The Cell Phone, Child Molester Blues

As I have remarked upon in previous blog entries, I daily walk my Siberian bitch along a more-or-less unchanging path that takes me down the street to a local park, thence around the corner to a thoroughfare that runs parallel to the first one and back home again.

This route takes me past the Land Park Hills Community Church (notable for its progressive leftist liberal creche scene protest, over which a sign has been erected that says ‘530 immigrant children STILL separated from their parents!’). It also takes me by the local Montessori school that lies adjacent to the church.

Two days ago, as I was walking Her Royal Huskyness (Princess Nala) near the Montessori school, a rectangular bit of flotsam lying on the lawn caught my eye. It’s amazing sometimes what one runs across on dog walks (the best recent example being the series of prophylactics…both used and unused…chronicled in a recent blog) and this day’s walk was no exception.

Princess Nala had suddenly stopped dead in her tracks and was sniffing a dark gray rectangular bit of plastic about 5 x 3 inches in dimensions…probably with a mind to squat on it and leave her mark, judging from previous instances of ‘dog discovered’ items along the path that we had run across.

Pulling her back from it, I walked closer and leaned down to pick it up. It was a smartphone (of the ‘Alcatel’ brand, whatever that is; never heard of ‘Alcatel’ before) that had been lying screen-down on the lawn. It was a very hot day, one of those late summer days that doesn’t want to yield to the Solstice, and fortunately for the phone, its screen had thus been protected from the full glare and heat of the sun’s warmth.

Interesting, I thought. It still had a half charge on it, so I attempted to turn it on. It did, but when it asked for an owner password I grasped that whomever had lost it, they at least had had enough sense to not leave it unprotected. This, plus the fact that the screen image was a conservative ‘standard’ one, led me to feel that the owner was not some post-pubescent teeny bopper but a more mature adult.

At any rate, I put it in my pocket and went on my way. The rest of the walk was uneventful, aside from running across the usual small piles of scattered, tattered clothing (homeless clothing wardrobes), remains of human excrement (homeless outdoor toilets), old grocery shopping carts (AKA: ‘Homeless RVs’), used condoms and perhaps a spent syringe or two. Bemused by all this cast-off detritus, I suddenly found myself reflecting on a remark made by author Mary Roach in her delightful book ‘Packing for Mars’ to the effect that personal hygiene in America is largely a cultural fetish, ‘actively and aggressively promoted by those with commercial interests.’

It’s true enough. Several days earlier I had run across an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly by one of their writers who commented upon the disconcerting sense of weirdness she felt upon returning to the United States after a protracted stint abroad (she’s an Atlantic correspondent on European culture), citing how divergent many American customs are from their European counterparts. Among those customs are bathing habits.

The French do not bathe regularly (or at least half as obsessively, as we do) and it consequently isn’t unusual for an American visitor to Paris to comment on strong French ‘body odors’. She also mentioned that it was strange that we in America have so many commercial options in terms of products to choose from. Specifically referenced was the fact that whereas in France consumers may have their choice of one, possibly two products intended to achieve the same purpose (say, soap for bathing), in America a typical grocery store has in excess of 20 or more such competing products.

The same is true for just about every consumable product one can think of and the result is the sort of hard, crude, simplified and repetitive advertising aggressiveness that one sees each day on American television, in which one product’s sponsors try to ‘infotainmentally’ convince the consumer that their product is the superior one. Dancing soap bars, blue bears sh*tting in the woods, ‘show & tell’ vignettes for seniors on the advantages of one pharma’s cardiac meds over another? This sort of thing is ‘other-worldly’, by French reckoning.

In fact, the French have an entirely different take on these matters. For one thing, they regard one’s natural body odor as a sort of distinctively unique perfume. Well, not precisely a perfume, but more of a proprietary cachet of unobjectionable odoriferousness that marks one person off from the next. They commonly bathe only once a week, if that often.

In the United States, people daily bathe obsessively, men, women and children alike. Men typically take a shower and use soap only on the four ‘grotties’ (the groin, the ass and the armpits). They are more liable to use something cleverly scented with a woodsy, masculine outdoor fragrance like ‘Irish Spring’.

