Callback

An old and dear friend called me very early this morning. He does this, being a night owl and usually staying up until dawn. He likes to leave voice messages and never expects anyone to answer, and I guess assumes that we all know how to mute our phones.

My phone is connected to my watch, though, and my watch buzzed. And kept buzzing, and while I scrambled to turn it off I accidentally answered it. With my watch, which is not a good way to communicate anyway, and I heard him saying, “Hello? Chuck?” and Julie is stirring and I’m having no luck hanging up. I eventually figured it out.

I was up for a long time, before falling back asleep. Part of me was pissed because I have enough trouble with sleep, even though I have all day to catch up if you follow. Still. Annoying.

I’ve written about this friend before, because he was representative of a type of person who puzzled me. But now he’s pretty much the only one left I know.

Because all the rest of them were old and are dead now. He’s my age.

He’s never used a computer, as far as I know. He’s finally got a cell phone since I guess his work demanded it, but that’s the only accommodation to the 21st century. No texting, emailing, social media-ing. Streaming. Learning stuff.

I’m trying to figure out how he got a Master’s degree without a computer, but that was probably the early 90s and it never came up. 

And he has a job, maybe one of the few jobs left like this, where technology doesn’t really play a role. 

My mother-in-law was like this, completely resistant to computers, but she was 35 years older. 

As the years have gone by, of course, he’s further and further removed from his old friends who don’t live nearby. None of us probably care to talk on the phone anymore — it’s just not a thing so much, and then FaceTime is more fun anyway. But I think many of us prefer text to voice, it just makes sense to me.

So he leaves messages, after a night of drinking beers, sometimes slurring, always happy and expressing affection, and I just can’t anymore. It’s 2025. At some point between, say, 1990 and now he needed to move on, and now I bet it’s too late. 

I love this man. I would do anything I could for him, but I can’t compensate for him anymore. It really doesn’t change our relationship at all, since these voice messages are the only thing I hear from him, but he’s in a bubble I can’t break.

It’s not entirely because I’m sick, but some of it is. I just don’t have the energy to even think much about this.

I usually tell people who’ve never gone to Facebook that they’re lucky. I sort of mean that, too, given how awful things are, but it’s been a gift in so many ways, to so many of us. 

I would have been happy with blogging, to be honest. I got to make new friends and have good conversations back in those days. And it’s always easy for old friends to find me, has been for 30 years. 

But it’s not just social media. It’s reality. Even if you want to make the point that everything that’s happened in the past 40 years with technology has been bad, making us worse off, we’re not going backward. We never go backward.

I can understand being annoyed by your friends always being on their phones, or feeling left out of conversations just because they’re online.

But this is something else. This is stasis, and I think the equivalent of living in a shack in the mountains, off the grid. He doesn’t think of himself that way, I’m sure, but then again, how would he know? The world has changed but he hasn’t. Bizarre. A little sad. He’s a Japanese soldier on a small island in the South Pacific, still fighting the war.