I'm at breakfast
again, at a little touristy diner—not really touristy, but close
enough to the tourist area to attract them in summer when you can't
get in here. It's still early enough, in the year, however, to be
safe to come here, and there's a long counter, so it's easy to come
in by yourself. Actually, this place is a hangout for the local
artists, being in the local art district, where old warehouses have
been converted into artists' lofts, which are now really upscale and
popular places to live, and out of the price-range of all but the
most successful of artists. I guess there must be this brief window
of time when the warehouses are being converted from warehouses to
places where people can live and work for very little money, but that
always seems to be a boat that I miss everywhere I've ever lived. I
don't know, maybe it's all a myth. Apparently, many of the artists
are now having babies, judging by the people with babies in here—it's
their current version of art. Actually, the artist that can now
afford to have babies are the ones who are successful, and the ones
that are successful are no longer painting but doing video
installations and other multimedia extravaganzas. From what I've read
about our local art community. There are still the few old timers,
the old holdouts who like to go out on the pier with their easel and
watercolors and paint lobster boats. They can even make a few dollars
during tourist season, but they certainly can't afford to live in
this new artist warehouse loft neighborhood.
Even more
prominent than berets and babies in this place this morning are cell
phones. I'm sitting at the counter looking into a big series of
mirrors and I can survey damn near the whole place without twisting
around on my stool or craning my neck, and this makes it a good place
for observation and reflection, so to speak. And what I see, in the
booths and at the tables behind me, are a lot of people talking on
their phones. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's not even the artists who
come here any more, maybe it's just the real estate people.
I suppose there'll
be a time not long at all from now that when you get phone service
turned on it will be cell phone service—and it'll be the only
choice. It'll be as affordable as anything. Why not? It's one of
those inventions that just makes sense. It's not like it's creating a
need that people don't have, or selling people something that is
already free (water, air) like so many businesses—it's
understandable that people would like to be able to take their phone
with them. You fell in love—you're waiting by the phone—hell,
take the phone with you, then the phone is waiting by you. You may be
miserable, in love, but you can still go to the laundromat, the video
store, and drive around in the car and park in front of her house and
will her to call—call! I guess at this point the automobile, and
the traffic jam, and the commute are leading factors in cell phone
popularity. If I was in that kind of phone oriented, drive here and
there business—hell yes. I'm all for useful technology as such,
telecommunications, tele com, the future. But right now, the cell
phone is still a symbol of ostentatiousness—and it's still a
negative thing in Portland, Maine, where there are poor people and
rich people, and the poor people are trying to make a living doing
art or doing nothing or pulling lobsters from the sea in a leaky
boat, and the rich people are people who own the land and own the
buildings and rent the living space to the poor people. And in some
cases it goes all the way back to the sailors who came here from
god-knows-where and killed everyone and started gridding out the
land.
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