Memphis Street Party with Jason D. Williams 9/24/15 South Main Street in front of The Church of God in Christ Bookstor

Smartphone Addiction

Smartphones

A couple of coworkers of mine recently took a trip to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. They were off the grid for a couple of days and once they accomplished their amazing feat they reentered the civilized world and started posting their photos and observations on Facebook.

I commented that it was good to see them with internet access again and Patrice came back with “being off the grid is so very refreshing”. I thought about it for a minute or two and really couldn’t remember the last time I was completely out of touch.

The more I thought about it the harder it became for me to remember when.  To the best I can recollect it was sometime before 2003.

I’ve been carrying a messaging enabled smartphone since 2003.  My first was a Blackberry 6510 through Nextel. At the time I was a consultant working in New York City at an Investment Bank commuting a total of five hours a day to and from work.  Occasionally being able to skip out from work a few hours early and showing maybe thirty minutes late was invaluable to me so I shouldered the cost of the device on my own.

At that time I used to marvel at the convenience of being able to shoot off an email from the train or respond to one with a follow up phone call. It was a limited device but you could read your emails and respond to them. They had a primitive internet browser that wasn’t really good for anything with the 300DPI monochrome screen and no websites being optimized for a small screen.

I transitioned to a color blackberry 7230 when they became available and riding the train everyday I could see these devices becoming more prolific.  Pretty soon half of the train car was filled with people looking at their hand held devices tapping off emails, texting friends and family.

Apple released the iPhone in June of 2007 and the race was on. You could only buy an iPhone on AT&T and although I secretly coveted one, their network where I live has pretty spotty coverage so  I waited.  In March of 2011 I accidently dropped my Blackberry 8830 into the toilet.  As I undid my belt, it slid in its holster and dropped into the bowl. I retrieved it, did my business and drove to the Verizon store.

Taking a number for the service department I longingly gazed at the new Verizon iPhones. I had received an iPad for my birthday in September so I had an understanding on how to use one. My number was called and I walked up to the service desk. I told the service guy what happened, said the thing was shingot and could he please just expedite replacement process. The guy whispers back to me that they are contractors and they needed a minimum of an hour of troubleshooting time in order to get paid. I was in a hurry so I excused myself and walked over to the sales desk and asked a woman how long it would take to put me in an iPhone  Her reply of 15 minutes got me thinking. I told her to do it and went back to the service guy and got my waterlogged blackberry back.

It changed my world almost instantly. All of a sudden I had my phone, camera, music on one device with one charger for both my iPad and phone.

The iPhone 4 became a 5. Judy held fast keeping her Blackberry 8830 and I used to make fun of her.  Verizon would call and tell her they would give her any phone she wanted if she would trade in the 8830 which was a bandwidth hog on their network. Still she refused which went on until November 2013 when she dropped her phone into a toilet and switched to an iPhone 4s.

Up until that point Judy would take a few emails on her blackberry and talk on the phone but little more than that. She would always make fun of me for starting at my phone when we were eating dinner or out at a bar.

The iPhone completely changed Judy’s usage.  She downloaded the Facebook app and within weeks we were both starting at our phones instead of talking to each other while eating meals. I began to suspect there was something wrong when we went to a new tapas restaurant in Danbury at happy hour which was so loud and busy we started texting each other across the table.

Fast forward to 2015 and I’m working as an airline pilot. I’m on the road all but twelve days a month traversing through sometimes five or six airports a day. Observing people I notice everyone from nine to ninety are starting at their phones. Passengers, rampers, gate agents, restaurant servers, cops, pilots and flight attendants all looking at their phone.  I’ll joke around about it with my coworkers saying “hey  what did we look at before we had these phones” everyone smiles sheepishly and goes back to staring at their phone.

I start to think about my own use. Anytime I have nothing to do, feel uncomfortable or bored, I pull out the phone.  Hanging with people and have nothing more to say, pull out your phone.  Have an hour to kill?  The phone takes care of that.

I'm concerned about this because this summer my eldest brother received a Galaxy 5S phone. He's always has been a technophobe eschewing any technology that has reached the mainstream in the past twenty plus years. I watched with fascination when he was in Connecticut last, sitting at my kitchen table looking down at his phone. 

