I’m reading Steve Jobs on my Kindle which reminds me of Europe with you and packing light and repacking light from hostel to hostel. The compactness of it all. This morning I showered as your Israeli soap grew paper thin in my hand. I knew this day would come when the scent of the promised land would slip through my fingers into eternity.

Only now do I begin to translate the grace of Europe into my own stubbornly American tongue. We are a literal folk with practical gadgets that make our lives easier to waste on them. Here I speak of smart phones and smarter computers and the numbing time it takes to clear out inboxes and superfluously stored megabytes. Next time I go to far away places, I’ll tell my people here I won’t be in touch for a few weeks, won’t be squandering the exotic continent I’m traveling to. Instant communication is a mixed baggage.

I walked into a vintage shop with Spencer and Joe in Toronto this weekend where Bob Dylan spoke-sang over the vintage speakers (not) as though no time had elapsed. In his time we didn’t have Steve Jobs and kindles and apples and orange ya gonna ask me if I regret those eruptions of genius? My brain is decidedly poor at processing all these processors. She enjoys mastery of new forms, like movie making and graphic design, yet craves a certain means by which to filter the useful from the chaff. She would rather sit quietly with pen and pad than drag and drop and sort and file the pixels.

Suffocating clutter of our gilded age is virtual and real. And at this very moment some genius is probably conjuring the next frontier of over-stuffed closets.

Photo credit Schuyler S Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic