I just adore the train with childish enthusiasm. I would gladly ride up to New York and then turn around and ride back to DC with nary a care in the world. This was practically my itinerary yesterday, as I whooshed up the the city for a two hour client meeting and immediately went back to the station to catch my train home. Kinda wacky, this railset life.

I don't have a cell phone, which is a tremendous liability on the train. I'm forced to listen to other people's conversations without being able to subject them to my own in return. It reminds me of when I was in Italy for a summer and I got so tired of breathing other people's cigarette smoke that I took up smoking myself. Not just any brand, but Nazionale -- the cheapest and most noxious kind on the market, a cigarette so foul that you wondered how people even brought the evil things close to their mouths. I soon became the master of secondhand smoke. From then on, no one could bother me with their pathetic, effete upmarket smoke.

I'd be like that if I had a mobile phone -- I'd make a point of having conversations so appalling, so inhumane and upsetting that other cell phone users would blanch and look at their own devices with revulsion. I would leave myself messages about erotic autoamputation on my voice mail. I'd call Susan and discuss African parasites I've known and loved.

It's ridiculous that I don't have a cell phone, since I'm supposedly all wired and ahead of the curve and all. I recently started playing around with writing simple webpages in WML for access through wireless devices. I made a first feeble foray for the Deadly Sins site into the wireless web at http://www.deadlysins.com/wap/ (drop that into your browser and you'll see the code -- it's basically just HTML modified for slow devices with tiny screens). I thought it would be really neato to post essays there as well so everyone everywhere could catch the latest Tale via their phones, and then I thought Oh, please.

I'm still checking my work by looking at it through phone emulators on the web. It's probably just as well that I don't have a phone or I'd be sucking up minutes by visiting it all the time to admire my own work.