On Forgetting Phones and Reading Books
I forgot my phone. I suppose rather than get all worked up about it, I'll instead take a few moments to enjoy being unplugged. I get way too much screen time anyhow.
Perhaps I'll read a book. I have a huge TBR pile that I haven't even made a dent in. It's gotten so out of hand that I've declared a moratorium on purchasing any new books until I get through some of these stacks. Of course I only actually have one book on me at the moment. It would be odd to carry a small library on my back like some literati tortoise.
I've been working my way through Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure by Michael G. Munz. I'm enjoying the book, but it's not exactly a page-turner. I'm not sure why. The writing is straightforward and the story is fun and funny. Unfortunately, there's something in the meter and rhythm of the storytelling that makes it feel slow for me, personally. As much as I really do enjoy the book, I still find myself specifically putting off reading from it, as though it were a chore.
Maybe it's just not what I'm in the mood for right now. I think what I really want to be reading is Philip K. Dick's Ubik or The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm in a sci-fi kind of mood (I refuse to call it SF, well, for today anyway). I'm usually in a sci-fi kind of mood. It's probably genetic. This is fortunate, because, as it turns out, we're living in a scif-fi kind of world at the moment. I am prepared.
Even so, I never foresaw the Industrialized World dropping out of civilization proper in favor of staring at our phones at every opportunity. That's an undeniably weird turn of events. Truth be told, I'm only very marginally better than the next guy at resisting the temptation myself. Oh what a sorry state we're in when we spend our days and nights reading top 10 lists and composing disjointed sentence fragments to overlay atop cat pictures.
I sure do wish I had my phone right about now.
This post originally featured the song "Lithium Flower" by Scott Matthew, but he, or some entertainment lawyers likely associated with Sony or some such, appear to have scoured the web to eradicate any vestiges of Ghost in the Shell from the internets. I couldn't find any other Scott Matthew songs that I liked even a little. Screw the lot of them. I'm replacing the dead link with KARP, because KARP rule.