Women, on the other hand, tend to scrub themselves ALL over, leaving no square mm of surface area untouched and I would put money on the fact that they ALL use Ivory Snow, based on the nauseating odor of that stuff that practically washes you away whenever you are around a gaggle of women (such as in a grocery store).

To my mind there are fewer obnoxious scents than that bloody ubiquitous Ivory Snow smell. It is so commonplace (among women) that you’d almost suspect they had all been reprogrammed by a cleverly planned & coordinated mass hypnosis campaign to buy nothing but that wretched stuff.

Argggh! I’d almost rather smell unwashed bodies than a concentrated assault on my nose by Ivory Snow initiates! I grant that perhaps in that preference I am a bit peculiar (various people have intimated this opinion before), but we all have our charming little likes & dislikes. One of my own is the Proctor & Gamble Company for having foisted this scented crap off on generations of American housewives.

But I digress. The French also have radically different toilet habits (as most of us know) but that doesn’t make them any less suitable to be around. The fact that toilet paper was almost unknown in France until the GIs ‘liberated’ the country is interesting, but even in that case, the French were not lacking in devising their very own adequate means of getting rid of 'Klingons orbiting around Uranus' (this typically consisted of each family member having a small personal pot in which he/she kept a moistened cloth used specifically for that purpose only).

No toilet pots for Americans, of course. Over here, we enter a typical grocery supermarket and find ourselves confronted by a dazzling (nay! daunting!) array of toilet papers in every conceivable strength, softness and/or consistency. In this instance, it seems to be true that most consumer choices are made based largely upon which company has the cleverest (dumbed-down) advertising promotion. On that basis, ‘Charmin Toilet Tissue’ seems to take the grand prize for its infotainment ads showing a family of blue bears’ insinuatively jokey interactions with the stuff (before that, they successfully used their ‘Mr. Whipple’ character with his famous ‘Please don’t squeeze the Charmin!’ schtick).

America! Ya gotta love us, with our inventively cheeky predilection for commercial banality.

Back on the daily walk (you were probably on the verge of despairing that I’d ever get back to the reason I chose the title of this piece that I did, given my penchant for discoursive tangents), the Princess and I headed back home, stopping along the way to allow Her Royal Huskyness to examine, delicately sniff and then daintily squirt on the scent of each doggy predecessor on this route. Fortunately, this time there were no runny stools (impossible to clean off people’s lawns, of course, but one must go through the slightly embarrassing motions regardless!) to contend with.

Along the way, we pass by a number of homes that house dogs whose owners leave them indoors all day…presumably as a sort of living home security alarm system. Doggy protocols require that the poor pups thus confined must rush to the windows and bark furiously, protesting our temerity in brazenly passing through their neighborhood unconfined by walls or a yard.

You get so used to this repetitive canine chorus that you can tell what breed each is part of by the characteristics of their bark. In our case, this includes a number of small yappy little things (probably Yorkies, Chihuahuas, Shitzhus and the like), slightly larger but equally noisy types (like Jack Russell Terriers, Beagles and Cocker Spaniels) and on up to the obviously larger breeds (German Shepherd, Labrador, Boxer & Pitbull). Each one has to express his extreme indignation over our trespass as loudly as possible and sometimes one can’t help but feel relieved they aren’t out on the street to complicate our Royale Progresse with unwelcome attention.

But back to the title of this piece. The next day, after recharging the newly found smartphone, I tried to figure out what to do with it. Since I am an uncontrollably conscientious, public spirited and dutifully responsible member of society, the only logical course to take would be to attempt to return the phone to its owner…but how to go about that?

Putting myself in the owner’s shoes, I well know what a lost smartphone can mean to someone (given the device’s cost and store of personal data). It was pretty clear to me that either someone who had been walking a dog along the same path we take had stooped over (to clean up some doggy doo?), causing the phone to slip unbeknownst onto the grass, or perhaps someone from the Montessori School (or Community Church) had lost it.

If the first explanation were deemed likeliest, it was pretty clear that I was not going to be able to find the owner and return the device. That left the second scenario.

Thus, I determined to go over to the Montessori school (since it is closest to the patch of lawn where I found it, adjoining their parking area) and hand it over to them after telling them the circumstances of its discovery. This I did and drove over there, parking my car and walking over to the main entrance of that school.

When I walked up to the door, it was locked (with a digital entry touchpad system in place), so I knocked on the door. In the background, viewable through the plate glass windows of the entrance, were a number of small children busily engaged in whatever paces the Montessori instructors put them through. After a few more knocks, an older woman, obviously of East Indian ethnicity, came close to the door and peered out at me.

“Hello! I need to speak with you.” She continued to stare at me with quite obvious distrust and very apparent suspicion.

I repeated my entreaty somewhat louder. This time, she opened the door…but just a crack. More distrustful stares.

Getting a bit tired of this stuff at this point, I forced the door open wider so that I could speak to her over the din of the children in the background. Big mistake! She must have thought I was trying to force my way in. Her eyes grew as big as saucers…and set against a dark skin, they tended to be VERY white, as well!

Then she started babbling something about security, ‘kids’, etc., etc., while I stood there, the cell phone in my hand as I vainly tried to communicate what I was there for. This was starting to become very irritating, to put it mildly. Even Princess Nala could tell that Dad was NOT amused, at this point.

Finally, exasperated to the point of extreme annoyance, I said “I’m NOT a rapist, NOT a kidnapper, NOT a terrorist, and NOT a child molester! All I want to do is give you this (indicating the phone), which someone may have dropped out on your lawn!” More poorly thought-through comments!

Finally, she seemed to grasp that I was not there to break in, steal the kids and/or create a terrorist atrocity and I was then finally able to fully explain the reason for my visit. This was followed by her apologies (somewhat effusive) for misunderstanding me, which further irritated me for reasons I am loathe to understand and/or even explain.

Eventually, I was able to hand over the damned phone, grimly wished her a ‘pleasant day’ and made my way back to the car, determined that in future, should I EVER find another lost cellphone, I shall immediately throw it in the nearest ornamental fishpond and wish it good riddance. Good Samaritanism has its limits in today’s nasty, backbiting, paranoid and suspicious urban American setting. I had just reached mine.

All this made me reflect on how far we have come from those ‘kinder & gentler’ times that existed 50 years ago to today’s hyperanxious, ever suspicious and even at times overtly paranoid society in which a father-raper, mother-stabber (folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s delightful terms) or similar no-good miscreant lurks around every bush and behind each rock (even under a few of them), intent on committing some sort of mayhem.

It saddens me to think that you can’t even be a kind & well-meaning, harmless old fuddy-duddy any more without someone reflexively thinking you’re up to no good. Of course, a lot of this free-floating paranoia is directly the result of the sort of radically polarizing socio-political sentiments and dogma that are presently splitting America apart at her seams. With daily murders, gang killings, street crime, school mass shootings going on all about us, you can’t (at least to a significant extent) blame some people for being perpetually on edge.

One could take this thought further by lumping all the leftist liberal progressive madness about diversity on social media being a major contributing factor to the problem, but I’ll stop short of that. I’ve complained far too much and for too long about how the present half-baked leftie PC sociopolitical dogma is destroying any remaining vestige of unified national sense of identity that may remain, or the possibility for meaningful bipartisan exchange.

Speaking of that, you might all enjoy reading the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly Magazine (October 2018). Half of the magazine is dedicated to a most interesting examination of democracy in America (‘Is Democracy Dying?’), with over half a dozen very competent writers analyzing and commenting on this apparent status quo that now obtains in the US.

While most of its rhetoric has a distinctly ‘left-of-center’ flavor to it, the questions asked and the observations made in this issue are nonetheless both salient and timely as the age of the Great American Experiment appears inexorably heading towards the scrap heap of sociopolitical history.

Oh yes. One last thing: If YOU find a smartphone lying forlornly lost on the ground somewhere. Just stomp on it. You’ll be doing all of us, myself and the entire nation and everyone else, a great boon in helping destroy the insidiously dark forces of the evil social media empire!

Bah! Humbug!