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We recently returned from a few days of Mardi Gras whoopee in Galvaston, Texas. And whoopee we did with the Krewe of Aquarius, one of the many krewe-clan-tribes that make the Mardi Gras festivities quite the party for a couple of weeks leading to Fat Tuesday and the start of Lent. By the end of a few nights I in my purple silk pants and Susan in her dress that looked like a flower garden were weighed down with strings of beads that were flung from tall floats with reckless abandon during the galas and parades held throughout the city.
It was a hoot and we represented the National Union of friendly Americans (NUFA) very well. The Krewe of Aquarius was embraced and initiated into NUFA, beer was spilled on the dance floor and tossed over the shoulder according to tradition. The Exalted Shack Master will lead the parades in 2015 atop the Grand NUFA float that will hover gently and span a whole city block, powered forward by ambition and free will, featuring the Shack Marching Band on the third floor veranda just to the west of the flight deck.
The weather was mild and breezy and very few Texans I visited with could fully comprehend that 30 below zero is 62 degrees below freezing and snowbanks taller than a man wearing a ten gallon hat are the norm in northeastern Minnesota. The locals seemed to think that an occasional hurricane wasn’t much of a problem when we described the joys of our frozen world.   
Galvaston Island was decimated in 2008 by Hurricane Ike as the tidal surge simply flowed around the very impressive 18-mile-long seawall along the Gulf of Mexico and into Galvaston Bay where it sloshed inland and inundated the community from the opposite direction of the hurricane’s raging winds.
Much of the island is rebuilding but quite a bit of the community still looks bedraggled, poverty-stricken to tell the truth, which is quite an irony in a seaside town that attracts throngs to its beaches and surf. On the one side is the Gulf and the dollars that flow from visitors and spendy real estate and a few blocks away are people living in boarded houses with yards full of flotsam left from the storm.
I’m still trying to figure out that town.
But that’s not the story I want to tell.
My significant other, Susan, has a brother Stu in Galvaston who is working to rebuild the homes that qualify for federal and state disaster aid. The company builds homes to federal specifications for housing within a flood zone, energy efficient homes on pilings. Stu’s girlfriend and her daughters stayed the night after a day of parades and barbecue and booze. Two of the kids were in eighth grade, the younger in fifth, all girls.
The two younger adults, Stu and girlfriend Laurie, both in their forties, apparently couldn’t handle all the merriment so they went to bed by ten or eleven. The two grandparents were left with the kids, to listen to their teenage angst about boyfriends and bothersome girls that were intruding on friendships, about their band teacher and soccer coaches that just didn’t understand that they had lives to live other than kicking a ball around all the time. Their smartphones were always at the ready, even as we talked. The phones buzzed constantly, diverting their attention immediately from our conversation. Back and forth it went between the phones and the old poops drinking wine and whiskey and blabbing on about the meaning of life.
These were good kids, good students, their mother was the principal of the junior high. At some point the old poops said turn off the phones while we visit. We told them they didn’t need all that stuff intruding on their lives all the time. By this time the fifth grader was asleep on the couch.
We obviously were speaking a different language.
After the third or fourth time we said turn those darn things off, the older girls blurted out, “We can’t.”
The one eighth grader said she’d tried to turn her phone off “a bunch of times” but it was too hard and gave up. The other eighth grader said she was trying really hard to turn hers off, trying really hard all the time. She said it was on her mind all the time to try and turn it off and so far she was able to do that once in a while but not very often.
In the meantime one of the intruding friends was buzzing away at one of the girls to the dismay of the other.
I was finishing about my 15th cocktail of the day, I lost count, but I still knew a cry for help when I heard it.
Before I fixed another drink I looked them both in the eye and told them it sounded like addiction to me. Addiction.
“You kids are addicted to those phones. Lots of people are. Those things are addicting to nearly everyone that touches them. If those things had been around when our great-grandparents were alive they’d be addicted, too. It’s the boob tube times a thousand, a million, because it travels with you wherever you are. At some point, you can’t get away. You can’t live without it.”
To that, I ask the simple question. Are you addicted? When we moseyed about the airport on our return trip from Galvaston we both did a simple sample. We watched people waiting for flights, at restaurants, in bars. An obvious majority of travelers young and old were hooked to their phone and computer fixes, occasionally coming up for air to take a peek around before diving back into cyberworld to protect their minds from the awful boredom of life in the airport.
I’m not judging too much here, as the electronic fix is one of the few vices I don’t have, but I do have another question. What happened to good old daydreaming, time alone with your mind, no intrusion by pesky messages from a world orbiting frantically beyond your horizon?
Facebook, shmacebook. Twitter, twatter. Blog, shmog.
Addiction.
Luckily, our own kids are old enough to have missed out on the addiction of youth by iPhone and the internet. Those things just didn’t exist to clutter their lives back twenty-thirty years ago. The phone was on the wall, TV time was limited by rule of household. Do we notice they have their face in the cloud, yes. But those of us who have grown into the electronic world have a perspective of before and after, a change. Those weaned on the stuff don’t have that same view. They are innocents. They pretty much come into the world predisposed to the addiction.    
Our job now as grandparents is to make sure our grandkids don’t get hooked, breaking at least one generation from the silly need to constantly be connected to everything at the same time, that feeling to not miss out on the mundane masquerading as momentous. We have to break this cycle of dependence that has overtaken this mad consumer-driven world.
Heroin junkie, hah. How fast will you be crawling around the floor when you lose your iPhone, a frenetic mess because you can’t live without it?   
Are you addicted?