples us. A great deal of the population is now codependent on their 4G phone. It is apparent everywhere you go. I see people walking and eyes glued to their 4 inch screens and letting the real world take the back seat as if it didn’t provide them excitement enough. Then as people have taken cell phone use to an even more dangerous level, texting, technology and it’s instant gratification has threatened the lives maybe as much as DWI has. I don’t know that for sure but the figures will become alarming when the studies are completed. 

I too have succumbed to the phone with every application, sans shoe horn and back scratcher and I want to admit openly that my will is as weak as most of America. I should not limit this phenomena to the U.S. either as a British friend of mine says that the English refer to their Blackberry’s as a “Crackberry’s.” 

Another drawback is just how rude we have become in the company of strangers when we are talking or texting to our inner circle. Just last night I was at a very boring seminar with an equally inept speaker when I spied about 1/4 of the audience thumb typing on their phones. I wonder if it was just because the speaker was boring, or how they were wishing they were someplace else. 

TBC

The Handwritten Letter

The handwritten letter might need explaining because it’s rarely if ever used. Simply it means a sheet of paper that has writing on it made by ink being pressed out of a pen or pencil containing words intended for one or more but relatively few persons.  It is a letter that has an envelope that is not pre printed and does not have prepaid postage marks. It has instead a real stamp that was personally licked with someone’s saliva and stuck onto the top right hand corner.  

When a hand written letter comes to me, it’s the first thing I open because it wasn’t mass produced and it required thought on behalf of another individual who was thinking about me specifically. The hand written letter like hen’s teeth is indeed a rare commodity. 

Flash

The news in America is a variety show, the only thing missing is the laugh track and applause. The kind of drivel that the networks pass off as news should be a crime, but since we have access to the BBC news, all is forgiven.  Every night the networks interrupt our favorite show with endless snippets about how bad the weather is going to be or how they can scare us about something that affects one person in the audience. 

Just tonight we were ‘exposed’ to a story about how certain bras made women sick and the impending law suit by the parasitical law firms.  Leave it to American ingenuity to try to make something serious about the obfuscation of mammary glands. 

e mail (Electronic Mail)

Electronic mail, the high priestess of 21st century communications leaves a lot to be desired as even the most ardent of devotees of it might agree. One characteristic about it that I find particularly disturbing is that it carries with it a degree of arrogance by the sender. It’s as if e-mail is universal and taken for granted that everyone uses it doesn’t matter if you like it or not. Phrases like: “Didn’t you get my e-mail” abound especially in the workplace as it seems to have replaced good old tried and true face to face communiqués. What it has done to the written word however cannot begin to be calculated. Once regarded as a wonder of man’s invention it now has become it’s own bureaucracy. Yes of course it’s more efficient in the world of multi-tasking but how far do we go in depersonalizing our own existence? When we go to our mailbox at the end of the drive or in the downstairs hallway we know instinctively how to separate junk mail from the items that we must pay heed to. Now however our being able to discern what is truth and what is fiction has taken a scurrilous turn.

When was the last time you sat down and actually wrote a letter to someone just out of your automobiles capabilities? I would venture to say it might be a long time. Oh I guess you still might send a card with your John Hancock for someone’s birthday but outside of that we seem to prefer touching others electronically which is totally devoid of human emotion. Yes we can add some new age anagrams and smiley’s but even those attachments are no more intimate than the greetings we exchange with familiar faces.

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The Narrow Path

Why a narrow path?  Should I not widen my sweep as middle age becomes my old man? No, I must avoid that and not be afraid to walk off the concrete and feel the earth soft under my feet. Therein lies the rub. The more I stay on path, the more set in my ways I become like my father before me. And that I will avoid at all costs, except to drink again.  But, off the path where new experiences lie, which I have always loved, the more fear I will feel because I love the thought of change but the uncertainty of the affect it will have on me plays havoc with my peace of mind. Now it leads me to another topic for another day, what is peace of mind?