My Unexpected Salvation

I dropped my iPad Mini into the toilet recently. I guess it was payback for all those times I left the seat up and the next person plopped down on cold porcelain. Thankfully, the water was clean, and I fished it out quickly but not before water seeped in and damaged the circuit board.

I had smashed the iPad so many times before that it looked like a shattered windshield and its corners were crumbling. Ever the inventive type, I patched the corners with electrical tape and the cracks on the screen with clear duct tape. You can’t go wrong with duct tape (see The Magic of Duct Tape). Still, despite gobs of tape holding the device together, the swan dive into the toilet bowl was the coup de grâce.

At first, the iPad took on a life of its own and did crazy things in rapid succession like run through a bunch of web sites, sort my email, and even place a call to a colleague in Tennessee. I tried desperately to press the red “stop” button before the guy answered. When that didn’t work, I was able to turn the iPad off. But now I can’t get it back on. This, after drying it out and wiping away the foam that continually oozed out of the cracked screen. I have no idea where that came from. You’d think the thing had been wounded and was cleaning itself with pus.

The upshot of all this is that I spend far less time on social media. My poison of choice has been YouTube followed by Quora and then Twitter. Twitter is my least favorite, because it attracts people who have no qualms about letting their inner three-year-old run around like a spoiled tyrant, attacking others and creating an atmosphere of Pol Pot-like oppression. Good luck with that, Elon.

Quora has been good with many entries about World War Two, tigers, criminal minds, imaginary encounters between gorillas and bears, and prison. People submit a lot of questions about prison. It seems to be the platform of choice for those about to do time. It also teaches you how to spot a guy who has done time. Hint: they tend to look around themselves a lot and insist on facing the door in restaurants. That applies to mob guys as well, which is a subset of guys who do time.

My favorite social media platform is YouTube. I have written before about how addicted I am, promising to kick the habit. I have been as successful at that as Mark Twain was at quitting smoking, which is to say not successful at all. Actually, I also still pine for a cigarette every now and then, but that’s another story (see My Last Cigarette).

I confess that I don’t like YouTube as a company, since it is owned by Google and has assumed for itself the power to regulate and censor speech. That reminds me of the chilling comment made by a Davos devotee recently in which she referred to the need to “recalibrate” speech. You know, you can’t have all that free speech. It misleads people. And, being an expert, she will decide what gets recalibrated. I’m sure she’ll do a fine job.

However, I love what I have been able to learn from YouTube. I’ll give them that. I have studied foreign languages: French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. I also watch political commentary of all persuasions. I like to watch ideologues dig holes for themselves and then sling the dirt at each other. I’ll leave the names to you with a recommendation to round up the usual suspects and then add economist Richard Wolff.

A representative list of what I like to call “TooMuch YouTube” includes videos on: the history of “Rocket Monkeys”; Hitler’s chauffeur; “Why Sailors Wear Striped Shirts”; the best scenes from “Bonanza”; “How to Organize Your Closet”; the “Incomplete Guide of Chicken Care”; forensic facial reconstruction; the lack of waterways in Sub-Saharan Africa; the Frankfurt School; “Dion and the Belmonts”; the history of Nigeria; “Dates: The Healthiest Fruit on the Planet”; early Venetian lute music; critical race theory; Frozen in Latin; Bee Gees reaction videos; Dean Martin celebrity roasts; the history of the Hittites (in Italian); identifying baseball pitches; and Beethoven’s string quartets. That last one lasted eight hours.

With a list like this, it’s easy to see why I would be great at cocktail parties. That’s if I went to cocktail parties, which I don’t. Besides, I wouldn’t have much of a chance to wax poetic on chicken care, since people really want to talk about themselves. To be great at cocktail parties you have to develop the art of listening to people drone on incessantly about themselves as in, for instance, their latest colon operation.

But something liberating has come out of dropping my iPad into the toilet. I now have time to sit and think, to sip my cappuccino without sorting through videos, to slow down and not feel rushed, to unplug myself from the great social media hive where the din of voices clamoring to get my attention and shout their case has become a kind of Dantesque hell. It’s not even a real hell but a virtual one. I’m also less grouchy, even–dare I say–pleasant from time to time. That might be pushing it, though.

This has been an unexpected liberation for me. I have returned to the world of the living; a slower, saner, safer world, one that is more comfortable and fits my daily rhythms. I’m not saying that makes it artificial and protected from “reality.” Pas du tout. In fact, I get to see and relate to other people rather than their avatars. I’m also not saying you should drop your iPad into the toilet, but you might want to turn it off for dinner.

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Image credits: feature by mahdis mousavi; iPhone by Laura Rivera; sketches by visuals; apps by Rami Al-zayat. Like fiction? Check out the Mercury “trilogy” (The Gringo, Laura Fedora) here. Also, go to Robert Brancatelli.