This made me think about the Star Trek episode "The Other Side of Paradise" where the crew of the Enterprise find a colony with plants that blow spores in your face taking over your mind. Kirk is the last one to get sprayed by the spores, but the love of his ship and command generate anger in him which counteracts the spores. These damn phones seem to be taking over all our minds, and I always thought my brother was like Kirk, the last holdout.  

The odd thing is there was a time in my life where I needed to in touch constantly. There were deals to be made and customers to respond to. But these days I am a very small cog in a giant gear. I’m not important and no one needs to get ahold of me immediately. So why do I feel the need to check my phone obsessively?  I really don’t know, but I think there is something subconscious going on.  Something about the smartphone likely releases Dopamine or some other chemical  that stimulates a pleasure center in our brains. 

Once we become accustomed to that pleasure center being activated, like an addict we continue to seek that again and again.

We may never find this out because there is an enormous amount of money being generated by the sale and use of these devices. But I’d like to suggest, if this was a cult, a drug, or a religion, the evening news would be filled with talking heads crying how the country was being taken over by these devices. I can see Wolf Blitzer Shepard Smith and Sixty Minutes dedicating segments to it.

But off the grid? Can’t remember when. But I doubt I will go to Africa anytime soon, so its unlikely. But maybe, just maybe when it comes time to renew my cell phone contract I will go back to a phone that only makes calls. We’ll see.

Harlingen TX

Harlingen.

Wow. North Expressway 77. “Mama and Daddy put their roots down here cause this is where the car broke down”.  That’s a line from a Kenny Chesney song and it has a special meaning to me because I believe it is how my parents came to reside in south Texas.

My parents moved to Harlingen back in the 80's. They had sold their house in Bethel Connecticut and set about traversing the nation in a brandy new, shiny red, Ford F-250 pickup- Holiday Rambler travel trailer attached, in search of a place to retire.

Harlingen was one of the locations on that search, which ringed the nation east of the Rockies, and another of the places on the quest where mom had fallen ill and spent several days in the hospital.  According to sister lore, mom decided Harlingen would do because she didn't want to get back in the truck anymore to continue the search. 

So while their car hadn’t broken down Mom’s spirit for trailer traveling adventure and sickness did. They were looking at condo’s in Port Isabel a half an hour east but somehow decided to live in another albeit larger more permanent trailer in landlocked Bumfuck Texas.

I’ve been to Harlingen twice now since Mom and Dad left us. I think that probably a third of the amount of times I can count where I’ve ever been there. The first time was in January of 2014. I was on IOE which stands for Initial Operating Experience and its where the airline takes a guy fresh out of the school house and teaches them to fly on the line. I did IOE with Josh Z, and affable thirty something check airman at my company. We spent a night in Harlingen at the residence inn eating the managers reception food and drinking their cheap draft beer . I never got to look around though because we got in late and left early, and it being winter, it was dark on arrival and dark on departure.

We flew down here from Houston last night arriving into Valley Regional Airport. By valley they mean the Rio Grande valley which seems hardly a valley at all. In contrast, I live near the Hudson River Valley and that my friends is a valley. Nestled between the Berkshires and the Catskill ranges the Hudson flows mightily throughout a cut between those densely forested mountains. 

That's nothing like the thin strip of muck and trickle of water that serves as a border between the Texas and Mexico.  But looking down from altitude at the featureless terrain, dotted with scrub sand and stones, briefly interrupted by farmer’s fields, pad malls, homes and highways one really has to stretch to arrive at the definition of Valley. The greenery is supported by irrigation systems put in place by Texas A&M back in the last century, and fifty years ago there was nothing here but agriculture

Prior to the airline trips I was last here on November 27th 1994. I travelled to HRL alone to visit my folks and have thanksgiving dinner with them.  The date sticks out because it was when Dan Marino faked a spike and threw the winning touchdown to Mark Ingram beating the Jets.

It was in a RV park called Paradise Park, which was anything but Paradise. For the first several years they lived there Mom really liked the sun and the pool. Every time you would see her or pictures of her she was well tanned. Something happened and she stopped going out to the pool and she told me the sun was aging her skin. At fifty five, I don’t sit in direct sunlight that much anymore so it does seem plausible, but it was likely the south Texas heat and humidity combining with her emphysema didn’t afford her good breathing as that horrible disease progressed.

