Picture the earth before creation – dark, desolate, and
scary. Time stretches endlessly, without the grasp of the ever swooshing
deadlines. Now picture yourself in that world, in this present world with
numerous technological distractions which have embedded themselves into your
everyday life.
You will be lonely in a crowd, wandering in the streets as
though you are a lost soul seeking redemption. I guess that’s how it feels
without a phone, for that’s the experience I went through back in the village
when power went off, and KPLC, ever reliable in disappointing, took its sweet
time.
I am homo technolopithecus, a reverse from the sapien sapien
thing. I can’t live without my phone. I love to feel it in my pocket, the right
pocket of my trouser, and whenever I feel its absence my whole body is sent
into unspeakable panic. It has to be there, even when I don’t need it, such as
when I am dead and need to check whether I have received a text.
You may have heard of people making jokes that the wifi was
down once and they were forced to talk to their families. They confessed that
they seem like nice people. I am one of them, though I do not overly peg my
existence on the internet. I just need to feel my phone, on for I derive
immense pleasure in drawing the security pattern and gawking at it endlessly,
for hours. When I get bored with it, I set it aside for ninety seconds and
resume fiddling with it.
I can’t, for the fluids in me, imagine how someone can survive
without a phone. Of course there are people who can live without it – dead
people and hopeless drunkards. Even though no one actively looks for me, I feel
I am obliged to be reachable. It is true with relationships.
When you are in love, there’s that constant need to validate
your affection. The only thing available, what with the distance is a phone.
Texting and calling brings forth two dimensions in a relationship – strengthen
it or break it. if you are dating a lady with the intelligence quotient of
boiled maize, it can be disastrous because every time your phone is off, she
conjures up a thousand scenarios of where you could be – which often is on top
of a naked woman. To her, there are never any other viable reasons as to why
you could be unreachable. That’s why I am a homo technolopithecus.
The other day, while with a friend, he turned and asked me
what postpartum meant. I looked at him with an ‘are you stupid glare’ and
answered him. Because I know things, and the way I know things is through
googling. That answers you why I thought he was stupid – he was holding his
phone, and I wondered why he couldn’t make use of it. Some people! They think
we have time to answer questions google can answer within a second, and not
just answer – have detailed illustrations that may even include pictures of
naked women.
As an avid social media user, I often rise in the morning to
see the posts and go like – what a complete moron. I love this routine so much that I log into
social media even before my eyes have fully deciphered the brain stimuli
instructing to open the eyelids. Even though social media has a certain
dumbing-down effect, I love it. I love gawking at pictures of people living
really good lives, read news and check out memes. Mostly I check out memes. And
imagine my complete uselessness.
Do not say ati I
am addicted to my phone. Everything is in my palms. What more can I ask for?
Money in my palm, entertainment, news, and naked pictures of women. I am a homo
technopithecus, and one day when my bones will be discovered in the year 4000,
they will discover my phone beside me. Archeologists at the time may wonder how
primitive I was (or I am right now), but I’ll answer them now – I don’t give a
damn.
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