WE CAN'T GET LOST ANYMORE
by Jeremy Glass
We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will
get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean, because there’s no
service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on
Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re
helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.
My best friend and I once got lost in Connecticut. We were
juniors in high school, it was 2004, and we were lost in the state we’d
grown up in together. We kept driving, hopeless and amused, using the
signs on the road and our spotty intuition as our guides. We sang songs
in the car as our cell phones, incapable of no more than a phone call,
sat like bricks in our pockets. There wasn’t a map of the world
conveniently in the palm of our hands, no app to see how many people had
gotten lost before us, no way to research the best local diners in the
state. We were lost and it was awesome.
Flash-forward almost ten years later and I’m on the beach
in the Rockaways with my little brother. We’ve been laying out in the
sun for an hour and I’m checking my phone every five minutes to see if
I’ve missed any calls from work. He’s feverishly texting the girl he’s
been swooning over for days and I’m trying to decide whether I want to
update my Twitter now or take a picture and upload it in the car. We get
off the beach and wander on the boardwalk, I Google the best place for
cheap seafood and we’re lead to a little restaurant a couple minutes
from where we are. Yelp tells me to avoid the fish ‘n’ chips, so I
settle on the clam chowder. My brother orders a beer and we talk about
how hot it is. My weather app tells me it’s only getting hotter, I relay
that to my brother. We’re about ready to go and he tells me he wants to
take one more dip in the water before we head to the car. I agree. He
was always competitive when it came to running, so we raced as fast as
we could to the ocean and jumped in without hesitation. We laugh and
surface, covered in seaweed, and I feel a dull vibration in the pocket
of my shorts. I brush it off and dunk my head back underwater. I can’t
see anything because my eyes sting and I feel my thigh vibrate again. I
reach into my pocket and pull out my iPhone. Completely soaked,
vibrating itself to death, hot and sluggish as a dog that’s been left in
a car all day. I panic. My life is over. My life isn’t really over, but
it’s over.
It’s 1998 and my family and I are inside the Museum of
Natural History. We’re waiting in line for tickets when my little
brother tells me he needs to go to the bathroom. I nod and he leaves.
Twenty minutes go by, I’m distracted and reading about dinosaurs and I
hear my older brother ask where Adam went. I look around and notice he’s
gone. I panic, we all panic. He doesn’t have a cell phone, no one has a
cell phone. The only mobile phone is attached to my father’s car, which
is parked god knows where. We all search for him, my older brother and
mom are crying and I keep thinking that it’s my fault because I didn’t
come with him to the bathroom. There’s no way to find him, he doesn’t
know where he is, we were all miserably lost. Eventually a security
guard brings him to us. He had wandered down towards the subway.
Back in the car with my best friend, we had given up trying
to find even a hint of a way home and settled upon taking only left
hand turns. We enter a strange town. I’ll never forget the name of it:
Nepaug. We both say it out loud, concluding that the town must have been
erected that very morning in preparation for our lost asses to end up
within it. To our left is a strip-mall and to our right is a store that
only says “Puppet Church” — it’s incredibly intriguing. Further down the
road, we spot the oasis in the desert; Dairy Queen. We each order a
milkshake and sit on the hood of my car, talking about what life is
going to be like after high school.
I remember the time I picked up my girlfriend from her friend’s house
in Massachusetts. She was going to school down in Georgia and this was
the first time I’d seen her in months. “We’re back together…finally.” I
tweeted, tagging both of our Twitter handles in the status. The flash on
my iPhone annoys her and she asks me to put my phone away. I
begrudgingly agree and I start to drive. I put my home address into the
GPS and follow the voice. She asks me if I want to get lost with her. I
ask her what she means and she tells me that she wants to get lost. I
ask her where she wants to go and she shrugs. I tell her that there is
an interesting looking coffee shop only 2.3 miles away and she sighs. I
turn off the GPS and drive. A few minutes go by and I get antsy. I turn
the GPS back on and follow the voice, she crosses her arms and is silent
all the way back to my house.
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