All Roads Lead to Cornithaca

“Lots of Not” Poem

I first began to notice cell phones in the videotape rental stores; people would read out loud from an empty tape case, wait a moment, then their eyes would glaze and they would wander off. The same behavior started popping up in grocery stores; like a kind of wandering question and answer game show. People sitting alone in restaurants would feel compelled to describe what they were eating, and every detail of the table décor, to avid listeners who may themselves be sitting in other restaurants and describing their own dining experience. • The culmination, if you can call it that, took place in a doctor’s waiting room — where a middle aged woman took a cell phone out of her purse and screamed a long repetitive conversation to a deaf relative. • Over the years; I have been engulfed in the frisson of vocal public dramas, and have more than once overheard parts of conversations that made me wish I could have overheard more — but I have never heard an interesting cell phone conversation. • Where are we going with this? That’s the question in the poem, isn’t it?