Today I was on the train on my way home from helping a shaman edit his video. So I'm sitting there, on the train, listening to some mix of recognizable songs, I think it was Radiohead actually, (Exit Music for a Film), and I happened to look over and realize that the guy next to me was wearing a watch. My next thought was that people don't wear watches anymore. Unless they don't own a cell phone. Watches are uncomfortable, and unnecessary, and they date you as someone who is not "with it". They are quaint accessories of another era, a time period that existed, in full force up until about five years ago. Maybe three. But who's counting. Wearing a watch let's everyone know that you are not actually traveling in "this" time. The conviction of my theory swelled, until I finally took off my headphones and turned to the guy and said, quite politely, "Do you own a cellphone?" I wondered what era he was currently living in. And he said, "No, I don't." To which I responded, "That's what I thought. You are wearing a watch, and not many people wear those anymore." At which point he pointed out that it wasn't even a digital watch. It had roman numerals and a canvas strap. Nothing digital about it. He then said that it was a choice to not particpate in the illusion of control that often comes with participating in a highly digital culture. He said that he loved the beauty of chance and did not like to eliminate it by checking in every three minutes with people connected through a phone. He actively carried with him an awareness of happening. He was against, what he called "the eradication of pre-planning" - he liked the idea of making plans and sticking to them, not "calling every three seconds to see how the plans could, should, or might change." He was, also, I later found out, a musician who was opposed to digital video, but had recently been given a digital camera, with which he had fallen in love. We seem to pick our loves based on our acceptance or removal of time. We then discussed our fated placement in the sweeping current of technological change and the ignorance or active participation that each individual can make as to their relationship with an innovation's effects on general ambience and social structure. Right about then, we got to Park Street where I had to leave the green train to catch a red one. It was strange to walk through the station, scanning wrists the way some single women graze for wedding rings, wondering, as I put my walkman on (I still call it that, innappropriately, but whatever...) if perhaps, by chance, I'd happened to speak with the only man left in Boston who still wears an old, yet uttterly functional, wristwatch.