By Gillie Easdon
I was on the lounge chair. Scotty was on the sofa.
Fritz was on the sofa too. We were at my house. Fritz is allowed on the sofa at
my house, and at Scotty’s, when the roomies are out. Scotty had brought over a
classic flick. Not
Gone with the Wind, Psycho
nor
The Sound of Music
. No, Scotty had rallied. He came equipped with a true
comedy classic; which, in my books, is a movie I can see at the age of nine or
32, and it is still funny. Scotty brandished Mel Brook’s
Young Frankenstein
(“It’s Frahnken-shteen”).
A bit of wine, a bit of this a bit of that, a blanket for him, a blanket for me and a blanket for Fritz. Centralized munchies that we would both have to reach for, but I couldn’t be bothered to move my armchair. Video recorder pre-set-up by fabulous Irish flatties at that time slinging drinks at Monk’s. Water to my left, wine to my right, red fleece socks on. I was ready, Scotty was ready, Fritz was ready. Play. Volume cranked.
I revered the stark, melodramatic black and white
pre-screening credit roll. It set the scene and I actually read the credits. It
was a good idea. It did not taunt me with trailers of similar flicks, nor did
it tell me to buy Coke. I especially appreciated that it did not present a
Cole’s Notes version of the whole film, thereby annihilating any possibility of
surprise in a very fruitless and irritating attempt to coax me into buying a
soundtrack of the film I had yet to see.
The anticipation was palpable. Scotty, Fritz and I
were transfixed. Yours truly reverted to her nine-year-old goof self and
started giggling before the first syllable was uttered, even before the credits
finished rolling.
Then my cell phone rang. It glowed and launched into a
samba. I tilted my head, shrugged my right shoulder and pressed the red button
that shut it up.
Back to Mel.
“I love call display,” I pronounced.
“Yeah, it’s great,” reaffirmed Scotty, my dear friend
and neighbour.
“It takes away the surprise, but you want to know. I
don’t recognize that number, I have a movie to enjoy. I am hanging with you and
Fritz. It is wicked. I love having the ability to make the decision to answer
the phone or not. I love technology. I can’t imagine life without it.”
“Yeah, I screen my calls all the time”, continued
Scotty. “And cell phones are so small now — not like the ’80s. Those were
hilarious. I like answering machines too. Remember the old ones, where you
could hear the voice and then cut in if you felt like it? Those were good, but
they were so big.”
We laughed. I pictured the ’80s cell phones and might
have guffawed, even.
“There are still lots of those answering machines
around. But when it is all inside the phone, the internal systems are just so
compact, so hidden, so high-tech. I am amazed constantly. The phone rings too
often and call display is the answer. Call waiting is good too. I feel weird
answering a phone that can’t tell me who it is. Sometimes I just let it ring
and check later. I do. Really.”
We nodded to each other, Scotty and I. Fritz was
sleeping. We refocused on the castle and sank deeper in our seats, satisfied
with the exchange of secrets, and confessions. Our bond of friendship had been
fortified.
Then my brain took the turnoff to Tangentia.
Scotty and I don’t call each other a lot. We are
neighbours. We see each other a lot. He and Fritz hang out a lot with me and my
roomies. But we do call, sometimes. And we don’t have each other’s home
numbers. We have our cells. With our call display. With our answering services
and our beloved call waiting. And sometimes, I have to leave a message because
Scotty doesn’t answer the phone.
“Sometimes, ha ha,” I offered, “I leave my phone in
another room and don’t notice that there was a call when I get back ’cause I am
doing something else and by the time I notice it is just too late to call.” I
smile and stare carefully at something on the floor to the left.
Scotty sits up straight, “Oh, you know, that happens.
You don’t always not answer because you don’t want to talk to someone.
Sometimes you are at work and you leave it in your bag and forget to turn it
off and the other person might think you are choosing not to answer it and you
really aren’t. It is crazy how that can happen too.” Scotty nods very
enthusiastically, a few times too many.
“Yeah, ’cause if that happened and, like, uh, you were
calling me, it wouldn’t be because I did not want to talk to you, obviously.”
We both smile at each other, no teeth showing.
Now, to tell the truth, I am not entirely certain if
that last line was Scotty’s or mine. It was our line. It was a communal line, a
mutual line. Whoever said it had it reiterated before the recommended pause
between social exchange had been endured. We had opened ourselves into the
realm of speaking openly and honestly in the world of possible communication
and now had left ourselves spread-eagled to the unnerving honesty we had
relished but moments before.
