Check me out, folks, I'm a Modern Man, pushing buttons, making things happen. Got me some computers, carry a phone in my pocket like Captain Kirk himself as I tool around in my climate-controlled automobile with earnest purpose etched on my face. You need to speak to Crespo ASAP? Sure thing, just ring me up on the old cell. Got an urgent message that needs my immediate attention? No prob, Bob, just e-mail it over to me and I'll deal with it pronto. Need some copies of something or other? The Modern Man presses another button and makes it so. Life is smooth and seamless for the Modern Man! Can do!

Got a house full of gadgets and a basket full of remote control devices. Burn you a CD? Bam, done! Got an ionizer that removes (or adds, who knows?) those pesky ions from my house. Flip on my surround sound rumbling speakers and fill the house with music while I micro-wave some tasty food? Easy as pie. Need to hop in the Crespomoblie and tool off on yet another purposeful mission? Bingo, press the automatic garage door opener, hop in and go! Will my mission take me to uncharted territory? No worries, mate, I'll consult my handy Global Positioning Sattelite device! Will waste no time at the fueling station, simply slide my credit card at the pump and fill-er-up. Wait a minute, is that a traffic bottleneck directly ahead at yon tollbooth? Hah!,. EZ-Pass will allow The Modern Man to sail through the wall of motorized metal like a hot knife through butter! All these things and more can Modern Man do…

Unless, of course I forget to charge my phone or cannot open the attachments on the e-mail. Or I forget which remote controller controls which device. These things happen frequently enough to put a few dents in my Modern Man armor. What can I tell you? I'm really not as modern as I can possibly be. I confess that until recently I was a backward technophobe and still have a foot in both worlds. I was probably the last man in America to get a cell phone. I only have a CD player because my sons Mike and Rob were embarrassed that their musician father was still listening to cassettes and bought me one. And until a month or so ago the only web site that I had was the one made by an industrious spider outside my back door. A pretty elaborate and impressive one, too, assembled every night and dismantled by the morning. Wish I was that consistent.

And oh, the GPS stystem and EZ Pass? I don't have those. Don't want them, either. Don't want to be kept track of any more than I already am in this well-monitored society. Foolish? Irrational? Perhaps, but that's where I stand. And all that driving around with earnest purposefulness? Hardly. Most of the time I'm sort of meandering around aimlessly unless the lovely wife Louise is in the car with me. Then I'm asking "where to next, love," quite frequently. And truth be told, I miss my cassettes. As far as my web site goes, it's designed and run by my son Rob, my contribution being only the writing, a technology as old as Phonecia.

So how modern am I? I've mastered VCRs and DVD players, like most American 8-year olds, but I don't have an i-pod even though my computer has a bunch of i-tunes stored up waiting to be downloaded to one of those things. I think they isolate people from one another, just like those dumb-ass video and computer games. Me, I like to actually talk and interact with my fellow humans, they're okay by me, most of them. The ones that I don't care for I leave alone and hope they do the same for me. No sense wasting my time trying to correct people. They pretty much are what they are and I'm not convinced that my way is the only way to be. Works for me (at least as often as not) and that's fine.

So I muddle along in this Brave New World taking what works for me and leaving the rest alone. I know, there's so much more I could be doing and so many more modern devices I ought to be employing but there's a limit. For example, I recently purchased a top-of-the-line digital home recording studio, figuring I'll be able to bang out polished songs at a swift clip in the comfort of my own home. Three months into my fruitless attempts to get the thing working I'm selling it and getting a less-than-top-of-the-line home recorder that's a lot more technophobe-friendly and gets great sounds anyway. Oh, I tried with the Digital Wonder, believe me I tried. Sat with the written and DVD instructions for hours, even tried to hire a tutor to show me what's what. No dice. Even the young techies that abound in this Modern Age couldn't make heads or tails of this modern marvel. Oh well, defecation occurs. Time for plan B.

Like my computer whiz brother John told me years ago, forget about keeping up with the latest advances in technology. "You're not NASA or IBM and have no need for stuff that will be obsolete in six months anyway. Just get what you need and what you can deal with." Amen, brother. Like Clint Eastwood said in one of his movies, "A man's got to know his limitations." Amen, Clint, or rather, the screenwiter who actually wrote the line. As far as the Modern Age and all the cool stuff in it, I like it and don't really long for the good old days. They were fine too but they're gone now and we must deal with what's in front of us right now. Life really wasn't any simpler back in the day any more than it will be simpler in the future when we have even more new toys and gadgets. What is, is, period, amen.

And at the risk of being called retro, I think I'll continue to carefully pick and choose what I want as part of my life, no matter how extensive becomes the menu of choices. The lesson I learned from my Digital Wonder recording device only reinforces this notion. To quote yet another great American, Popeye the Sailorman: "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam!" Hey, it's not like I'll be chopping wood or drawing water from a well or anything like that or that I can't learn new tricks, but there's a limit, even for this purposeful button-pushing Modern Man.