And thirty some odd years later, here I am sitting in Starbucks, waiting out a rainstorm, drinking coffee and wondering how far I am from where they lived and would they recognize it now. I briefly considered stopping into the Whataburger! on the corner, where my dad used to spend hours drinking burnt coffee and smoking cigarettes. I clearly remember his stained white plastic Whataburger! cup with its faded orange logo that he bought once, and brought each time for free refills at the senior discount. 

I also recall the smell of the place, dirty fryer oil mixed with burger grease, old coffee and cigarette smoke mingling to create a disgusting mélange that stuck to your clothes like camp fire smoke.  It was here that Dad would hold court whiling away the hour’s bullshitting about all things aviation and nautical, clouding up the place, surrounded by his posse of retirees proudly serving in the Confederate Air Force, Coast Guard Auxiliary, or like him -both.

I chose Starbucks - something familiar and am sitting tapping away, writing this on my phone, a large coffee complete with my Irish milk, just checking out the people in the place. This could be anywhere in the country, it looks like the Starbucks in New Fairfield where I live. The students replete with spiral bound notebooks conferring over laptops with fru-fru coffee drinks, business people interviewing prospective employees, women in workout garb and business suits, construction managers meeting with subcontractors,  going over schedules, realtors half listening to mortgage people detailing products all the while they imagine themselves in flagrante delicto with either the girl in the workout garb or the one in the business suit.  

A few caught my eye. A couple, study buddies, or actual boyfriend girlfriend, I can’t tell the difference. He is a little meatball of a man, dark skinned, of Mexican heritage with a mustache, t-shirt, ball cap, cargo shorts and flip-flops. She is a statuesque stacked Asian or perhaps Hispanic with long straight brown hair that comes halfway down her back, in form fitting grey stretch pants, and a white cropped sports top that displayed her ample wares. A pair of large round faux tortoise shell glasses made her look studious while they discuss something they are working on, him with a laptop and her with a thick well used spiral bound multi subject notebook  

Across from that pair is an aging hipster, with an equally aging white Sony Vaio in his lap.  A black Beat’s headset placed over black bug eye ray ban shades with a mop of black curly greying hair connected by sideburns to an equally greying beard. He’s attired in black jeans and t-shirt and a members only style leather jacket in the comfy chair in the corner. His head is nodding rhythmically to some unheard music clearly out of time with the coffee shop eclectic blend of non offensive yet suitably hip music playing quietly in the background.

I was distracted by a cute forty-something, thin, foiled blond hair tied in a short ponytail, pink spaghetti strap top covering a black sports bra and yoga pants, She was picking up an enormous extra sweet green iced tea from the heavily inked barista. Her sculpted left shoulder and arm is a tapestry of color, tastefully tattooed to her elbow. She looks amazing without makeup on and I have to avert my gaze, else appear to be leering.

An interview is going on at the table next to me where an overweight dowdy woman in her best ill fitting business suit is telling a nattily dressed woman with a diamond wedding ring the size of a car headlight, earrings to match, why she is the best candidate for the job, why should she be hired, and what a great addition she would make to “the team”.

Team, what an overused horrible description of what most work associations actually are. I guess it is used to tell prospective hires that companies are looking for people who can get along, and don’t want to hire anyone stands out, who is strong willed or always needs to have things go their way.

The contrast between the women couldn’t be starker, and there is no doubt the one doing the interviewing is incredibly strong willed, and from reading the body language of the pair,  she is 100% sure everything will go her way.  She ended the interview with “we have many other candidates to look at, if you are the best match, we’ll be sure to get in touch”. I’ve been on a lot of job interviews in my life and when you hear that at the end of the meeting you want to say “Fuck you very much”

The nattily dressed woman gets up and leaves while the dowdy one sits and finishes her coffee, pulling out her calendar and making some notes.  I’d like to see what the notes are and I’m hoping that it’s not how many more days she has left before she runs out of cash.

Witnessing all of this just makes me think. I start snapping pictures of the surrounding scenery on my way back to the hotel. The single story flat roofed stucco buildings painted in weird pastels that housed the old local based businesses are being torn down and replaced with strip malls replete with national branded stores of standardized design, funded by wall street’s insatiable desire for growth.

My mom would have loved to be able to go and shop at some of these places I think. She always complained about how it was so backward here. 

