In June of 2001 at a conference in Philadelphia I heard New York Times columnist Tom Friedman complain about what he called the “evernet.” Friedman said that increasingly we’re all in a condition of being ever-connected by cellphone and internet, a state that doesn’t allow for thoughtfulness, and that he personally was doing what he could to unplug by checking email relatively infrequently and by not… owning… a cellphone. I found the latter claim incredible, and he said so did most people who would call the Times insisting on having that cellphone number, only to have Mr. Friedman’s assistant say, “He doesn’t have a cellphone.”

These past four days I’ve thought a lot about what Friedman said, because I switched off my cellphone and email for four days (and counting) and left town. I had already been out of town for three days on business, and had been shall we say “robustly scheduled” for the four or five weeks prior. Now what I wanted was to talk to no one (except to say something like, “Yes, I’ll have another”) and I wanted to do nothing according to schedule. I didn’t even want to know what time it was. I wanted to be able to order room service if the mood struck me. And I wanted to be able to get everything I might want in one location. With those parameters in mind, I went to Las Vegas. While there, I checked no email, answered no cellphone calls, observed no appointments save one (which I’ll get to), and, incidentally, ordered no room service.

It felt strange. And wonderful.

One morning I ate “breakfast” (it was 11:30 a.m.) at the oyster bar. Breakfast consisted of New England clam chowder, six freshly arrived Bluepoint oysters, and a whiskey and soda. The day before at 6 p.m. I had had “lunch” there: steamed mussels, six assorted oysters, and two whiskeys with soda. On some day during my stay I ordered a meal that one would actually associate with breakfast — eggs, sausages, potatoes, orange juice — at 3 a.m. I don’t know what day that was.

I did some writing while I was there, just because I felt like it. It turned into a completed short story, written in one sitting. I still write plays that way, but I don’t think I’ve written a short story that way in 10 years.

And at some point Friday I decided that I was going to see the Cirque du Soleil show and Beatles tribute, “Love.” Once I bought the ticket, that was the one appointment I had to keep. When my wife and I went to Las Vegas in December I took her to see “Ka.” I had wanted to see “Love,” but it was dark that week. “Ka” had its moments, but its specious advocacy of primitivism over advanced civilization annoyed me in its naivete. (More about that soon, probably. I still have my notes.) “Love,” on the other hand was, well, awesome. In the literal sense. Everyone in the house felt awed by the performance, by the staged interpretations of the music, by the physical accomplishment and the ingenuity of the staging and most of all, afresh, by the music itself, no matter how rejiggered. Said mash-up did nothing to improve the original music, but by nature of the new context it did everything to remind one of its inherent originality. At one point, the entire audience is submerged, so to speak, down below with the Yellow Submarine. That feat alone showed the work of genius. I made a mental list of everyone I would like to bring back to see the show.

So, I had four days off. (I’m officially back checking email and the link tomorrow at noon.) It’s certainly not a lot of time. But in an over-connected and over-scheduled evernet time in my life, it was a welcome respite, the sort of thing done more easily before three kids with schedules all their own, and a hodgepodge of personal and professional obligations, all of them important to me. In the week before I left, while I was considering where to go, at one point I mentally had my passport in my hand. With a few more days I might have gone that route; Costa Rica looks beautiful and remote in those photos on the internet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under On being, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.