PHONELESSNESS

I have joined the esteemed club of Owners of Depocketed iPhones. Specifically, the ones that make their suicide leap from back pocket into the sparkling waters of the toilet bowl. The same ingenious design that makes the iPhone so sleekly delicious to the touch also makes it treacherously slippery.

Confession: I've had my iPhone for a year, and I am afraid that I am one of Those People: an iHole. I reflexively touch my pocket to make sure it is there; like a tamagotchi pet, it must be tended, stroked, checked upon every few minutes; I can mobile-upload a moment before it's even over, no, before I've even experienced it; I have been known to lie in bed post-contact-removal, myopia be damned, holding the thing three inches from my face as I scroll through my horoscope or tap my way through Word Wars. Sitting three feet from the door, I pull out the iPhone to check the weather. I know! Look, I'm coming clean here. Don't judge.

And now, following its watery plunge*, it has lain dark and still for two and a half days, tucked in a bag of rice. 

Which supposedly sucks the moisture out. No sign of life yet, but it's also possible the battery has run out. And I dare not plug it in yet for fear of braising the innards.

After a few initial anxious hours, I have not only adjusted to phonelessness, I have embraced it.**
a. Whomever I'm with, I'm just with.
b. A radical concept: making a plan and then carrying out that plan as planned.
c. Punctuality is once again not merely a general area of time, but an actual point. (A punct?)
d. I am not fondling my back pocket all the time, which must have looked weird.***

Today my friend and I drove down sunny roads through corn fields to the bulk-foods country store, phone-free and listening to an old R.E.M. tape. In my 1996 Honda. And time was totally itself again.

Let's not worry for now about the nightmare I had last night wherein a girl was violently thrown off the roof of Harkness in front of me and had blood shooting out of her thigh and I, phoneless, could not call 911, only yell it.

* Clean waters, for the record.
** For now.
*** See also: revelation when I removed my nose ring after nine years of fidgeting with it.