Technological Wonders

Although a sprite 38 years old, I have one foot grounded in the new world order and one in the remote past...I embrace technology, but I must say that, mostly, it's all worthless.

This morning I rode the bike up Franklin Blvd. with my iPod on, as I usually do. Cell phone was in the front handlebar bag. Cateye bike computer was hammering out speed and mileage...as it's been doing for the past nine years. Technology follows me.

However, none of these things make my ride any more enjoyable. The iPod (and I'm being absolutely honest here) is to guard against hearing loss by all the police and fire sirens up and down Franklin Blvd. They must be 103 dB, designed to alert an Elk Grove thru-commuter in her ultra-quiet Lexus that she should put down her Jimboy's 20-oz soda and pull over...which she will routinely fail to do regardless. Have you ever been walking 10' from a Sac PD siren? Of course you haven't, because pedestrians and bicyclists are immediately cast under suspicion as less-worthy citizens and you the reader aren't a low-class citizen. A pedestrian on Franklin Blvd, as viewed by passing Elk Grove thru-motorists, is lower than a snake's ballbag. You the reader aren't about to go there, so you drive everywhere, as all responsible Sacramento area citizens do. So you haven't the first fucking clue how loud a siren is to someone not encased in a motor vehicle.

Consider this...every police car with its siren on always, always! has its windows up, never down. Even policemen are smart enough to realize they'd immediately go deaf with their own damn sirens going off two feet away from their heads. This isn't intended to deride lawmen, only to point out the deafening noise we require for safety...103dB sirens, 94dB train whistles at 3AM, light rail's twelve-bells at every stop, backup beepers on forklifts...

I'm not quite the citizen that Sacramento society expects because I ride a bicycle, an almost two hundred year old invention. But I also do it with technological tethers; a cell phone for emergencies, an insulin pump to keep alive, an iPod to prevent deafness...But what if I didn't have these things? Honestly, I might be just as well off. I wouldn't have to work quite so hard to afford them. I wouldn't have to spend hours on the phone with AT&T, fuckering about with my frozen credit to get a new cell phone or with their support staff trying to figure out why I can't access my account on-line. I wouldn't have to expend life force trying to download just a few more songs onto an iPod without having to deal with settings, controls or other new horseshit features. (a complete pain in the ass, btw).

Is this what life is about? Being constant slaves to operating system failures, comm protocol incompatibilities, heart-rate monitor breakdowns, cycle computer glitches, Shania Twain ring tone losses, IRS e-filing errors, Blackberry connectivity issues, on-board navigational headaches, irig-B time sync shutdowns, cell phone/toilet encounters, ftp transfer failures, voicemail messaging breakdowns, emission control module burnouts, DVD region code restrictions, Outlook exchange server connection problems, left-channel stereo cut-outs, power window fuse blowouts, or firmware revision backward compatibility issues?

We've substituted simple living arrangements in concert with other human beings (a get-together with neighbors in a walkable community) with living in isolated, car-dependent, air-conditioned personal compounds with technologies that sap every scrap of free time trying to get them to function.