It's sort of a miracle that I still have the box my first phone came in.
When I was around sixteen-years-old my parents jointly decided that I could benefit from some change of scenery after they started suspecting that I was engaging in substance abuse and some other, shall we say, less-than-reputable pursuits. They were absolutely right, too.
Their solution was to ship me some 200 miles south to my dad's new home, which was located on a place of such haunting natural beauty that it even challenged my whole worldview in a way -- I just couldn't believe that a place so untouched by man could still exist somewhere in the world. But, of course, due to the circumstances of me finding this place to begin with, I began referring to it as "My Prison Without Bars" and "The Bad Side Of Eden".
I knew I was in for some pain even before I arrived in that place, because the five-hour-long bus trip took me through nothing but endless farmland that extended as far as the eye could see. For a while I was convinced that I had entered The Twilight Zone (or that odd episode of So Weird in which this exact thing happens), feeling like I was trapped in a single second, moving in place as the world around me remained frozen. It was a deeply poetic take on boredom, but I'm sure that's how all sentences feel like. Fortunately, I had come prepared to deal with that after quickly Googling the distance between everything I had ever known and the absolute unknown I was being dragged towards.
I was never a particularly tech-savvy individual (in fact, most viruses and computer problems could kick my arse so thoroughly as to result hilarious), but I had learned a trick or two in my years of lurking around boards and techy sites. One of the tricks I learned? That I could convert large video files to MP3 through a neat --if flawed-- piece of software called "Format Factory". I loved using FF to do all sorts of space-saving maneuvers, like hacking away at large .MKV and .AVI files until they turned into small and cute .MP4s and desperately efficient (if completely crappy) .3GPs. That Sunday afternoon the celebrity was someone completely unexpected, though: I was converting entire movies to .MP3 files just to cram as many as possible into my loyal player, hoping that codecs and batteries would support the gamble (and also doing it in secret, because I wasn't allowed to take any form of entertainment on that bus).
The sole idea of LISTENING to movies wasn't all that interesting to me, but it actually worked surprisingly well, and it even taught me a new angle from which to judge all films moving forward: "How much do these depend on their visuals to tell their stories?". I know that that sounds kind of demented, but I quickly learned that some films can't survive at all with their writing and dialogue, whilst others even get enhanced once they are reduced to their lines of dialogue, their music and sound effects, and the talent with which the actors delivered their lines. Without going into specifics here, I'll say that some of my favorite movies were not so anymore after failing to entertain that way, whilst some really fringe ones really rose among the
ranks after I was done listening to them. And I know that's really unfair, and an unrealistic metric to use... but I was sixteen and Godzilla levels of pissed, so I just rolled with it.
My beautiful prison without bars.
But, of course, the experiment couldn't continue after I arrived at my dad's new house (a small but adequate one-story, three-room cabin in the middle of a quaint little neighborhood, the kind you only ever see in movies). Dad rummaged through my bags and took away anything that he deemed as "contraband", only leaving with my crappy phone (AKA: my leash), the clothes on my back and some toiletries. He was really pissed about the circumstances that had landed me there, and a part of me always wondered if he wasn't also scared of what might happen if he let this go unchallenged... after all, he was a heavy smoker and had been since turning 14, all because my grandpa didn't think it was a big deal to slap some sense into him when he was wheezing and coughing those Marlboros he bought in a not-so-secret manner. Whatever the case, I was in such deep trouble that I wasn't even allowed to spot the military planes that sometimes flew overhead. I'm not kidding.
After a few months of getting really twitchy and so anxious as to bash my head against the wall, the restrictions started getting lifted bit by bit. Oh! I still wasn't allowed near the computer, the DVD player, or even the TV, but I could still take some unsupervised walks around that beautiful place, so long as I took my phone with me (I guess my dad figured that I couldn't get stoned if I didn't know anyone to buy from or trade with). At first, I only did that out of the sheer necessity to leave the house, but I was soon enchanted by a place so utterly fantastic as to have many surprises waiting for me to find them, like a tin statue of Don Quixote that just laid hidden over a peak so grassy as to completely mask it from view, or an abandoned race track which nature had retaken and sort of turned into a waterfall of sorts by disfiguring what was once a tall concession stand, causing the water to flow down freely whenever it rained just enough. I soon started coming home packed with stories about my discoveries and didn't mind the fact that I was doing so out of boredom anymore. It was quite precious.
My dad didn't think that I was ready to get my MP3 Player back (I guess he really did buy into those "music these days ruins children" conspiracy theories, even though I'm sure my grandparents thought the same about the crap he was listening to when he was my age), but he surprised me by giving me his old, prized Walkman and a collection of tapes he had mixed himself or bought from businesses long gone, all spearhead by a little tape called "Queen's Greatest Hits". I had no idea what a "Queen" was at the time, but I soon found myself rocking to "Bicycle Race", "We Are The Champions" and "Show Must Go On" like they were the most important thing on the planet for me (I also took to making a complete fool of myself in public by doing the funny voices on "Flash", despite speaking absolutely no English at the time and having no idea what any of that meant).
To my surprise, dad came up to me a few weeks later and asked me if I wanted to pack a bag, head to the nearby dam (an area I knew by heart at that point) and try my hand at midnight fishing, even going as far as to lend me his good rod and a worn piece of cardboard advising about the moon phases and how they affected sea life. I thought he was kidding at first, but he was so eager for me to try that out that I just sort of gave up and accepted. A few days later, I was already at the dam, casting my line on to the dark and chill waters underneath.
I was never that big into fishing (mostly because I can't even eat anything I catch due to a severe allergy that almost took me out completely when I was little), but I was marveled and mesmerized by the spectacle of sitting on top of a dam, a man-made structure that was surrounded by the most beautiful nature scenes that I had ever had the privilege of laying my eyes on. The moonlit hills bathed on silvery light to my right, the calm waters just beneath my feet, the howling wind that made the leaves rustle with the kind of sound that can never be fully duplicated; the deep knowledge that somewhere in that place life was going on as indented, as it had for millions of years... And then there was me: a single person against the immensity of it all, a man who still hadn't earned the right to call himself a man, a person whose outline was highlighted by two street lamps placed directly above him and that resembled the eyes of an ancient beast that was ready to swallow him whole as Mother Nature amused herself with the absurdity of it all. It should have been a moment of great reflection, a sort of wordless sorcery at which center everything suddenly clicks together. And it almost was... except for one thing:
My phone JUST. WOULDN'T. STOP. BUZZING.
It's even more of a miracle that I still have many of these other boxes... Don't I ever throw away anything?
For all the lifted restrictions that had led to me being in that damn, uh, dam at midnight, I could tell that my dad still didn't quite trust me. He felt the need to check on me constantly, perhaps suspecting that I had either ditched and gone somewhere else or just jumped into the frozen waters (the latter being much more likely than the former). It grinded my gears so much that I often thought about throwing the stupid thing into the river, to let the fish have it. But then I remembered how much my dad hated texting and another memory started materializing at the back of my head, one that made me want to hold on to that little, annoying piece of plastic like it held all the secrets of the universe... and it actually held one of the best.
I always thought that my dad had the makings of a great poet in him, and that he could turn into the modern Lord Byron by just allowing the embers of creativity to burn free inside of him. I like to think that he knew that, too, and simply decided that it wasn't really his calling, instead settling for being the local Charles Bukowski, a very (VERY) talented man whose incredible work was born out of surliness and sort of an aggressive bitterness that led him to create some of the most incredible turns-of-phrase that I had ever heard, often laced with just enough venom to sting without actually damage, sort of like how a mosquito operates: by getting your blood flowing after she stung you with the tiniest of bites, generating a reaction that was much more frustrating and annoying than harmful.
At one point my sister had come home very upset about failing grade and my dad wasted no time grabbing the paper and making a snide remark, commending the teacher for brutalizing my sister's low effort on brown ink. He then said that he had never seen such an accurate portrayal of failure. But the most enduring memory was when I was being particularly bratty about something related to a videogame, at which point dad looked over and called me "Inverse Metamorphosis", then sighed as I drew a blank and proceeded to explain that that was the act of a beautiful creature reverting back into a worm. It was such a cutting remark that I cried on the spot, but damn! It's a really good one, and he delivered it so effortlessly as to be instantaneous. I knew that he had pulled that gem out of thin air.
But dad hated texting because he hated being wrong, and he had never been more wrong than when he decided that kids would never have phones.
I still remember the day he came home sporting that signature, childish grin of his that indicated that he had just gotten his hands on something cool. Indeed, not two minutes after making it to the kitchen, he reached for his coat pocket and pulled out a towering piece of black plastic, an amazing piece of alien technology I was instantly drawn to, Hey Arnold! (the cartoon playing at the time, and one of my absolute favorites) be dammed. He then proceeded to show it off to my mom, whom to my surprise looked quite interested on the whole thing (although she was probably wondering why he had blown so much money on something like that when we had a perfectly good landline). Dad talked endlessly and rapidly about all the amazing features his new toy had, putting special emphasis in its ability to SAVE NUMBERS DIRECTLY INTO IT (!) and TO GET TEXT MESSAGES (!!). He even mentioned something about a very futuristic feature: the one about CALLING PEOPLE BY MENTIONING THEIR NAMES (!!! -- that's probably not such a hot idea, though). When he finished making a damn infomercial for the thing, I swallowed hard and asked him if I could take a look at it... and he then drew from his --seemingly endless-- repertoire of Bukowski-like comebacks, asking me to "Stop The Civil War Between My Marbles", then remarking much coldly that kids had no business even looking at those things.
