OK, twist my arm, I’ll give up Saturday mail delivery, but only if I can stop getting e-mail, too. While we’re at it, let’s dump the entire Internet on Saturday, including Facebook. Can somebody please shut down the 24-hour news cycle, too? As a public service, I suggest the cell tower waves could benefit from a good scrambling, as well. I’m tired of being “on.” I want to put my antennae down once in a while.
In the new Saturday World Order, I’ll never again witness a woman romancing her smartphone for a full nine innings at the Rockies game. I get it, lady, we’ve got no pitching, but what riveting news on the small screen could outshine the perfection of your 8-year-old son, holding his spanking new Rawlings glove and hoping for a fly ball with all his might?
“Ann,” who interrupts my tranquil Highline Canal bike ride will just have to put her enthusiastic offer of lower credit card interest rates on ice until Monday.
I’ll not suffer the indignity of watching a movie theater light up with screens, like I did during the closing scene of the “The Help.” In a moment of confusion, I actually imagined the audience intended to wave their phones overhead like concertgoers begging an encore. Was there nothing in such a fine film to warrant even a moment’s reflection before morphing back into cyberspace?
Just imagine, on Saturdays I’ll be spared the awkwardness of overhearing the sloppy details of somebody’s relationship hitting the skids while comparison-shopping for tomato paste in the canned-goods isle. I won’t be watching children in mini-vans playing “Angry Birds” on expensive hand-held devices when they should be looking out the window wondering why the weird lady in the car next to them can’t mind her own business.
Raucous Friday night parties will no longer be instantly flaunted in the faces of my teenage friends who were excluded from the action.
Social-suffering-free Saturdays is a banner I can proudly fly. Aggressively opinionated cable network news, and Balloon Boy style emergencies can wait in the wings, leaving me refreshed and centered on my day of rest from digital noise. A mandatory break from my rapidly multiplying tangle of power cords, adapters, and USB connectors sounds breathtakingly appealing. “Update” harassment of any sort will be strictly prohibited. Computer glitches and demands won’t concern me at all, so I’ll happily cede my regular seat at the Apple Genius Bar to Cliff Clavin, the postal worker on “Cheers” who’ll have the day off, anyway.
The downside will be missing certain opportunities though, like the multi-tasking lesson I received from an adjacent restroom stall at Nordstrom’s last week, where I picked up a few tips on the delicate art of negotiating with your car mechanic, while simultaneously convincing a toddler to go “tee-tee.” That kind of stuff, I’ll miss, but can easily pick back up on a weekday.
Under the new system, Saturdays will be restored to their former glory as a day replete with spaciousness and individual choice. Initially, we might robotically head to the mailbox looking for Value Pak coupons and DMV notifications. Denied and disheartened, we’ll reflexively whip out our cellphones and, finding them dark, sprint for our disabled computers. Lacking outward direction of any kind, our new Saturdays might feel chaotic, initially. With repetition, I trust we’ll get the hang of completing sentences face-to-face, and taking our first wobbly steps toward independent thinking and creativity. Getting reacquainted with our brain’s natural rhythms may seem strange and boring at first, but a fresh and satisfying relationship with reality may unfold. We might discover that busyness is a choice after all, and we don’t have to ask “How high?” when our tech toys say jump.
A useful side benefit of unplugging on Saturdays might even be emergency preparedness. If the grid is taken down by the insidious Conflicker “botnet,” as author Mark Bowden contemplates in his new book, “Worm: The First Digital World War,” we’ll have had a few practice rounds.
Who knows? Going antenna-less could actually go viral.
Julie Savoie (jslivetolaugh@gmail.com) of Englewood is a homemaker and volunteer.
