We live in a world of traffic lights, department stores, sidewalks, and of course, cellular phones. Well, we call them “cell phones” or “cells” for short, which is really stupid if you think about it. It’s not a cell. It’s a phone. A cell is one of those microscopic parts of an organism that makes up a whole organism.

However, there are some single-celled organisms, and I am not a biologist or anything, but I am fairly certain a cell phone is not one of them. There are also battery cells and jail cells. These are cells, and I hope I stay familiar with only one of them (I can’t figure out batteries for the life of me). Cell phones are not cells. They are cell phones, a type of phone. Everyone has one, so everyone should know what they are.

That’s what I want to talk about. Everyone has one. No one can leave their home anymore without worrying about who’s going to call them. Is every call you get that important? Are you expecting a call about your rich uncle dying to leave you his fortune? Is Denise Richards going to give you a jingle at some point today? You can jingle yourself all you want, but that fantasy is never coming true. You never get a holler from Jimi Hendrix back from the dead or a ring from a secret society of sorcerers who want to reveal to you all the mysteries of the universe. It’s never anything important. It’s just a continuous rampage of unnecessary calls.

Do you really want to be at a bar trying to get some ass-ction and suddenly get a call from your grandmother? Fuck that! Grandma can leave a message! That’s what answering machines are for. The answering machine, sitting safely back at home, can listen to Grandma’s repetitive rambling of senile claims of a martian living in her refrigerator, eating all the apple turnover. I’m looking for another kind of pie to put something alien into. I can call Grandma in the morning when I’m telling Rosy Palms she’s not getting breakfast.

It’s already bad enough you can’t find a phone without an answering machine anymore. I figure, if I’m not home and someone calls, if it’s important enough, they’ll call back. Then I can answer and drive across town to see the inchworm a drunken friend has spotted on the window sill and absolutely must show me. With a cell phone, I would have to answer this obnoxious call, but I don’t have one. When I’m sitting at home listening to voices in my head telling me to eat dog food, then I’ll answer the phone. Save the dog food for the dog. However, while I’m elsewhere, doing something else, without my inchworm-obsessed comrade’s presence in the same building, I could not give two shits and a fuck less about the inchworm. I’m busy. I don’t want to talk to you.

By the way, there is a reason I used the concept of hearing voices in my head other than for the sake of random humor. Because of cell phones, people are always talking to people who aren’t there. Have you ever been in a room where everyone in the room is talking, but none of them are talking to each other? That’s an eerie experience. Each of them has a little device in their hand, not even reaching all the way to their mouths, jabbering into them. Then I stand there in awe, witnessing firsthand our society almost reaching the top of the cliff it will be plummeting from soon.

I’m watching the civilized man make advances in technology to make life easier, but then he forgets how to function like he did before the advancement was made. When everyone shuts their phones, it’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time. All of a sudden the room is cursed with an awkward silence. No one knows what to say to each other. It’s astonishing. It truly is.

Now you can’t have a conversation with someone without a cell phone call interrupting. It’s not that I care to hear what they have to say all the time, but the concept is dumbfounding. I’m standing right in front of someone rambling on about some TV show I’ve never heard of, and the person is suddenly summoned by a phone. Then the person answers with the grammatically incorrect “where you at?” phrase and talks to someone who isn’t even in the same room, the same building, or sometimes even the same town. Maybe they have relatives in Turkmanistan. I don’t know.

Anyway, they also like to say, “My phone is ringing.” No, it isn’t. It’s playing a song. If anything, it’s making an annoying sing-songy beeping noise. I know what ringing sounds like. It’s what my phone still does as it sits connected to a phone jack in the wall. Hearing a professional rap artist instruct the listener to back that ass up or some such thing, is not equivalent to a ring. It may be just as irritating of a sound, but don’t say your phone is ringing when it is not. Just “back that ass up” back to the door and put the phone down before you leave the house.