Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Death to technology!

I don’t own an iPod. I don’t even know what an MP3 is.
I don’t own a hi-def, flat screen, liquid plasma, 5,800-inch television with picture-in-picture, cup-holders and magic fingers option.
I don’t have a satellite dish system that allows me access to thousands of really important channels like the Home Shopping Network for People Who Really Like Cheese (HSNPWRLC for short) or ESPN 8 (the Ocho), or cool packages like the Sports Freak package (watch 10 different football games simultaneously until your eyes bleed!) or the Movie Buff package (your chance to enjoy every single movie that came out this year, including classics like Codename: The Cleaner, Norbit, Premonition and Are We Done Yet?).
I don’t own a satellite radio in my car and I’m sure I’m missing all types of fine programming, such as Howard Stern asking a stripper if she ever got Chlamydia from her dance pole, and Anthony and Opie listening to people making whoopee in church.
I don’t have a digital radio set up. Which means that I can’t hear all of those secret, hidden stations in between the regular stations I listen to. This saddens me to no end because I can’t help but wonder how many other radio stations there are out in the void of the air waves, all playing 15 minutes worth of commercials, all at the same time! (Has anybody else noticed that at any given time, four of your five car radio presets are commercials?)
I don’t have an iPhone, so I can’t scroll through youporn.com whenever I want, or balance my bank account or do whatever it is people bought iPhones to do, (I assume that iPhones have some kind of super sweet option or ability that no other phone has, which is why people were stepping over each other to buy the damn things.)
I don’t have the latest video game console. I don’t have the hottest and newest game that looks so lifelike that I actually can feel the gun buck in my hands as I spray the streets of Los Angeles with lead. I don’t have large parties where I invite people over to play games where we have to simulate the act of bowling or fishing.
I have a c.d. player. I own hundreds of c.d.s. True lugging around a big ass c.d. case is unwieldy and heavy, but at least I don’t have to worry about dropping it, losing it or anybody stealing it.
I have a 20-something inch television. It isn’t super hi-def or whatever, but I can watch shows and movies on it regardless, so I guess it’s working. Works well enough for me, anyway.
I have cable. My cable gives me access to hundreds of channels, and you know what? Most of them are pretty pointless anyway. I basically just stick to the Food Network, Cartoon Network and a few other random odds and ends. Of the 300 channels available to me, I watch less than a dozen.
I’ve got a regular radio in my car. Nothing fancy, (though it does allow 12 presets on the FM dial. Classy!) but it gets the job done. I hit a button and I listen to a station. If there’s naught but commercials, I press another button and I get to listen to one of those c.d.s that I mentioned earlier. It’s a good system.
I have a cell phone. A Katana, actually. Guess what it does? It allows me to talk to other people when I want to. Isn’t that amazing? No need for extra bells and whistles. I don’t need to check my email on my phone, I don’t need to listen to the latest uber-digitized mega hit by Timbaland (I don’t think he even has real people singing in his songs anymore, he just uses Stephen Hawking’s computer voice thing. He wants to be this generation’s Roger Troutman, from Zapp.) And I don’t care about taking really grainy pictures that just end up looking like something Helen Keller took with her eyes closed (wait, would that even make a difference?)
I have a Nintendo 64. It came out in the late 90s. I’ve got a good half dozen games, but I play just one: Mariocart.
I am an analog man in a digital world. I don’t try to match my outfit or my mood to the color of the device playing my music. I’m not that shallow. I don’t want to turn my oven on with my phone from 300 miles away. I don’t need a feature that uses dots to represent where my friends are located on some map.
My laptop doesn’t work half the time and I don’t really mind. My digital camera has only 4 megapixels (for those of you that don’t know, megapixels are tiny little creatures that live in cameras and paint the pictures that you take. The more megapixels you have, the better the pictures) and is from Hewlett-Packard (which isn’t known for its cameras). It broke over the summer, but I don’t really mind.
I like it this way. I don’t feel the need to be a slave to technology. I prefer incorporating technology to fit my life, instead of trying to rearrange my life to accept new technology. I honestly don’t need a bunch of different little doodads to make my life any easier or more efficient than it already is.
So, when the day comes that some kind of technology-based disease or sickness arrives on the scene (oh, it’s coming, you’d better believe it!) I’ll be sitting pretty, laughing from my analog kingdom.
I think I’ll go punch Bill Gates in the face now.

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