Garp called in sick and said the world is ours for today

Do you ever wish you had a device you could use to shut down cell phones being used in inappropriate places, like a local restaurant where my wife and I were on Friday evening? Don't get me wrong, even though I'm terrible with remembering to take my cell phone or turn it on, and not real good with getting it to do stuff (I have a "Pearl Blackberry" or maybe it's the other way around which does things I can neither comprehend nor imagine), I like the idea of having a cell phone, just in case. When you say cell phone, I think insurance. Go ahead, say it; I can use the practice. Ready? Go. We're gonna need to rehearse that-you were really ragged.
I confess to a problem with phones of any kind, anyway. Until Caller ID you had no idea who was calling, and yet when conversing with someone in person when the phone rang, you always chose to answer the phone. "I have to get this," you might have said, choosing a stranger on a Bakelite device and picking it up to learn within seconds, no, you didn't have answer it because it was something or someone you didn't want to talk to in the first place. It's just worse with cell phones because they are everywhere to include behind the steering wheel of cars being piloted by folks not real good at concentrating on the task at hand, trying to operate two or more tons of self-propelled vehicle in combination and concert with hundreds if not thousands of others.

Turns out, from what I've seen on line, you can really buy silencing or EMF (electro-magnetic field) stun devices, all from overseas locations because using them is illegal in this country. I'm still a little hazy on the technical aspect since it seems to me if I can push a button and temporarily silence cell phones at twenty (or forty or some number of) paces, what's to keep mine from being included in the EMF silencing wave? Do I wrap it in tin-foil; put it in my back pocket?

And maybe, but only maybe, is it sign of our coarsening times that people, like me and unlike me, consider buying devices like this instead of walking over to a table in the restaurant and asking the obliviot using the device to take it outside, upstairs, back yonder, anywhere but here. What does it say about our passage on this planet and who we are becoming that we spend more time with our fists balled in anger than our hands outstreteched? Yossarian just shared Garp should be in shortly, it was something he ate.

It not only depends on the dream, it depends on the fish.
-bill kenny