You know, there really is something to be said for getting away from it all. I spent a long weekend down the coast earlier this summer, followed last week by a long road trip that included quality time out on the Oregon coast and in upstate Washington state – hell, about as upstate as you can get without a passport, and in fact, you have to have one anyway because you can’t get there on land without crossing borders. In short, I have spent a good amount of time in places with little enough Internet access and if anything less cell signal.
And honestly, that’s fine. I have been surrounded by fog, mist, cloud cover, marine layer, weather that basically looks at August and laughs and demands a jacket anyway. I have walked out on cold, cold, COLD beaches that have rocks as often as sand and where you would have to be insane to consider sunbathing. I have set up in the blogger’s pit at the beach house, looking out at the sun setting over the Pacific, and spent the whole time reading and writing rather than surfing and watching.
I was fine missing out on the email. I was fine missing out on the social networking, for the most part. I was certainly not sorry to skip the RSS feeds, and the steady stream of bullshit made worse by a Net-enabled world. I actually read text from a book (albeit on an iPhone, often as not) and got through a whole bunch of socially unredeeming but generally amusing stuff. (I would bet real money that “Harry Turtledove” is a series of shell scripts connected to emacs, but I finished the Timeline-161 series anyway.)
I know I’ve said before that I can get by for a week with only the iPhone. I could have gotten by for 10 days with only the iPhone if not for my fantasy football draft – as it is, if you set aside the draft and occasional blogwork, I only pulled on it two or three times the whole way. There’s still no acceptable way to use the iPhone for long-form text entry. But I could scale it down even more. Give me one of my basic phones for emergency contact and maybe the Twitter feeds of my friends (the promotional feeds I can skip), a good stout notebook and a couple of pens, all the Economists and New Yorkers I haven’t gotten through yet, and maybe half a dozen books, and I’m good to go for the long weekend. In a real pinch, give me the iPod shuffle with all the podcasts I’m behind on, and I’ll use that on the trip down or something.
There’s a lot of bullshit out there. Sometimes, instead of trying to reason with it (or add to it), the best thing to do is punt and go have some time for yourself to get your head together. And amazingly, I did the whole thing without pulling out one cigar. Don’t ask me to total up the coffee, though…