Mel brought me back to the screen, away from this
creepiness, away from the glaring reality of thinking that I had revealed too
much.
Then we enjoyed the movie a lot. Gene Wilder’s Igor
has a perpetually migrating hump, a sexy blond Transylvanian chick in the
horse-drawn wagon asks if young Franken-shteen wants to “roll in the hay” and
then literally rolls to and from in a pile of hay. Random horses freak out
whenever the freaky Frau appears. This is a masterpiece. Young Frankenstein is
silly and yet artistic. And it is also totally clean; mind-boggling. My inner
and not so inner geek was satiated.
After the movie, Scotty and Fritz went home. They took
the movie home with them.
My phone confession took seed in my brain for about a
week. Tangentia had really blossomed into a many-splendoured town.
It was a Wednesday night, 7 p.m.-ish. Scotty and Fritz
dropped by in time for dinner. I sent him back to his place to grab wine. Rose
and Colleen were out burning the Monknight Oil once again. Scotty sat down on
the sofa, Fritz paced for a while and then sat down and considered me with his
coy German shepherd eyes.
I was roasting a fish. I poured Scotty a glass of
wine, we clinked and then I returned to course number two in my dinner
creation. Scotty moved to the picnic table with his wine. Fritz stayed where he
was. We exchanged pleasantries, bitched about the usual and then we settled in,
having completed the third proverbial circle that precedes The Evening Relax. I
peeled and chopped garlic for the salad dressing.
“The other night,” I said casually, “after we talked
about call display and answering machines I felt weird, sort of uneasy. I have
been thinking about it for days. Well, because, we call each other, and it was,
uhhh, just weird. Jesus, maybe I am just thinking too much. Again. I should
work more. Do you think that’s weird?”
Scotty looked up, smiling and said, “Yeah, it was a
weird shift. I thought about it too.”
Then we had a nice dinner. Thank God for Scotty.
But I kept mulling it over, even when my visa was up
in Tangentia and I had to come home. There was something tugging at my brain
— something about privacy and communication and control thereof. And
then, it occurred to me. The word, “communication” was the rub. Communication
is a misnomer for much of what we recognize as technological advances in
communication. What many of these baubles effect is just the opposite. They
lock it up, they hinder communication. I was reminded of an autobiography I
once read of Doris Lessing, at least I am pretty sure it was hers. It was
something about the radical familiar changes that occurred with the invention
and proliferation of the television. Something about the end of conversation,
of spontaneous song, the end of the family, in a sense. That is how I remember
it. I think at the time I appreciated the concept, or the way she put it, but
not necessarily the content or meaning. It was more of a comment than a lament
or a complaint, if my memory serves.
Cell phones and e-mail and pagers and all the other
communications tools make it easy to contact your friend, family member, work and
others. They also make it easy for your friend, family member, work or others
to contact you, in theory. But, with the additional features, you can
intervene, delay or avoid communication at all times. You can elect to block
communication with a handy feature on your communication tool. Granted, you are
able to yak on the phone when you are expecting a call if you have a double
line. You can also find out who just called with the cheeky *69. You can
conference call, hold, even re-dial, and so much more nowadays. You can send an
e-mail to some cute guy or girl by merely aiming your phone at him, I think.
But in Canada, nothing yet compares with Virgin cell phones in Australia that
has a special feature, where you can submit a list of numbers that you cannot
dial nor receive calls from between certain late, late evening hours. No more
drinking and dialing? Are you kidding? What next? But I digress.
The subtle backlash of this efficiency results in
secrecy and isolation based on how you manage your communication tool. I would
rather ask someone how much they weighed or how much money they made before I’d
ask them how they handle their cell phones and e-mail. I would sooner ask if
the PIN I did see that lady in front of me key in at the ATM, because I was bored
and wanted to know how hard it would be to use someone else’s, is also her
password for her Telus account, or anything else. That moment with Scotty was a
gem, but even that had its own peculiar aftermath in my head, and his.
But Fritz is fine. He has been fed. He has gone for a
run. He has fetched that ball as many times as Scotty will throw it. Fritz is
an impeccable communicator. When he is happy, you know, when he wants
attention, you know, when he needs to go out, you know. His life is simple. The
only time he lies is when his face is covered with ice cream and he won’t fess
up that he ate the whole tub. There is nothing covert about darling Fritz.
I screen calls, I don’t always return calls. Sometimes
I don’t because I don’t have the time to have a proper chat, sometimes it is
because I just don’t want to talk to that person. I do sometimes forget to call
someone back, I do sometimes claim to forget to call someone back. I genuinely
don’t know how to go back to the first line if I have gone to line two on my
cell phone; that is true. I am suspicious of friends who are cell phone whores
who neglect to answer my calls or return them for weeks.
