My concerns are very contemporary. I live in the world of today. No musty nostalgia for me. I keep up, I take part in mass excitements. I don't churn butter or travel on a horse-drawn carriage. You will not find a woven basket balanced on my head, unless it was one filled with Powerball tickets and Prozac. Look at my cell phone. It takes pictures. I don't really like pictures, but that's not important. The contemporary world loves pictures. Banality must not only be experienced but fully documented and digitally archived so that future historians can glimpse the true extent and shimmer of our desperation. Why this mania for photographs? How many pretty flowers can you coo over in one lifetime, or red-eyed friends with their arms around each other's shoulders? When I look at photos of happy friends I always speculate about the order of their deaths. When the evening news has a story about obesity they show random anonymous heavy people walking down the street, struggling out of cars, eating ice cream. Sometimes I'll see someone smoking in the background behind a heavy person and think, Hey you're in the wrong footage pal, that's the smoking story. My cell phone is a marvel of technology, but I don't like talking on the phone. I come to terms with new developments. Giddy despair inheres in technological novelty, which you would certainly know if you ever listened to the audio commentary track on a gay porno DVD. Let's live in the culture that's been made for us by excitable people who want to get rich. My quarrels with Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell have no bearing! Look, I can keep all my contacts right here, the push of a button. What contacts?