Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/56704
The Great Barrier Reef of the Mind by PITT DICKEY I went cold turkey for 16 hours. It was inadvertent and it wasn't easy. I left my iPhone at the offi ce and, for once, didn't go back to retrieve it. Fate offered me the opportunity to face the old world of life before my iPhone became my constant companion. Unfortunately, I went into withdrawal. There was no sweating and nausea, but things were out of balance. Like Gollum, in Lord of the Rings without his Precious, something large and powerful was missing from my portion of Middle Earth. I missed the phone of power. Since acquiring my iPhone last spring, I am seldom without it, either awake or asleep. It wakes me up in the morning with its Antelope alarm. I check the news on it just before I go to sleep. My iPhone and I are joined at the hip pocket. On the rare occasions I leave the phone at the offi ce, by the time I get to the Market House I am acutely aware of electronic emptiness. I go back and retrieve the Precious. Facing the world without Apple's electronic umbilical is so 2007. It was different when I forgot the phone this time. I decided to see if I could still function as an almost normal human being without the constant stimulation of Apple's invention Who Must Be Obeyed. I have habits that border on ruts. Each day after work, I walk about four miles to the FTCC campus and back. I take my iPhone and listen to music, MSNBC propaganda and read newspapers while walking across Fayetteville. Oblivious to my surroundings due to my iPhone, I could be anywhere. A black hole sucks up time and light. The event horizon of iPhone sucks up time and the world outside. Nothing exists outside of the glowing bar of iPhone. Its miniature multi-media center keeps my brain occupied while my feet march on without adult supervision. You miss a lot when you don't pay attention to the world around you. The virtual world has its charms, cultural backwaters and Angry Birds, but it doesn't have real vultures. Fayetteville now has real vultures that I walk past every day without noticing. Our own fl ock of vultures is living on the water tower in Haymount. I did not know they were there until I read about them in the Fayetteville Observer. Vultures in Fayetteville? What could be cooler than that? Like Miss Pittypat said about the Yankees in Atlanta, "Whoever let them in?" I would have missed the vultures if I had kept my head corralled in iPhone. Life is too short to miss the vultures. You need to stop and smell the carrion. A moment of clarity reared its ugly head. If I didn't get out of the iPhone, I would continue to miss the vultures of life. Even though vultures are unlovely, they are real. Like Casey Stengel once almost said, "You can see a lot just by looking." I resolve to look up and look around. No longer will my iPhone be a barrier reef between me and the real world. One of the fi rst things I saw on looking up was the Far Right's really cool fear about something called Agenda 21. Agenda 21 is the Far Right's current boogie man. It is trickier than a catch 22 and more potent than NP-27, the scourge of athlete's foot. Born of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, the evil Agenda 21 has morphed into this year's version of the black UN helicopters that were going to sweep red-blooded Americans into re-education camps. Although the camps have yet to appear, the Far Right has not given up its quest to scare Americans into a state of quivering jelly. The Right claims that Agenda 21 will take away our property rights under a nefarious UN scheme claiming to protect the environment. Local governments are encountering irate opponents of Agenda 21 who are using it to oppose things they don't like. According to our friends on the Far Right, Agenda 21 threatens to drain all of our precious bodily fl uids in order to grow little green cars in Indianapolis. We are fi nally reaping the whirlwind of fl uoridation revealed by the pernicious growth of Agenda 21 onto the athlete's foot of the American soul. In a desperate effort to appear severely conservative, Mitt Romney will announce that he is severely opposed to Agenda 21. Mitt is still severely unconcerned about the very poor, but now has a 57 point plan based upon application of Absorbine Junior to clear up outbreaks of Agenda 21. Bless you Mitt. You are severely the man. PITT DICKEY, Contributing Writer, Up & Coming Weekly, COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. Come and see why we were voted Best of Fayetteville in the following categories: Brewing Good Times! B 6 UCW FEB. 29 - MARCH 6, 2012 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM