This article just freaked me out y’all, and you know I’ve got a pretty damn high tolerance for this kind of thing.

Now, the whole “Wah, wah, the innertubewebnet is turning us into a race of shut-in Morlocks who never go out and do anything, won’t somebody please think of the children” thing has been done to death. And – with the exception of people who would have been Morlocks even if they had been born in 1792, living in Mom’s basement with a stack of books instead of a laptop – it hasn’t really happened. No, seriously! Look around at the people you know. If they’re not leaving the house, it’s ‘cos they wouldn’t have left the house anyway. (These people have existed in all times, in all places. I should know: I’m one of them. One of my genetic throwbacks was probably listening to his parents harrumph and cluck, “Stupid kid, always got his nose buried in a cave drawing, why isn’t he outside like Urrghh’s boy, you know, the one who discovered fire.” Anyway I bet Urrghh’s boy got eaten by a diatryma while my ancestor lived to a ripe old age. Ha! I digress.)

But the article isn’t about the Morlocks. It’s about the so-evolved Eloi, outside in the sunshine and the fresh air, eating organic produce, and craving constant stimulation, attention, data, and activity… but not with other people. Who needs other people when you’ve got a GADGET?!

That’s when I got the chills.

The article is lighthearted and cute – father playing chess on his phone and absentmindedly hitting the tap while his four year-old floods the bathroom, husband surfing the net during a boink, guys whose iPhones are in their hands ‘from the moment I wake up.’ There was no reason for my reaction to be all “NO! NO! AAAAA!”

These smartphones, these adorable little devices that carry the entire world inside them, that connect their users to everything everywhere all the time, that make life so much more convenient, that let people broadcast their slightest thoughts as fast as their thumbs can go… they are, I think, my greatest enemy.

I’m not talking about the carpool boy steering with his knees while he texts his wife (”Oh, you caught me at that, huh”) or the thoughtless date that whips out his Blackberry mid-sentence without so much as a token mumble of “Hang on, I just gotta update my status,” or the one who turns his back on you in the movie lineup so he can check his favourite news site; I’m not talking about the guy I saw on the train who walked directly into a set of closed doors while writing something (riveting, I’m sure) on his iPhone. I’m talking about the ones who use smartphones as a snail shell. I mean, I can see the appeal. For those of us sufficiently immersed in the cloud as to think of the internet as not merely something to use to send Grandma baby pictures, or pay the gas bill, for those of us who consider it a home of a sort, along comes this device that essentially says “Guess what? You can take your home anywhere you go.” For me, logging into a strange computer and seeing my iGoogle startup page, with my widgets that I picked out and my theme that I’ve had forever and my familiar inbox, yes, it’s reassuring, it’s wonderful in fact, it’s like going to a scary neighbourhood and opening an unfamiliar door and looking into your own house. I’ve been blogging for seven years; I consider Meticulous Vandalism to be more of a home than any of the apartments I’ve spent a year in. There is safety in the stimulation, security in the fun. And you can take it with you and never really be alone. I get that.

But there’s no appeal in them, for me, and I can back that up with an anecdote.

Last spring, on a lark, I bought one of those little game emulators. What can I say? Thinkgeek had a sale, and I had a little cushion in my budget. $100 and two weeks later it arrived, pre-loaded with about thirty retro games and instructions on how to load more. While playing around with it that first week, I discovered that you could also use it to store books, photos, video, and music – so I excitedly crammed it full of media and took it with me on my trip back East.

And all of a sudden the temptation was always there. The temptation was always there, in any moment of downtime – ten minutes in line, two minutes before supper, fifteen seconds mid-conversation, if the train wasn’t arriving immediately – to pull my toy from my purse and listen to some music or watch an episode of ‘The Tick.’ Even when it would be inconvenient. Even when, bluntly, it would be rude. Even when I was having a good time with charming company, there was always this thought, which I had never really had pre-toy, “What else could I be doing?” When I came home, I put it away. I could feel something in me yearning towards it, presumably like your average crackhead wanting just one more hit, “Last one, last one before I go cold turkey, I swear,” and I ruthlessly slammed the drawer shut. I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. And you couldn’t even access the web with it – really, it was like a glorified Gameboy – but it was bad enough.

I’m pretty self-aware. I know that if it’s hard enough to get me away from my books and get me out of the house, I shouldn’t be into anything that makes it easier to stay in. And I know that if I can’t even listen to the radio when I drive, I probably can’t manage to walk and tweet at the same time. And I know, most of all, that I have an easily addictive personality, which is why I don’t even sample most of the things I feel would be an addiction threat. When I dropped my celphone on its head just before Christmas and went to replace it at Londonderry, the guy in the wireless store tried to interest me in a smartphone. I reached for a stupidphone instead, one of those ones you’d buy for your crazy grandfather in the nursing home, the numbers on the keypad as big as Chiclets. “But that costs the same as this one with the data plan,” he whined. “Don’t you want a smartphone?” “Nope.” “But it costs the same!” “Not to me it doesn’t.”

I have to resist this whole ‘There but not really there’ smartphone phenomenon. I just have to. I have enough trouble being fully present in the real world with just my mind to distract me. Can you imagine how distant and rude I’d be if I had a smartphone? Can you imagine how my already-crappy personality would deteriorate? As it is, right now, between e-mail, blogging, Wave, Facebook, and Buzz, I have a zillion ways to jabber about whatever I want anytime I want. Can you imagine how bad I’d be if I could do that anywhere? I would never shut up. There would be no such thing as self restraint. My whole brain would turn itself inside-out like a shark’s stomach and plaster itself all over the web. And frankly, I think I’d rather stay as a Morlock.

(Because I couldn’t think of a title and then I happened to notice the counter.)

1. I just found something very, very horrible that I wrote last year, and it has perturbed me sufficiently that I am going to have to stew and brood and froth about it for a couple of weeks till I have become fully consumed by it, so that I may thereby get it out of my system. It has to do with a hated four-letter word which, till tonight, I had not fully realized I hated.

2. So in the car on the way home, apropos of nothing, the one carpool boy goes, “By the way, do you know of any songs where you heard the cover, then heard the original song and couldn’t stop laughing?” Or maybe it was vice-versa, I wasn’t really listening, because I was thinking of my favourite cover song ever, the ridiculous ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by the Kinks, covered by Def Leppard. I discovered the Def cover in, I don’t know, like 2006 or something, and didn’t till last year know of the original song, so when I cued it up for the first time my instantaneous reaction after the lead-in is just hysterical laughter.

Here’s the cover (which I adore):

And here’s the original (which, uh, enjoy):

And here, apparently, is my favourite artist singing my favourite cover, which I just discovered five minutes ago whilst trying to find the first video. Whaaa?

(The Def Leppard version is still my favourite because, frankly, Dave could not possibly sound more like a bus station letch in this song if he tried, and I’m aware that doesn’t make any sense, I just keep picturing him in a dirty trenchcoat singing under his breath as he watches schoolkids go by. Or maybe I just need more sleep.)

So what’s this about there being a fourth Gormenghast book?!

Is anyone around here as confused as I am?

The ‘Gormenghast’ series is my favourite book series ever, always has been, and OK, I haven’t read that many books published in a serial fashion, I don’t count ‘Discworld’ because fundamentally they aren’t a serial, also, did you guys hear about how Sir Terry is planning on assisted suicide? anyway, I digress, the main thing is that I can’t decide whether this fourth-book thing is SOME KIND OF UNFORGIVABLE HERESY or THE BEST THING EVER. One thing’s for sure: given my obssession, it certainly cannot be something in the middle.

Things that are interfering with my opinion:

1. Did Peake get a chance to illustrate this fourth book before his death? Because his illustrations hold significant appeal for me and if the book has been illustrated by someone else, or if it lacks illustrations, I will judge the new book slightly more harshly than the original three. The article indicates a new edition of the original trilogy will be released with new illustrations, but it doesn’t say whether any of those will be for the fourth book.

Alice in Wonderland illustration by Mervyn Peake

2. The ending of ‘Titus Alone’ doesn’t exactly forestall a fourth book – if anything, it screams ‘What happens next?’ at the top of its papery lungs – but with that said, it was a fucking perfect literary ending, and that does not happen overmuch in my experience. I do not see how another book can improve on a perfect ending.

3. I notice the article says the book was completed by Peake’s wife, Maeve Gilmore, and that she is cited as ‘who was also a writer.’ So I checked Bookfinder.com and all I can find under her name are books she’s written about her husband and anthologies of his stuff. Which begs the question:
- How complete were Peake’s notes? Are we talking back-of-the-napkin stuff or pages of dialogue that she’d be able to write about? Because, and pardon my lack of faith, it does not do to speak ill of the dead, but assembling one’s husband’s poems and drawings in chronological order does not necessarily mean that one is capable of writing a novel.
- Am I really going to buy a book if it’s written by a chick? Maybe I can talk myself into buying it if I hear that he wrote most of it and she just filled in, you know, the apostrophes or something.
- On the other hand, since I used to read Barbra Hambly and CJ Cherryh, I suspect there’s a hole in my mental ‘Do not want’ for female authors if they’re writing fantasy or sci-fi.
- On the other other hand, ‘Gormenghast’ isn’t really fantasy. It’s just a place that isn’t easily locatable on any map. I mean there aren’t any like dragons or unicorns or hobbits or anything.
- Where was I?
- Oh yeah, and how come she died without saying anything about it? Kinda fishy, right?

Anyway, I am quite, quite looking forward to it despite my many misgivings. I’ll just have to go into it with low expectations so I’m not horribly disappointed.

I used to not want kids, then I did, then I didn’t, then I did, then I didn’t, then… you get the idea. Now I’ve settled on ‘do not want.’ Which turns out to be a good thing because hey, in two years, 90% of my eggs will be gone!

Eggs, of course, start to die almost as soon as they’re formed in your ovaries; but that’s a new number to me, that 90%. I wonder if I’ll even have 10% left at 30, what with all the mercury, UV, carcinogens, ammonia, nickel, jet fuel, etc, etc, etc, etc, that I’ve gotten a lungful of or stepped in or had squirted into my face or spilled onto my lap or soaked into my socks.

So, it looks like if I want kids my only choice will probably be to switch my focus from the velociraptor cloning project and start working on a copy of myself instead. Dang.