Little did he know that just a few, short years later I would be attending a school assembly regarding how out-of-control those things were, how they were being aggressively marketed towards us and disrupting the learning environment because of the clever way we were using them for cheating our way out of school (and through life). At one point my principal even addressed us about a VERY offensive ad he saw (but I never did, so I guess he was right about it) by local mobile phone juggernaut CTI Movil that encouraged kids to ditch their studies and get on with their mobile phone experience. Yes, my principal actually took us out of class because of phones to warn us about... being taken out of class because of phones. It was amazing.
Pictured: the root of all evil, apparently.
Even though I was already painfully aware of how out-of-touch the previous generations were when it came to all these new technologies that seemed to come out of nowhere, I must admit that they were quite right about phones. Whether we wanted to admit it or not, a line had been crossed when those started getting in the hands of literal kids, and there was no going back. It was like seeing the slowest bomb in history going off, slowly (but surely) enveloping it all. My dearest Walkman and MP3 Player, the tools that helped me keep my sanity? Rendered obsolete as soon as phones started including good enough internal storage options and cheap SD cards to boost them. My Polaroid digital camera, once the center of my creative world? Replaced in an instant by the time my phone had a nice enough camera. The unfulfilled childhood dream of playing Pokemon on-the-go? Completely realized once some random maniac actually programmed Gameboy Emulators for Java, resulting on most devises being able to introduce gamers to these classics for the first time.
Fallen soldiers.
The second line that was crossed did so so gradually that I still have a hard time believing it, but it was so painfully obvious in hindsight: people were just more careless now that they didn't have to share their home phone numbers with those they wanted to impress... or just briefly befriended in some watering hole or party and quickly decided to "book". It was actually not uncommon to wind up collecting strangers' cellphone numbers like they were Pogs. However, the thing that got my attention was when an online friend of mine (and one who was so painfully shy as to result adorable) finally got her hands on a flip phone with a powerful camera on it and decided to post a picture of herself for us to see, after having backed down several times in the past. She did the classic mirror picture on the bathroom, but with one exception: she covered her eye with the phone, resulting on a blurry, darkened image that nonetheless gave you the vague idea of what she looked like (helped by the heavy compression of the early pic) without revealing too much about the person who took it. I thought it was a genius idea... until I realized that she was being encouraged to share her number now that she had grown legions of "fans" after taking the smallest, blurriest, most unidentifiable of pics. But I guess those were really our times... after all, I had friends who fell in love with the opposite gender after spotting the same kinds of pictures as MSN Messenger profile pics, and those weren't any more detailed.
And speaking of MSN Messenger... it would be wrong to end this article without mentioning a very annoying Trojan that was born out of the genuine desire people had to see pictures of those they interacted with. It was called something like "Cel_Pics.zip" and it worked by sending itself as an attachment on open chats, disguised as the suspiciously (but believable) small files that were generated when an early phone camera took a severely low-res pic. A lot of us fell for it, and it ended up wrecking friendships because most people truly believed that they were knowingly being sent a file that had a virus on it. I still remember the wars and finger-pointing on endless forum threads about that.
I kinda wish that my dad had been right when he predicted that kids would never have phones, because the sole fact that we did have them changed things and brought forward the Swan Song for childhood. It was suddenly all about which phone you had and who's number you had managed to snag and add to your ever-growing virtual phonebook. Talking when we were standing maybe 200 feet apart? Why? It was easier to text those indecipherable hieroglyphics instead. Making plans when we were already on the same physical space? Nah, man. I'll text you the details later. Even something as simple as to asking a single question was seen as archaic if done by any other means than through a screen.
If you can't beat them...
NOW... I'm not gonna be so fake as to criticize phones like that when some of my best stories were born in (or made possible because of) them, like when my GF and I would mess around on those primitive games, or when my cousin and I would share our deepest, darkest secrets on unsent messages as we passed the devise back-and-forth. I just kinda wish that the whole thing could have slowed down just a tad, because it was world-changing in its speed and reach, and I'm not entirely sure we were quite ready for it yet.
But I guess I could have been like that aforementioned statue of Don Quixote: a forgotten, still monument to craziness that was hidden away like a bad memory, refusing to be swept by the ever-advancing new tech, allowing my pride and discomfort to drag me down and to cause me to be left behind. Or I could embrace the times and download the latest port of Carmen San Diego on my shiny new devise... and that's MR DETECTIVE to you!
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