This is your weekly notification that I am not in fact dead yet

I have never, ever been good at technological communication. I'm a firm believer in the notion of putting the phone away when people are talking to you, of prioritizing the folks in the here and now versus the folks across the wire. And then I moved to a place where I would never get an unwanted call again, where even making a phonecall required driving into town.

Maybe it's the spectrum folk's difficulty with multitasking that causes this in me. Here I am doing something, anything, and my flow is interrupted by a ringtone. I know this is part of it, because people that send five texts in a row irritate me by disrupting my concentration with every notification. (I've done it too and probably will again, but I'm trying to remember not to.)

I also dread important conversations over the phone, especially if it's with a boss and it's more important than "schedule's changed, come in Tuesday." I once let my landline (yes kiddos, I'm an Old) ring off the hook for a whole weekend because I didn't have an important project done for the boss yet and didn't want to hear about how important it was for the umpteenth time. I was already working on it, and I slipped it under her door before she left for the conference where it would be presented. She gave the presentation, everything worked out, but I just don't respond well to pressure, especially over the phone.

I'm not alone in this. A bunch of my generation hates getting a phone call (or, Heaven forbid, a voicemail, whatever barbarians leave those) that could have been a text. I'm not quite so bad as getting anxiety over the thought of ordering a pizza, but people do to the point that online pizza ordering has become standard among the pizza chains. It's just good business to not let anxiety get in the way of more customers, after all.

The upshot of this tendency of mine is that I'm hard to keep ahold of in the best of times. I lose my phone for a week and don't care to find it because it's basically an anxiety box, and then people tell me they've been trying to get in touch for days. Money gets tight, and the phone is an expense that can always be dropped, if you know your way around public wifi and free apps. If you have a phone number for me that's more than a year or two old, it's probably no good. (Although I've begun switching out SIM cards as the cheap phones I buy break, so this should be less of a problem in future.)

So if you move me out to the open range, without phone service, my anxiety box becomes a music/video/writing machine and I will just forget to check in with people for weeks. It's not personal; I'm just living my best life and have little to report. "The plants grew a few more inches" is kind of a lame update, especially if there's pics of the growth on here and more details than I'd remember in the moment.

But I forget, I am kinda pioneering a new way of life out here. It's not the old pioneer ways, exactly; they didn't have the technology we do. Not just in the necessary things; they didn't have computer games to pass the days lost to labor by the burning sun and bastard wind. But it's not just a modern technological life either. This isn't the suburbs, and long may that be true. No phone, no internet, very little electricity, to the point where I willingly choose to do things low-tech even when I have the gadgets to do it "normally," just to save energy.

I've read enough history and geography to be convinced that this is a fundamentally good idea, and not particularly risky. But most people haven't done that reading, and to them I probably look like a suicidal madman who moved to the desert to die.

When I came back to my old bar in my hometown last year, everyone figured I had literally died, and we're surprised and excited to see me. I had nothing to report for a month and didn't call home, and my mother was also worried I'd died. Before I left the first time, she tried to take out a life insurance policy on me, lol. What's even funnier is that the insurer refused her business, believing I was too risky. To my knowledge, that puts me in a rarefied group mostly populated by professional wrestlers (Mankind wrote in his autobiography about being refused by Lloyd's of London).

So I try to call home more often now. I just got off the phone with my dad, who didn't mind getting his day interrupted with the news of my non-death. That's what prompted this piece, because the whole concept that I'm believed to continually be on death's door blows my mind. I just had a comrade come visit, and he was impressed by the hominess of it all despite the circumstances.

But until everyone else gets that I'm not in danger, I don't mind calling home more.