Mirrors, mirrors, on the walls

I dreamed last night of a world where all mankind was free of time’s tyranny, an age when leisure reigned and all were at liberty to engage in endless recreation and cerebral improvement.

And today I’m going to help launch that age by embarking on a mirror-smashing crusade.

Any ensuing bad luck will be offset by usefully harvesting all the time now wasted judgmentally staring into mirrors.

We as a society are obsessed with appearance and mirrors are to blame. They are everywhere.

Even utilitarian mirrors installed for safety purposes become detriments to it. How many fender-benders are caused by distracted motorists using review mirrors to ensure their lips still have that pouty appeal?

I’ve become intensely more aware of mirrors, the time I spend gazing into them and how they ruin my day because I recently purchased a protective mirror skin for my smart phone.

I vainly thought it might come in handy if I was ever about to enter an important meeting with an authority figure and needed to ensure nothing repulsive was dangling from my oversized right nostril.

This was foolish on multiple levels. First of all, few of us are ever more than 10 feet from a handy mirror. Many rooms have vanity mirrors installed in places where great art ought to hang.

Second, I haven’t had an important meeting with an authority figure since I was summoned from detention to the high school principal for interrogation over who yanked the fire alarm the morning of spring finals (no, I didn’t crack).

But I thought, yeah, maybe a little mirror would be useful.

Instead of being useful, it is an ever-offensive reminder that my appearance has become ever offensive. It’s like having a pocket-sized judgmental twin always staring at me and mocking all my facial flaws as he sits on my desk.

First of all, the human face, especially an aging one, is inherently repugnant and should not be studied in places with adequate lighting from any vantage point inside of 10 feet.

At arm’s length, my face is a mottled moonscape of gaping pores, festering moles, old hockey scars, and a blooming nasal field of wine-colored surface capillaries. The teeth are a jagged horror show uniformly screened in shades of yellow, pale and gray.

It is utterly repellent. And hold on a sec while I check . . .

Yep, I still consider my face damned handsome.

Still, I spend a lot of time throughout each and every day looking in mirrors for reasons I cannot explain, knowing each time it will only depress me. It’s not like my face is going to look better when I check it 10 minutes from now.

No, time and gravity will continue to ravage me with its claws. There’s no chance my face is going to look better in five years than it does today, which is a hell of a lot worse than it looked five, 10, 20 years ago.

I think in time we’ll come to a consensus that authentic mirrors are harmful to our mental well-being. Perhaps, some genius is right now working on a mirror that will individually show us -- not as we are -- but as what we once were.

We can program the mirror to mimic our movements while projecting images of us from how we looked back when we were all young and fresh.

Until that day, I argue we should replace each and every mirror with things like still-life paintings of bowls of fruits and cheeses.

That way if we wanted to achieve our goals of looking at something beautiful, we’d see works of art instead of, ugh, close-ups of all our miserable faces.

And I apologize for this exercise in harsh self-indulgence.

The thoughts expressed here, I’m sure, do not reflect well on me.

Just like so many mirrors.

Smart phones, stupid people

Napoleon made it a practice to open and read his mail just once a month, assured the leisurely passage of time would resolve the urgency of every issue.

I check my e-mail about once every 12 minutes.

In my life’s history of communication, not once have I received a note that could be considered Napoleonic. It’s grocery notes, jokes, spam or e-bills notifications.

Yet, I persist in checking it as if I expect some distant general to zip me an urgent e-mail asking me how he should defend Leipzig.

And, honest, I’m not that bad. I can unplug without trembling withdrawal. Our daughters enjoyed the Rapunzel-inspired “Tangled” so much with Mom last week they wanted to take me to see it. It was great, too.

Not great enough, apparently, to hold the attention of two adults I saw basking in the warm glow of smart phone activity.

This is bound to be another battle in the ceaseless civility wars. That’s twice I’ve been to movies recently and been distracted by the firefly-like activity of a smart phone bouncing about in the darkness as I’m trying to concentrate on the picture.

I guess when movies aren’t compelling enough, people are going to drift to their smart phones to play games, check e-mails and tweet scene-by-scene micro-reviews for morons.

Who knows? Maybe these people who sneak away to Disney matinees are really busy professionals who need to monitor office activities.

Someday, just of the fun of it, I’m going to stand on a busy street corner and shout into my cell phone, “No! No! No! The cranial incision needs to be made behind the left ear, you idiot! The left ear!”

But that’s a story for another day.

What’s amazing to me is with this constant whirlwind of e-mail activity, very few people on the planet take even a nano-second to respond to things that are important to me.

I’ve spent many years sending out various book proposals or story ideas to countless big shots in the hopes they’ll call me right back and inform me they want to enrich me with money and fame.

It’s never happened. That’s not surprising. Trying to get any book published these days without the benefit of being named Palin or Khardashian is a daunting task.

What is surprising is how few of these well-connected industry types ever bother to take the time to type even two letters -- NO -- to convey their disinterest. Two other letters -- FU -- would certainly get the message across.

As few of them bother to respond, I’ve taken to convincing myself they are too incapacitated by the exposure to my genius to be able to initiate simple motor skills like typing.

Try this defense mechanism yourself. I find it helps.

There’s a remote chance maybe they are like me and don’t have smart phones. Maybe that’s impeding my chances for success.

In fact, I have a very stupid phone. Ugly, too. It can’t text. It can’t take snapshots. God help me if I’m stuck in traffic and need to look at some pornography.

I was recently in New York and surrounded by pretty people with smart phones. Merge their genetics with their communication devices and it would have been a table full of really pretty Einsteins.

My 4-year-old Verizon flip phone is so ugly and awkward I didn’t dare take it out in front of New Yorkers.

As my fortunes seem to be on the uptick, the siren call of the smart phone beckons -- and there has to be a nifty siren app, too

I think I can justify it now, too. But do I really need it?

I already spend way too much time checking who’s reading the places that run my blog (thanks, my friends!), and reading re-runs of the news I’d read two hours previously. It’s just a big waste of time and who has time for that?

A smart phone or an iPad wouldn’t give me more time to do what I really want to do (read, enjoy the family, guzzle hootch). In fact, those devices would take away from those activities.

It’s something I need to think about -- but not now.

Right now I have to check my e-mail. It’s been about 16 minutes and I’m pretty sure something really, really important is starting to itch in my in-box.

It’s bound to happen one of these decades.