My Dad, probably not so much. He would have hated the idea of fresh expensive coffee thrown away after thirty minutes, that you order in anything other than small medium and large. Getting my dad to order a venti or a grande coffee would have set him off on a tirade about how Italians were cowards only slightly higher on the human food chain than the French   A WW2 vet he liked it old burned and bad. It was a sign of manliness and courage, and went well with the harsh smoke from his Camels.

 As a coffee drinker I’ve had the opportunity to hang out at quite a number of Starbucks. No matter where these stores are located  the customers are always the same. Sure their hairstyles and clothing and accents may differ slightly, but their demeanor and purpose is the same.

The gig economy and agile working has created a concept that work is no longer a place you go but a thing you do. Messaging enabled smartphones and other business mobility tools made the agile revolution possible. Companies across america have been ditching their expensive office buildings and allowing workers the freedom to live their lives interspersed with their work effort, saving millions in real estate costs and creating ghost-towns of empty office space in suburbia nationwide.  To support that Starbucks, Panera’s with their free wifi and tolerance for people sitting with the same cup of coffee for hours, holding meetings, stewarding commerce, and the like have sprouted up practically everywhere.

But at what cost? The loss of a regions character, no matter how primitive backward or awkward it may be perceived to some, is akin to extinction of a species. It can never be replaced, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Seeing locally owned Taquerias  being replaced with Chipotle’s and Taco Bell’s in an area where Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine has been the staple diet for a hundred years or more, is a horrific distortion of culture. And frankly that’s just not right.

Step right up for another steaming cup of Corporate Monoculture served by the new american workforce of non-agile $7.35 an hour restaurant servers.

I'm thinking I’m glad Mom and Dad didn’t get to see this, or the unbridled business expansion that decimated of their other adult home towns in Bethel Connecticut, Bayshore New York or South Boston Massachusetts.

I wonder what I’ll think in another twenty five years.

Are all Law Enforcement Officers Hero's?.... A heartbeat away from death?

900,000 Law Enforcement Officers in the US

146 on average die each year – Source National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund

As of July 1^st this year, this same group killed 550 people.

Source  http://Thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/07/01/3675670/many-people-police-killed-far-year/ 

When you compare the stats on both of these the numbers are truly insignificant.

Police kill some people and in a country of 200 million people they really don’t kill that many.  Additionally from a fatality standpoint police have a 99.984% chance of not dying on the job.

I work as a Pilot and when I leave home my wife always says “Have a safe flight” to which I say “I’ll do my best” and although it is a risky job the chances of dying in a plane crash in the United States is one in seven million.

Driving to the airport is another story, actually driving anywhere, is a risky endeavor with 130 people dying each day or 47,000 people per year dying on the roads.

This should give you a perspective on how many people the police kill and how many police are killed. It’s along the lines of dying by getting hit by lightning or by a shark attack.

So when I see the heartfelt blue candle post being circulated on Facebook  asking me to support the police, I get confused. The Video of the attractive blond holding up handwritten notes while music plays in the background- about her man, a LEO, a father, a brother, a cousin, a husband and best friend and you want me to help make it viral because you’re a LEO wife and you want everyone everywhere to be aware of the sacrifice he makes in his pensioned union job and how he might not come home tonight- the figures completely belie this.

Something happened on 9/11/2001 where everyone on the country was suddenly made very afraid, and we looked to those courageous public servants in New York and Washington DC clearing rubble and searching for bodies and we rightfully thought of them as hero’s.  Elsewhere around the country that heroism was transferred via osmosis or some other method to where we’re made to believe that every police officer everywhere is also a hero, just seconds away from an untimely death at the hands of some nere’ do well. 

But the reality is, like any profession, there are good cops and there are bad cops. I like the police officers that work in my suburban Connecticut town, I obey the law and they leave me alone. I hope that I never have to use them for anything. But the reality is they are public servants, paid by our taxes. A large percentage of them are like Andy and Barney in Mayberry,  Getting cats out of trees and directing traffic at accident scenes and writing reports.

But there is a bunch of them who are quick on the trigger and kill quite a few innocent people along with the bad guys. Hey, they’re human, they make mistakes. But by and large they have a good middle class job with retirement benefits, healthcare and vacation. Yes they have to work shitty shifts, nights, weekend and holidays in all sorts of weather and catastrophes, and aside from the catastrophe part SO DO I.  

