The Death of a Luddite

It was inevitable and now it has happened. I finally broke down and bought a cellphone. For all of my anti-cell posturing and longwinded diatribes about their tackiness and direct contribution to the decaying of social etiquette, I decided to eat a big steaming plate of crow and just give in.

In the end it was the gadetry, not the funcitonality, that sunk me. About a month ago I fell in love with the Motorola RAZR V3, the goddamn Escalade of cellphones. It's slim, black, cool as hell and if it was available with 22-inch spinning rims I would have got 'em. If all this thing did was open soup cans I still would have bought it, but it is indeed a cellphone and I am now officially wireless.

I can already feel the change coming over me...I'm becoming one of those people. Like Frodo with the Ring of Power, I am constantly fiddling with it; checking my pocket to see if it's still there, opening it to gaze at the backlit acid-etched keypad, and holding it up to other fatter objects for perspective on how slim it is. It's only been in my posession for 4 days and I would say that my ratio of pertinent to frivolous transmissions is something approaching 1 to 10. In that time I have also transmitted 8 text messages, all of them meaningless.

Over the course of the next few weeks I am going to seek out some counseling and find a way to deal with my competing emotions of love (love of my new toy) and self-loathing. I wonder if I have any messages...