I Blog While At The Beach

Except I wasn’t actually at the beach, I just thought about it on the beach then went back to the hotel and wrote about it later. And I didn’t actually have a computer, I just wrote it down to transcribe later. Which I will do now, and then backdate this entry.

I took a walk up the cliffs by the beach and passed five cars parked by the side of the road, all of which had their drivers sitting in them talking into celphones (2), what looked like some sort of memo recorder (1), and, apparently, themselves (2). There was nothing obvious for them to be waiting for there; it was just a road along the cliff by the beach. They were just all sitting there, talking. I hope the two on celphones were talking to each other.

Everyone has a celphone now. It’s to the point where it’s eccentric to not have one. We were very near unable to rent a car in Albuquerque, because they insisted we had to have two phone numbers before they’d hand over the keys. And I still have to choose a physical location ahead of time if I want to meet someone. Which people find weird. And forget about finding a pay phone anymore. Next time you see one, look closer: there’s probably no actual phone in the booth anymore, just a few loose wires. At the airport I saw many people walking around wearing those clip-on ear phones. Not using them, just wearing them, like some sort of small scale Star Trek fan costume. I feel out of date.

I could live with the weather here, though. It’s springtime in an area that’s perpetually springtime anyway. Emily likes having all four seasons every year; she feels like she’s missing something if there aren’t a few months of bitter cold thrashing at the windows. But give me a twenty-four hour midsummer any day of the week, I wouldn’t miss a thing. A long time ago we had a conversation about immortality, whether if given the choice we’d swap out bodies for replaceable parts or even go all the way to some transhuman software life-on-a-chip. (Yes, this is the sort of thing we have conversations about. That, and negotiating over whose turn it is to have to call the plumber.) She wouldn’t do it. Blew me away when she said that; I thought it was like liking pie. Everybody likes pie. Everyone wants to live forever. I’d jump at the chance, no question; half the time I feel like I’m rushing back and forth from one thing to another because there just isn’t going to be time to do all of them (so too often end up vaccilating so long that I wind up doing none of them properly or, often, at all) — if I knew I had some reasonable percentage of “forever” to work with I’d be able to calm down, settle, focus on one of them for as long as it wanted to take, and not have to worry about what I might be missing out on by not working on the others.

But now I’m thinking it might be the same as the weather thing. She wants the whole cycle. I want endless midsummer. I spend all but the very first few weeks of spring just counting how many months, then weeks we have left; seeing every dead branch and sickly tree as an early sign of fall approaching. Christ, it’s early May, winter hasn’t even properly ended and I’m already worrying about the next one. Drives Emily up the wall, and I don’t blame her; it’s an awful habit. But summer feels so short I can’t help wasting most of it worrying about how soon it’ll be gone. And the same with everything else. There are already too many things I’m too old for, too many others that’ll slip past plausible grasp before I can get around to them. (We saw Avenue Q a couple weeks ago — the song “I Wish I Could Go Back to College” was the tearjerker in my particular case.) Limited available time just chaps my butt, basically. So, yeah, give me immortality. And make it in a summer country, while you’re at it.