But showing up for work shouldn’t make you a hero, a conscientious employee, maybe, a caring and concerned member of the community, yes. But a hero – No.

We way over use that title. It’s like giving every kid in the pee wee football league a trophy.

If you, your husband, brother, cousin, wife, uncle or mother is a police officer please take no offense by this. And if you are a police officer who has done something heroic, then you deserve to be called a hero. But the guy sitting in the car at the airport watching planes land and driving around the perimeter every so often and checking to see if gates are closed and locked, I mean come on.

I am sure that someone will be offended by this, and I really mean no disrespect by it. But I am tired of people telling me how grateful I need to be that I have these awe inspiring protectors of the community keeping me safe from the boogeyman I say Horsehockey. My gratitude is the taxes I remit to help pay their salaries, benefits and equipment.

                                              

Nicotine Addiction, Laws, Children

I recently had a friend on Facebook post about a new law is taking effect where it will be illegal for parents to smoke cigarettes in a car when they have a child on board. At first my closet libertarian became outraged about how could we possibly legislate away all of our  freedoms, as if somehow poisoning your child with lethal carcinogens was an inalienable right guaranteed in the constitution.  That thought alone made me think about my own upbringing 

I remember my parents smoking in the car. Growing up we had an array of different vehicles ranging from a Ford Country Squire Station Wagon to a Massive Winged Cadillac and the Chrysler the B52’s sang about in Love Shack. None of these cars were purchased new, nor could any of them ever be considered pristine. Regardless of make or model all of them were smoked in by both my father and mother. The country squire had through rust in the rear where the fold out seats were. On long trips the smaller children (like me) would be put back there where the combination of the cigarette smoke would mix with the exhaust fumes.  No wonder I like a good buzz as an adult.

Growing up in the sixties and seventies my folks were smokers and unabashed about it.  I wasn’t around for the start of their addiction but I did live through their cessation and ultimately their demise directly impacted by their lifelong affiliation with the RJ Reynolds Nicotine Cartel 

Friday nights when I was a kid they would drink hi balls of Canadian Club and Coke and smoke Camels in the kitchen while listening to John Gary, Harry Belafonte, Petula Clark, Johnny Mathis, and others at a thundering volumes while smoking. With no ventilation the smoke would extend from the ceiling to about three feet from the floor. We thought it was cool as kids we'd crawl around under the smoke and run thru it mixing it up like fog from a smoke machine. A circular fluorescent light would illuminate the kitchen and when the starter would age the light would strobe creating eerie shadows   

My mothers favorite color was blue so out kitchen was always painted in a robins egg hue which after a few years would take on a patina of nicotine brown that would stain the white ceilings tan and produce a sepia gradient from the ceiling to the floor.  

Dad would paint the kitchen with semi gloss paint for wash ability but I don’t ever remember anyone washing them, just repainting when they became too dingy for mom to tolerate. Humidity would cause runs in the nicotine, clearing rivulets of clean blue paint next to the brown. When these became prevalent, the calls for painting would come out.

Keeping people from smoking with their kids in the car is a great idea, but as a reformed cigarette addict I can tell you from experience smoking in the car is probably where I received the most enjoyment from the habit. Cigarettes helped me through the tedium of traffic jams, assisted me with boredom on long commutes and calmed my nerves after close calls. Later in my addiction, when being a smoker was synonymous with being a social pariah, the car was the only sanctuary where I could smoke without the fear of disdain, rejection or verbal assault.

Kids in cars with smokers are literally hotboxing nicotine especially in the northeast where we keep the windows up in the winter when it’s cold and in the summer when it’s hot.

Restaurants bars and night clubs in most places as well as public buildings, airports and transportation centers are all now non smoking and lighting up near any of them will result in a quick rebuke from practically any one.

But we really can’t expect to come into people’s homes and make it illegal to smoke in them, and in my experience as a child that was where I had the most exposure to second hand smoke.

It’s not like the old days. We know better now. The Mad Men advertising executives of the 50’s and 60’s had my Mom and Dad convinced that four out of five doctors preferred camels for their patients who smoked. Education programs including the new non-varnished ads of people with voice boxes, cancer victims and low weight babies can convince young people that starting smoking is a bad deal for you financially, socially and ultimately will kill you.

Having parents who heed that advice largely makes all the rest of all this unnecessary.