Filled with enthusiasm for having risen before the sun, I left home for a walk and some photos. I'm much more interested in what the world looks like at dawn. By the time the sun shows up, my excitement has usually waned.
I like to let the sun rise behind me while I head toward its special effects in the west. The dark mountains turn violet and the white contrails pink. But that morning it was the east that I found more photoworthy. It wasn't the sunrise itself, but the little world in front of it that came alive on my cell phone screen.
At first click (I'm not sure how one mimics taking a photo on a cell phone) I was still in the field behind the farmer's house. But the more I squinted and framed the shot, the more detached I became from my immediate surroundings. I continued clicking, gone from the real world yet enthusiastically alive in a tiny forest with dead trees still standing and live ones seeming to silently fall. For seven unearthly minutes, I was lost in the enchanted forest I'd created on the screen.
Once the sun had risen I woke up (for the second time that day). I thought about where I'd just been. When I looked back at the real scene with no cell phone to impair my vision, I saw nothing more than a clump of tall weeds backlit by the sunrise. I saw reality. I compared my surreal experience to life on social media, where we're connected and disconnected at the same time. (And usually for more than 7 minutes.)
In my Alice in Wonderland moment at least I was the creator, living in a fantasy world designed by me. I wasn't a follower and if there's such thing as a copier, I wasn't a copier either. But I had been momentarily absorbed in a different world and felt morbidly alive inside that tiny screen.
The 1980s frying pan and eggs commercial has already been remade with a non-Teflon pan and fresh eggs. But if the Partnership for a Drug-Free America needs a new campaign they couldn't go wrong with a photo of a person and their cell phone on a bus (escalator, sofa or chairlift), at a soccer game (restaurant, school concert or museum) or in a car (waiting room, checkout line or field). The same slogan applies. "This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"
