cell phones

I haven't been to a nightclub in years.  I've been to bars, but that's not what I'm thinking of.  I mean nightclubs, happening places, the places where people go to meet people.  I think they still call them 'meat markets'.  They're for younger people, yes.  Me and Ms. Donna used to attempt to visit them when we were first together but I like to go home at nine and wind down.  Get to bed soon after.  Nightclubs are vacant till then.  Young people are just going out to dinner about then. 

I quit going to those places when I realized I didn't know how to do it.  As a single dude, I would get a hankerin' to go out and party so I'd go to some famous watering hole and find me a place and find me a beer and sit around looking at everyone who knew how to have fun.  Having no instruction manual or assisting guide, I would soon get bored and go to another place hoping that maybe it would magically be different than the first.  Pretty soon I would get frustrated because all I was doing was driving around town and paying a cover charge everywhere I went so that I could buy a beer much more expensive than the one I could drink at home and then watch other people have fun.  So after a while I'd go get some food and head for home. 

I'm only talking about this because I had a thought today.  Yes, I have them.  I was in the break room at work and there was a youngster there.  She was no longer with us.  She was, how should we say, 'phoned'.  She was holding her cell phone with both of her hands and she was head-bent-over staring at the piece and she was so involved that I'm pretty sure she didn't even know I was there.  All young people do this.  The younger, the intenser.  Nobody looks up anymore.  I often joke with Ms. Donna, saying that, "Hey, know how I can look thirty years younger?"  Then I pull out my cell phone, hold it with both hands and stare at it.  She doesn't laugh.  Oh, I don't know, she may have laughed the first time.  But wives don't put up with clowns for too long. 

So anyway, I thought of young people in bars.  Used to be when I went to bars, well not bars, I already established that I'm not talking about bars.  When I used to go to meat markets, I would enjoy the antics of the young.  I would watch the dancers and the strutters and the posers.  I would enjoy the rituals of the cool.  They had something to attract me.  Nowadays, not having been there to actually see what's going on, I'm wondering if there's anything anymore that any normal person would find interesting.  I'm concerned that the whole nightclub, being filled with young people, would be a quiet place with absolutely nothing going on except enrapt cell phone concentration.  Everyone would be sitting around staring at their phones.  Nobody would be doing - nobody knows how to be doing anything else.  Unless they look it up on their phone, of course. 

Maybe they could all just sit there and text each other.  There used to be a bar like that in Tulsa when I was younger.  It had a lot of booths in it and there were telephones at the booths.  You could call people at the other booths.  I guess it didn't go over too well because I remember tables of guys calling and calling over and over getting busy signals.  And tables full of girls who would keep picking up the receiver to see if there was really a dial tone. 

So anyway, is that the way it is nowadays?  Does everybody do what they do out in the rest of the public?  Do they just sit around and stare at their hands?  Sadly, youngsters are missing the world.  It's going on all around them and they're not even there.