I don't have a cell phone. I've said this a few times in my writings. And, contrary to what a financial columnist reported about his life without a cell phone (he had held out until very recently--and his company pays for it), people don't really get all freaked out when I tell them this.

In the early to mid 90s, I knew people with pagers. Remember pagers? They graduated from being just for drug dealers to being for people who liked to annoy the shit out of people whose houses they'd visit and then use the phone to call someone else back about something that was more important than talking to the people whose house they were at. But, even as pagers branched out into larger society, they were still thought of as these dirty little buzzers mostly used by drug dealers and doctors (which, I guess, are pretty much the same people these days).

In the late 90s, cell phones became more and more accepted and adopted by regular people. And regular people had to have a good reason for having one, so they would say this: it's for emergencies, just in case I'm driving somewhere and my car breaks down or I run out of gas or I'm wandering in the desert.

You see, cell phones would save your life. This was the line.

Very few people say this anymore. No one has a cell phone just for emergencies. I'm not sure if there are any real emergencies anymore. Unless needing a bottle of wine for dinner is an emergency.

I'm not going to try to convince anyone to get rid of their cell phones. I thought, probably in moments of drunken reverie, that there would be this huge revolution where everyone throws their cell phones away. The only time I saw this happen was in the movie Wild Hogs. It was, for that movie, a revolutionary act. And then they brought up how horrible it was to throw their cell phones away when they ran out of gas somewhere in the 200 miles between a bar in the middle of nowhere and Madrid, NM.

For those who are wondering, Madrid is about 20 miles from the next nearest town. And I'm pretty sure they have a working gas station on Sundays. I'm not sure if there is anywhere in the continental United States that is 200 miles from nowhere.

Nowadays people tell me something different when they talk about their cell phones. They say they held out for a really long time, didn't want one, and then it changed their life. And now they can't live without it.

I'm pretty sure the only thing that would make massive amounts of people throw their cell phones away would be proof that they caused irreversible brain damage in users. And, even then, people would take their chances. Kinda like with smoking. Which makes me wonder if there would be second-hand brain damage from sitting near people who use their cell phones too much.

I do know one thing, I don't call people much. The last few months I've had these thoughts that I should call people, and then I don't. The thought leaves about as quick as it came in. Not that I don't want to talk to people, but I don't really have any plans or good reason to call--it's just that I haven't talked to them in a while. And I don't have any great stories to tell them or anything. But I have noticed that people with cell phones are prone to call people for no reason whatsoever. To tell others that nothing is going on, and how is it where the other person is? Nothing going on there? Well, I'm sitting here doing nothing, so...

And it might be because I don't have that constant reminder. A little tug at my belt line, buzz on the table, ring tone of Kanye West's "Stonger." I hide my (landline) phone in a corner of the office and scowl half the time it rings. There might be a little bit of anti-social behavior I'm exhibiting with my non-phone use. I apologize to social people for this. We have competing neuroses.

So it goes. I have no cell phone (and have no plans for one) as we get into the later stages of the first decade of the 2000s. I don't have an iPod (or less cool portable mp3 player either), even though I have more music than most people I know. And I don't have any of the many gaming systems out there, either.

And yet, I fill up my time.

Matt Worley apologizes if he hasn't called as much as he should.