Is Your Mobile Phone Slowly Killing You?

It might surprise you to learn, esteemed reader, that I've never owned a mobile phone in my life. Not a flip phone, not a brick phone, bag phone or even a smart phone.

My phone stays put!

Between you and I, I feel a smug sense of satisfaction when new acquaintances discover that I'm actually telephonically immobilized. Not that I'm out and about much or anything, but I hate the thought of someone interrupting my infrequent excursions with a phone call. I've heard more than one lamenting confessional about the euphemistic "dog collar" factor of always being accessible: Sometimes I just wanna chuck the damn thing into the river.

Just because I don't have a mobile phone, doesn't mean I don't expect everyone else to keep a mobile communications device on them at all times... for MY convenience!

If you're under thirty years of age, you've probably never experienced the joy of prank calling. With caller ID, it's neigh impossible these days. I'd invite my pals over and we'd sit around a rotary telephone taking turns making prank calls around the town. It was such a delightfully devious activity for us preteens. Our impromptu scripts were mostly juvenile and unsophisticated, but it was quite a lark when someone took the bait!

Today, if I want to prank call a friend, I use the VOIP Google phone and pretend I'm someone from California.

Zosia Mamet, Chacha

I watched the first four seasons of Mad Men on DVD over the past few weeks.

When I saw Zosia Mamet appear in the Sterling Cooper building's elevator, my faith in womanity was instantly restored. I know it's childish and weird, but I crushed hard!

Anyway, I find her captivating enough that I was inspired to try to make an MS-paint impression.

I know my brush strokes fall short. The eyebrow is way off, and the hair is all wrong. Even the perspective is awkwardly skewed. 

Zosia has a band, and I'm a yet to be acclaimed songwriter. I'd love to pen a song with her and her band in mind. I like her so much that I'd give her and her stellar band, Chacha, one of my compositions free of charge!

Harry Swift Harry Swift

Computer Liquor & The Middle Class

If you follow my feed on Twitter, then perhaps your impression of me is that of someone who spends all their time drinking liquor in front of a desktop computer screen. Let me assure you, Esteemed Reader, you couldn’t be more right! 

Today I took one of my Christmas presents, a $50 CDN banknote, down to the strip mall one long residential block away from where I live in my parents basement. I bought a package of 25 filtered cigarettes from the grocer’s before heading next door to the booze mart. 

Now, I don’t know about most people, but one of my friends who seldom drinks alcohol of any kind tells me that he’ll start to feel rosy (or even tipsy) after six beer in a sitting. This is not some slip of a man I’m talking about either. At 6'2" and 230 lbs. or so, he outweighs me by at least 35 lbs. Tolerance.

As someone with a reasonable palate who works sporadically, averaging just a little over a grand a month in wages, calculated booze selection is mandatory if I expect to drink every night. If only I weren’t such a bitter failure at life, my precious synaptic process wouldn’t need to be bothered by such   necessitated frugality. After the clerk at the till scanned in my six pack of 8% / vol. porter, I requested my usual pint of cheap rye whiskey to go with it. Total price: $27.05. 

I know someone who spends a frustrating twenty minutes a week rearranging stuff in a cramped deep freeze. That’s what you get when you can’t pass-up volume discounts in your obsession to save a few pennies. I’m gonna save money! Costs be damned!

Once you find yourself spending hard earned money and precious time on time / cost saving devices that never pay for themselves before they malfunction in some way, it’s time to reevaluate your purpose here on Earth - stuffing one's deep freeze so full of vacuum sealed meat and bulk bread, only to have them  become lost in the shuffle, and wind-up freezer burned, is ultimately more wasteful than conservative. Twenty minutes a week is seventeen hours a year. As unlikely as it may be (at least where I live), I imagine scrambling to find a power generator during an unexpectedly prolonged power outage on the hottest week of summer to preserve a $2000 investment in frozen food!    

My point is that some people take home economics to the extreme. Instead of hiring a cleaning lady to come in a couple of times a week, you live in a house full of space-age brooms, bottles of chemicals under every sink, robotic vacuum devices, and pantries bursting at the seams. You “invest” in home renovations during the good times, only to compete with the lowest bidder when everything goes bust. 

Am I wrong to think that most people, aren’t reluctant to shun cold logic for warm fantasy? I used to do a bit of busking on Electric Avenue in downtown Calgary when I was barely out of my teens. On a good night, I’d make about $30 in a couple of hours for playing Elvis tunes over and over. Then I’d carry my guitar sixteen blocks, across the Bow river, to my uncle’s place in Calgary’s little Italy district - in the center of which was a Dutch bakery. 

On one later than usual night out busking, I smelled the distinct smell of dough crusting as I approached my old flop house in Bridgeland. I couldn't believe anything was open for retail business before 5:00 AM, but there they were. With $40 worth of Loonies and Twonies jangling in my pocket, I thought, "What the hell."

Arrived home that morning with a couple of nice round loaves, still fluffy, and infused with hints of sage and other spices. Today it makes me think of suburban life. Gone are Damien the baker and Octavius the butcher. In their place are homogeneous aisles of stocked goods that glisten not with the moist glaze of a fresh cut of meat, nor butter brushed onto a crust, but of overhead fluorescent lights and cellophane. 

At the end of the day, it makes me think that much of the middle class are more than willing to trade-in a proper lifestyle for a false sense of being consumer savvy. 

Don't Know Why

Maybe some of you who are reading me are unaware of the fact that I started this silly blog before signing-up for:
Facebook- Blakey Mathews
YouTube- B. R. Mathews

or even MySpace: More, More, Enough!

Whatever.

Check out my new work of art! It's a cover song for a change:

Don't Know Why

To My Twitter Followers:

Lighten up!

Thom people are tho thenthitive! 

May You Get Bent?

I don't often draw, but I drew this around eight in the morning this morning.  

It always bothers me when people ask me if they can.  Gee... I don't know. Can you? 

Or folks who step-up to a cashier at a convenience store and open-up with, "I need..."

There's nothing here you really need.