Chapter 140
Well. Here I sit in a parking lot in Shawnessy, a tenuous hold on external communications through the wonder of free wifi from a helpful restaurant. As many others in the area, I was somewhat excited to get an email from Starlink last month telling me they were ready to take more of my money if I still wished them to send me an installation package. Joy!
One wonders how much they made from the investment of, presumably, several thousands of people who made a deposit to get “on the list” over the past two years. Enough to fund the system expansion to launch the service they dangled like a star-spangled carrot before our rural internet-starved eyes. Crowd-funding in action.
Strange how times alter so many things. I can’t think of many services that I would have been prepared to shell out a deposit for, over two years in advance. Communications have morphed so dramatically over the last decade or two. My early days in Calgary saw me inadvertently plunged eye-deep into the blooming world of new technology and mind-boggling innovation.
I arrived in Canada when Fax still trumped E-mail. When people were still writing E-Mail, not email. When no-one knew what a JPG was and a PDF had yet to be invented. When mobile phones were still the size of small bricks and only the most tech-savvy had yet invested in a laptop each.
I have bags of hand-written missives either from others, or myself, saved and returned to me by friends who kept them like a time-lapse log of our lives. There are reams of tales in wafer-thin gossamer-fine email papers from my time in Iran and other places… when we wrote in tiny script to pack as much information as possible onto the least amount of paper. Airmail was expensive.
Imagine the plethora of words I used to spray out around the globe to keep in touch with my far-flung family and friends. Less than a generation later and I can blast off an email to a few hundred with one touch.
In 2010 when I first collapsed the tent of life in Canada to erect a new, more nomadic one in Thailand, I did not own a computer or a globile phone. I did not have a FB account. Not long after arriving in Chiang Mai I was the owner of both. Keeping in touch with the burgeoning list of new friends and contacts from all over the world devolved to FB. That was it. Now we have at least a dozen alternative methods of connection across the ether.
For the first few years on the road, I travelled with Fantuzzi and his spare phone was my phone. It was a carefree time, a honeymoon period when I existed in a bubble of magic, weaving endless dreams of music and colour and light. Everywhere we went, we made people smile, dance, laugh and sometimes cry with the discovery of light within. Looking back now, much floats in a fuzzy amalgam of memories, much more is written down in XXXX prose that may or may not see the light of day. Meanwhile… a simple phone, some FB posts and a few emails were all it took to grease the eternal wheels and keep us moving.
Fast forward a couple more years, my parents strong-armed me into getting a smart phone so they could stay in touch with me as I travelled at lightning speed around the globe. It was, no doubt, a double-edged sword which I resisted for as long as possible. When the parents dump the money in your lap and insist on you buying, it’s time to give in.
I was right about one thing, my ability to resist the (deliberately) addictive setup of these things. Natch. I had to uninstall app after app – every time you get a new phone/ replacement, it is littered with ‘helpful’ bundled apps. Helpful if you want your life to dissolve into a tiny glowing screen. I want to stay out in the real world, with plants and animals and sky and earth. It’s so hard not to fall down the rabbit hole. I fail and fall daily.
Getting back to Fantuzzi after over two years of forced separation was such a balm to my soul. Hanging out with friends I haven’t seen in four years – those evenings of music and sharing – no amount of technology can replace these treasures.
Yet… the glorious, instant access to information, answers to questions, addresses & maps, to booking flights and accommodations, to paying bills and automating boring necessities, there’s so many marvellous, intelligent, useful, fantastic applications of technology. Wow!
How incredible being born now; ubiquitous internet, wearable devices, magic machines that one merely have to speak to and… the oven is on, the curtains closed and the dog has been fed… and you’re talking to it through your phone sitting in a traffic jam in NW Calgary instead of in front of your fire at home in West Bragg. These are the things I read of in book after book as a child. The stuff of what was then referred to as science fantasy. How the world has changed. Robert Heinlein was a great prophet.
Appreciate the prophets among us. They take any form they like.
I hope you are in good health and mental focus. You have what you need and like what you have. See you on the trail from here to there.
With gratitude and love,
Kat Dancer
bodymudra@gmail.com
403-931-3866 (h)
+1 415 525 2630 (c)
