A Day Without a Computer...I Survived

At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without it by my side. But as it turns out, going an entire day without turning on my computer didn’t kill me. I did survive.

The date was November 7, 2015. It was a Saturday just like any other Saturday in Chandler, Arizona—sunny skies; highs in the 70s; birds chirping; scorpions scurrying. It was all very ordinary, except for one thing—at no point that day did I turn on my computer. I didn’t flip open my laptop. Didn’t press the power button. Didn’t enter my password. And most importantly, I didn’t surf the internet. No checking my email. No scrolling through my Facebook feed. No tweeting or retweeting. No randomly searching Wikipedia or the IMDb. Just digital silence.

And for those of you thinking, “Big deal! Who needs to turn on their computer to do any of that stuff anyway? You just use your phone for all that,” I should let you know that I never use my phone for any of that. Yes, I’m about a decade behind when it comes to electronic technologies. My iPhone is certainly capable of doing any of those things, but I don’t use it in that way. Mostly I use it as a phone, a camera, or a paperweight.

And so it was that I spent an entire day without looking at my computer screen. More than a day, really, since I went from about 11:00 pm on Friday, the 6^th until about 8:30 am on Sunday, the 8^th without booting up. That’s 33.5 hours for those of you doing the math at home.

When I finally turned on my computer on Sunday morning, I wondered what kind of world would await me. Would cats have evolved to be winged-creatures? Would purple now be the new black? Would the Donald Trump presidential run all have been an elaborate prank that culminated with his appearance on SNL? (One can dream, anyway.)

As it turns out, nothing particularly earth-shattering seems to have occurred during my computer hiatus. I had 45 new emails in my inbox, of which I deleted 34 without opening. Of the eleven emails I did look at, the most important one informed me that my brother Mark’s 91^st favorite album of all time is Venus and Mars by Paul McCartney and Wings. Again, nothing earth-shattering. (Had it been 90^th instead of 91^st that would have been earth-shattering.)

On Facebook, I missed the birthday of three friends. But unless any of them keeps an Excel spreadsheet of their birthday greetings, I doubt they would have noticed that I didn’t post amongst their hundreds of well-wishers. But just to be safe, happy birthday to Michele, Kevin and Joanna!

And as for Twitter, I gained one follower in my absence—someone I never heard of named Ali Spagnola. I’m guessing she’s someone famous because she has one of those blue “verified account” symbols next to her name. Why she decided to follow me, I have no idea, but given that she follows 1.78 million people, I’m not going to take it to mean that we’re going steady.

So what did I learn from this grand experiment? Was it worth it to not be tapped in to our cyber society for an entire day? And will little Billy be rescued from the well? This and all more on the next exciting episode of As the Days of Our Lives Turns into the Shadow Knows. 

Past and Present Tense

I’m writing this blog by hand! Okay, well, this is the version typed into my computer after having written it by hand, so you’re losing the spontaneity, but the point is that these words were originally written with a Uniball Vision fine-tipped pen (black ink) in a spiral notebook (wide-ruled).

And it was kind of weird writing in the past tense—as though I’d already written this thing I was writing at the time—but it seemed the thing to do, since I knew that later I’d have to type it anyway, so if I used the present tense while typing up something I’d already written, it would seem disingenuous.

I suppose I could have written this whole thing in the present tense when handwriting it in the notebook originally, and then just scanned in the original pages and posted that version to my blog, but honestly, my handwriting isn’t very legible to begin with, and I happen to be writing this while on an airplane experiencing turbulence, so the likelihood of you being able to make out much of what I wrote would be slim to none. (Although, ironically, while I was writing that last sentence, the turbulence calmed down considerably, so the writing wasn’t that bad.)

And I now realize that with all this self-reflection—and moving back and forth between present and past tenses, as though I were an extra in the film “Memento”—I’ve strayed horribly far from the point I was trying to make in the very first sentence of this blog. I’m writing this by hand!

I have my laptop with me, but the battery is running low after playing three games of Scrabble in which I was humiliated by the computer; so I decided to power down and put away the laptop so I didn’t have to look at his smug little screen anymore.

Now I’ve whipped out the notebook and am writing hand to paper. I’m making a big deal about this, because these days, who writes this way anymore? Seriously, I’m having a hard time remembering the last time I sat down and wrote by hand for as long as I’ve been doing since I started writing this entry. And that’s probably another reason that my handwriting is so lousy. I’m out of practice. And I bet you are too. And you. And you. And especially you.

Writing by hand is a lost art, like metallurgy and phrenology. Computers may be convenient and efficient, but if by using them we sacrifice our penmanship, are we not eroding our very humanity? Give a man a pen and he can write for a day; teach a man to pen and he can write for a lifetime. Okay, I’ll admit I’m going off the rails a bit here, but I’ve been in the air for the past three hours and I’m starting to go a little stir crazy.

Anyway the point is/was…um…not really sure anymore. I’m fairly certain there was a point at one time, but I think I’ve become so distracted by the process of writing by hand that whatever the point was is lost somewhere in the ink.

And if you’ve read this far, I apologize. Nobody should be subjected to the hopeless ramblings of a man using a tool as antiquated as a pen. I assure you that my next blog entry will be written on a computer. (I mean, the original blog will be written on a computer. Obviously this blog was written—in the sense of typed—on a computer, but that was only after this blog was first written—in the sense of created—with pen and paper. But I think you got all that.)

I’ll be quiet now.