Empowering the stationary mobile device

If a break from the rage-and-propaganda-stream isn't sufficient incentive to occasionally detach yourself from your phone, not looking like a mannerless robot should be

I've not only made complaining about inconsiderate users of Boulder public spaces a motif, but even suggested that the act of bitching itself has the power to accelerate the production of exactly the kinds of scenarios I detest in my immediate environment. As much as I'd like to attribute the latter phenomenon to a degree of cognitive bias straddling the boundary of suspicion and frank paranoia, I have no choice at this late hour but to in fact credit bleak magic for the ongoing local expansioni of dubious public conduct.

The other day I was walking Rosie on the sidewalk along my street when I saw a woman pushing a stroller coming toward me. I moved into the street, as I always in these situations; I have a hierarchy in my head that reminds me that runners can safely occupy most roadways, and that dog-pedestrian combos nearly always can, but that baby-strollers cannot. I don't think it requires a princely mindset to see things this way.

But as I approached the woman, I noticed that she and whoever was riding in the stroller were not alone. A girl of maybe four was ambling along behind her, watching a terrier that was pattering along just ahead of her. The terrier was on a leash, the owner's end of which was pinned to the handle of the stroller by the woman's left hand. The woman's right hand was holding a cell phone, and she was staring at it with her mouth hanging partly open in a bemused gawp. Unless she is employed as a paint-chips-taster, she probably wasn't looking at anything work-related or otherwise urgent or even essential.

Then I noticed that the woman had an unusally large abdomen, and felt a stab of morbid excitement. Please don't let her be fat, I thought—not because the idea offended me, but because I needed this to be a new unofficial record. And sure enough, the woman proved to be probably eight months along. Rosie and I passed this procession at a distance of about ten feet, and the woman never once looked up from her screen. (The little girl noticed us and smiled. The terrier somehow didn't see us; maybe it had its own phone somewhere.)

This meant that I had just seen a woman in charge of four distinct lives, not counting her own—a young child’s, an infant’s, an unborn baby’s, and a dog’s—walk by me while visibly disengaged from her entire immediate environment. All because she couldn't leave her mobile device at home for even the duration of a stroll around the neighborhood.

Now let me say, in full and total honesty: More than ever, we need people like these. Fertility is dropping; lower-income people who have babies will see those babies shuttled through a public-school system devoid of educational value and laden with perverts and purple-haired neo-wiccans posing as teachers, and put on injectable drugs that scuttle their neurotransmitters and endocrine systems. Outside of irrepressible prodigies, poor American kids are completely fucked from now until whenever the country is summarily fragmented or dissolved, however this occurs.

If this woman lives in my neighborhood and will soon have three young kids, she's probably not poor. And despite her apparent unwillingness to be fully present for outdoor walks with her dependents, she's trying. She and her presumed husband, like most normies, have probably dreamed of having a family since they were old enough to think about it. Credit the stubbornness of basic mammalian instnct if you must, but here was an example of someone who simply wasn't letting the social and biomedical pathologies of covid, Wokism, U.S.-led and -inpired warfare, and other destabilizing externalities get in the way. And I'm imagining these kids being capably educated at home or otherwise outside of the Gates-and-Soros-funded mass-insane asylum Americam school system has become.

I've also noted that the prevalence of mask-wearing in Boulder, indoors and out, remains alarmingly high. There's one dude I see at least once a week one neighborhood yonder who has been running with what looks like a gas mask on his face for over three years. He is one of the friendliness fellow runners I see, but I still feel bad for him.

In general, the maskers and the moms represent two distinct demographics. However else they may differ, the moms have not given up and are living their lives as they intend to, while the maskers—who tend to be older and either childless or with fully grown “kids”—have largely checked out of their own lives in favor of monitoring the buzzing and demented hive. These are your maximally tribal dingbats with SCIENCE IS REAL sings on their lawns and FUCK PUTIN stickers on their car bumpers.

I of course identify in spirit with those who have quit trying to better their own lives in any meaningful way. The maakers and MSNBC-watchers are utterly deluded about the state of literally everything, but their anti-MAGA, pro-Fauci Facebook groups offer them a daily purpose, however lowbrow and wrong-headed and sad. I don't believe any of the bullshit they say (and much of the time, neither do they) but I'm right there with the Erin Strout-calber superharridans who have decided to just while away my remaining time avoiding and criticizing people. The fact that I'm neither retarded nor a coward doesn't mean my outlook is any better than that of the retards; in fact, it's probably worse, since at least the harridans and other “Cocks? Twats? One and the same, you racist antivaxxer!” clownplane-passengers can always find a lucrative grift, at least the few with any organic creativity embedded in their brainglop.

The common factor between the maskers and the mothers I see is their uniform refusal to go anywhere without their phones. And this is where I sharply part company from both groups and virtually everyone else alive in Boulder County, including the homeless: with few exceptions, I don't take my phone out of the house. I treat it like it's bolted to a desk or weighs 75 pounds.

I realize this is not a real option for people with kids, especially now that so many licensed adult professionals are intent on shoving lies into children's heads and dildotic devices into their moist and tender orifices. But the rest of us? I'm tempted to bring my phone with me at all times in case of emergency, but that's as moronic as it is arrogant; I'm not interested in calling anyone to get out of any jams I find myself in, and I'm not the first person any of my few friends would contact for any reason in a pinch.

This habit has positive cascading effects. The less I have my phone with me, the less inclined I am to load it up with optional apps. I sometimes misd out on what might nbe funny or interesting photos, but for whose benefit? The most striking of these images will always remain in mental file folder. And ther more outdoor time I spemd looking at things that are a part of the outdoors instead of at cultural and governmental vulgarities—something I clearly have time for at home—then the more of these private but meaningful pictures I’ll retain for as long as I choose to keep the haunted shithouse atop my neck lit.