Well, Mr. Mailer is still playing hard to get. You’d think a person in a grave couldn’t really hide, though they sure can remain silent. But I’ll lure him out with threats of interviewing Vidal first. So while I keep banging on his ego, Kent Ballard has kindly agreed to join my pinch-hitters. …Zach

Some of my friends call me a Luddite. Some claim I’m a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. Some just think I’m…well…peculiar.

I do not own a cell phone. I never owned one and if I have my way, never will. Many people are genuinely staggered by this. And the younger they are, the more astounding they find it. The majority of the world’s population, even in the poorest countries, now own cell phones. They have access to the Internet, instant worldwide news, the weather on any part of the globe, can communicate with the guy across the street or in Timbuktu, can film asteroids crashing into the earth, check their stocks, send and receive nude photos of each other, and generally have a nifty little piece of genuine Star Trek equipment they lug around with them everywhere.

I’ve had people tell me they would rather leave their homes without clothing than without their cell phone.

And in this one, lone, and remarkable instance, I am right and everyone else is wrong, so far as I’m concerned.

The modern American cellular phone is generally agreed to be Ameritech’s 1G DynaTAch, which took a decade to reach the market and cost one hundred million dollars to develop. It became available in 1983. It was heavy, awkward, took ten hours to charge, and had a talk time of about thirty minutes. They sold them faster than they could produce them. Waiting lists numbered into the thousands.

The cell phone is only about thirty years old, if you skip over bulky car phones, that ridiculous-looking brick with a three foot antenna and a weight approaching two and a half pounds. And you know what? We had a pretty dandy civilization before they came along. Yes, you may find it hard to believe, but before we had cell phones we had lasers, had been to the Moon, were flying operational missions with the Space Shuttle, had discovered the DNA double-helix, and even had electric lights.

One writer about my age (60) said that “we are the last generation on earth who will know what it’s like to be totally alone.” But I don’t see that as a necessarily bad thing. Sometimes I want to be alone and not looking at some YouTube film of a two-headed goat my neighbor sent me or texted nineteen boring cat jokes from Aunt Matilda. True, cell phone films taken by citizens of police abuse have proven valuable court evidence, but sworn testimony by eyewitnesses is still taken as gospel in the courts too. How do you think they handled these matters in, say, 1978?

Another thing I do not want is the NSA, FBI, or some podunk county sheriff “pinging” me to know my location at all times, day or night. I don’t want them to time me between cell towers and gauge the speed I am driving. I usually have a good idea of my location, and it’s none of their damned business. I don’t have enough room in my car to haul around forty government agencies, nor do I want them riding with me.

They say there’s no such thing as privacy now, and that’s often true. If they’re going to put me on a list of potential skateboard hijackers, they’ve already done it thanks to the shredding of the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights and the PRISM program that reads all my email. And yours. But if I want to jump in my car and drive to Winslow, Arizona and wait for a girl in a flat-bed Ford to look at me, there’s no way in hell they’ll know where I am or what I’m doing and I like it like that.

But when wide-eyed people ask me, “What if you need to make an emergency call?” I tell them the truth. I can’t, and pay phones have all but disappeared. But if I’m on the road anywhere, I can reach for my CB radio, call out to just about any trucker, and they’ll place the call for me. I’ve done that before. It works very well, bless the truckers. CB radios, I predict, will make something of a comeback after the news releases about PRISM. The technology is so old they’ve simply overlooked it. And if you know how to do it, you can power them up to reach out hundreds of miles if you wish.

During the Boston Marathon Bombing, in one second the millions of viewers on the scene could have called anyone on the planet. The next, and their 4G iPhones were utterly useless. Sheer dead weight. Whether the cell towers were overloaded or if they simply shut them down isn’t the issue. People who had sure and certain communications with the world lost them, and for many that equaled panic.

But the race’s official communications were all handled by Ham radio operators. They never failed, not one. They set their frequencies to call in police, ambulances, emergency services while at the same time helping runners locate loved ones and maintaining an information flow with the outside world. Cell phones just slowly drained their batteries, silent. Think about that for a moment, and you will realize authorities in any area can simply shut down the cell towers whenever they think they have a reason, leaving you literally speechless, unable to contact a soul. You may wish to develop your own backup plan if the government tinkers much more with our communications in the near future.

Like all technology, cell phones have their good sides and bad sides. For me, the bad outweighs the good. They make very large crowds of people easier to silence, and that ain’t a good thing.

Yes, I’m among the last generation to know what it’s like to be truly alone—when I want to be. I can walk back through my woods, sit down by the little creek, and the only sound I will hear is the babbling of the water and song birds. After a bad day, that is peace few people can find. And I will have no beeping, ringing, squalling, or moon-dancing racket interrupt my solitude and gathering calmness. No nameless “officer” will be able to locate me. No hordes of ad agencies will know my habits and send me eighteen pounds of junk mail for outdoor goods. That’s known as targeted advertising.

And I don’t care to be a target.