the title here is from bad religion’s i love my computer, a song about the disconnect that dependence on electronic communication creates in a human being. coincidentally i’d been thinking lately about this thing Garrison Keillor said on a prairie home companion this past weekend, something i’d been searching for the words to describe for a while, and he nailed:

There’s just something in people that enjoys the lack of electricity, for at least few hours, and everything goes back to the 19th century, and suddenly you can’t read that crawl on the screen anymore, you can’t text anymore, you can’t send email – [it's] all shut down. We’re such driven people, we push so hard, and then when we can’t, because the power has been shut down, we walk outside, we walk into this world we knew as children, before we got fascinated by electronics, where we knew everything by the touch of it.

sliding over the rocks on the bottom of the river in my bare feet… sprawled on my back in the freshly cut grass in my front yard… rushing water up to my knees, dangling over the side of the boat… all things i resisted when i was a kid, furious that my parents would separate me from my tv and video games and computers, and yet memories that make me smile sitting here writing about them.

am i really, secretly, desperate to rid myself of this blasted technology? or does it just sound glorious and ambitious and countercultural?