I also know who has a computer and I don’t think it
takes much to send a speedy reply, although I have a few sitting on my hotmail
that I have yet to reply to because an “I’m fine, how are you?” will not
suffice. And I know that a blanket YOU got my message. The blanket YOU has a
flipping built-in answering service. And I know a blanket YOUR cell was on
because it kept ringing, but maybe that will be the next new feature, an
appear-to-have-your-cell-phone-on-when-it-is-off feature.
On MSN Messenger, you can appear to be offline, but
you aren’t. When you reflect that you select who you MSN, isn’t it a little
like playing God — a little eerie that you would pretend to be away? In
case you don’t want to talk, but you want to know who is about, sitting in
front of a computer, a pretty lame-ass voyeur. Now that is even weirder than
call display.
And this is all pushing me more and more into my head,
away from people, into isolation, when the point of having all these fun toys
and features is to talk, to communicate, which by definition needs an exchange,
needs more than one party. You cannot communicate with yourself (in the
strictest sense of the etymology of the word). Now, in this age of voicemail
and call display, communication should be adjusted to, maybe, mononication?
Hmm, too bad there was no option for Latin at my school.
It is important to point out the inconsistencies in
the perception of communication tools and the reality. Are they masquerading as
bringing us all together faster and better merely as a result of sneaky
marketing, or did this side-effect just sort of happen unexpectedly and now we
have to deal with it? The consequences of communication management are
propelling us efficiently into an unanticipated isolation. And it all started
with Young Frankenstein. I can hear the horses again.
Maybe the underbelly of communication warrants more
than casual observation, a simple roadside attraction in Tangentia —
because it encourages and supports lying. Maybe it is the spawn of some guilt
about lying or hiding who makes the grade and who does not. Who you talk to and
who you don’t. If I am doing this, then chances are that at least a few others
are doing it too. Hyper-efficient communication could be leading to the demise
of the honest-identifying population. I never lie. I think I never lie. If I
lie, it is for a damn good reason. I pride myself on this. But if I don’t
return a call when I got the message, am I lying that the call occurred in the
first place? An elliptical lie?
Someone once asked me how often I think about dying. I
said, “never.” Then she asked why I look both ways when I cross the street, and
why I lock my door and why I put my seatbelt on. It was a similar ellipsis.
Somewhere out there, there is a support group for
people like me, and maybe for you, if you find this applies. A support group
for people who are feeling detached from their fellow beings due to their
fascination for advances in communication. But I don’t know where it is and
anyways, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m F-I-N-E. So this piece may be the
stand-up-in-the-circle-we-are-all here-for-you dump. Does anyone identify with
this? With the awareness of what isolation can result, could one possibly
continue along the unavoidable trajectory of mass communication and unconscious
isolation better equipped? Stronger? More able?
When I check who is calling, I measure the “now” that
I am having, against a preconceived notion of a possible next “now” with the
person on the incoming call. I weigh it up and make a decision based on the
past. Now, present social trend is very much focused on the “now” — not
so much in a cavalier-type of vein, but more in terms of being grounded and
keeping yourself in the moment. What this era of communications has done is
manifold. In some ways, it advances and supports the drive for The Now. You can
opt to pull yourself from some present situation to talk to someone elsewhere,
or not. The onus is on the individual. It also encases the individual in a
sense of responsibility or ownership of a moment that may not be good or
necessary. We have forfeited the beauty of the possible.
Suzanne, my cranio sacral/physio/healer/friend once
said to me: “When you have expectations, the best you can do is live up to
them.” Needless to say, the quote was in a very different context, but
applicable nevertheless.
Scotty came over on Sunday. I don’t know where the
girls were, but maybe Vancouver. I made dinner, Scotty went back to his place
to get wine and Fritz. We did not feel like watching one of his old movies, so
we made up a hit song on guitar instead. It is an incredible tune; we will see
where it goes.
Mid-chorus, my cell phone rang, and launched into
reggae. It probably glowed too, but the lights were on so I couldn’t tell. I
saw the number. It was a number I recognized. It was someone I really wanted to
talk to. I tilted my head, shrugged my shoulder and pressed the red button that
shut it up.
Back to the song.
“I love call display,” I pronounced.
Scotty looked over, sighed a big “Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh” and
we both collapsed laughing.
We woke Fritz up, then we went back to the song.
I stayed in Whistler that night. My visiting right to
Tangentia briefly, but thankfully, suspended.