Though there's a bit of padding to this piece, overall he nails the inherent hilarity in our relationship with our cellphones.
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 2, 2004
Digital cameras in cell phones? Video capability? Built-in walkie-talkies? Four hundred distinct voice mailboxes, each with customizable polyphonic ring tones and a personalized greeting and special high-definition digital screen effects that light up and pulse and spin? Whatever.
You know what? We deserve a little bit more.
We need phones with features that fulfill real desires in the human animal. Phones that don't just claim they do it all, but actually do, and with lots of lube and laughter and excellent mortgage rates and minimal bloodletting or cleanup. Nokia, get on this. I am so not kidding.
Because cell phones today? Claim they do everything. Claim they scrub the ..damn sink. Claim they are so gloriously feature packed you couldn't possibly add another feature or they'd burst wide open in a screaming cataclysmic blinking gurgling mess. In other words, phones today lie their beeping asses off.
It's true. We all know cell phones are packed mostly with wild telecom hype, all beeps and chirps and bells and whistles, when the damn thing's really only truly good for locating your lost husband in the meat aisle of Costco or ordering Thai takeout on your way home ... or calling everyone in your address book from your seat in the back of the café because you're bored and jaded and you think it makes you sound important and besides you paid for all those ...damn minutes so dammit, you're gonna use 'em.
To which I say, big freakin' deal.
Get me a cell phone that can flip the TV on just in time for "The Simpsons." Get me the phone that will pause the (video) when the doorbell rings. Get me the cell phone that can store my entire music collection but will play only the song I'm in the mood to hear right at that moment even though I might not have any idea what the hell that song is, but then will switch to another tune in the middle of the song when I realize my mood isn't what I thought it was because I'm an American, ...dammit, and hard-core random-access schizophrenia isn't just a personal choice, it's a way of life.
Screw the video games and the 1,000-number address book. Get me the cell phone that not only screens my calls but also will tell me the psychoemotional state of the caller at the moment they call, and will also tell me, in efficient bullet-point detail, what they really think of me, and what they said about me last time at that party just after I left the room, and whether they think my new jacket is cool or just frumpy, and whether they desire, or have ever desired, to sleep with me, and why or why the hell not I mean what you don't like my cell phone or something?
Give me the cell phone that will help me penetrate the deep miasmatic fog of existence and beam radiant light on the true nature of the meaning of it all. And also warm up my damn coffee and organize all my unread magazines.
Get me the cell phone that intuits my lover's kaleidoscopic emotional cycles. Get me the cell phone that can tell when I'm supposed to offer constructive insights and tough-love feedback and fulfill my male role and try to fix everything in a powerful sweep of logic and sex and astounding reserves of grounded calm, and when I'm just supposed to shut the hell up and listen and nod and sigh sympathetically and give back rubs and money.
Give me the cell phone that will be so tiny it disappears inside my shirt pocket but also large enough to accessorize brilliantly with my watch and my car and my dog. Give me a cell phone that has an interactive fully automatic continuously updated map of all parking spaces in the City that will become available in the next five minutes at the destination to which I am driving and at which I will arrive in exactly four minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Internet access? Baseball scores? Real-time stock quotes? Yawn. Give me a cell that doubles as a ... swizzle stick and a poultry thermometer and a tire-pressure gauge and an emergency paper clip, a pocketknife and a corkscrew and a toenail clipper and a selector of the perfect cheese to go with a crisp summer Pinot Gris. And it should also have a pen. And a pack of Kleenex. And sunscreen dispenser. And coin purse. Lighter. And nose-hair trimmer. Pregnancy test. Incense burner.
This is not too much to ask. After all, they're the ones who promise everything. They're the ones churning out devices faster and easier and increasingly multifunctional every single goddamn day at an insane breathless breakneck technological pace no one can possibly follow much less understand or even care about.
They're the ones inventing gizmos that contain enough raw processing power to navigate the ...damn Cassini satellite and that pack enough random multifunctionality to sufficiently hurl anyone over 30 into the black hole of depressed quasi-nostalgia, saying holy Christ I remember when I used to have to actually dial the ...damn thing and hold it all the way up to my ear and actually speak in order to communicate.
And now, of course, it's all just infrared inter-lobe thought-triggered nanotransmitters implanted at birth into a tiny hole drilled into that tiny little bone in your inner ear. Or, rather, it will be, soon enough.
I need a phone that effortlessly and with excellent footnoting capability disproves the existence of an angry bitter homophobic money-cravin' war-lovin' born-again conservative Christian God. I need a cell that knows that spirituality and sex are inextricably linked and fused and gorgeously inseparable. I need a phone that knows full well how this nation has been blinded and bitch slapped by this sneering hate-filled war-mongering administration and is mad as hell and isn't gonna take it anymore.
I need a phone that can not only help me reconcile the divine existence of Jenna Haze with the radiant bliss of fine scotch and the perfect feeling of a late-summer night when you know all is right with the world despite the sneering conservative demon dogs who would deign to eat out the heart of all that is joyous and moist and salt rimmed, but can also celebrate this convoluted sticky endlessly savage orgiastically beautiful mess, and do it all for about $39.99 a month with unlimited night and weekend minutes.
This is the age of miracle and wonder. This is the age of when any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is the age of everyone saying oh my God I can't keep up with all the freakin' gizmos and hell look here I still can't program my VCR and I don't even own a VCR anymore because now I have a DVD.I need a phone that can interpret all this glorious obnoxious white noise, find the rainbow through the downpour, the rose among the thorns, the cosmic car-pool lane, the cool press-on tattoos in the giant box of karmic Cracker Jacks. Plus it should play that cool Lamb song whenever my girlfriend calls and wants to have sex.
What, too much to ask? Nah, couldn't be.
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