I think that smartphones herald the death of the Great American Road Trip.

This is something I've been trying to put into words since returning home from my last one, which was my first in many a year -- it's nobody's fault, but I think the "point," as it were, of a road trip is to get away from your life for a little bit. And if you have instant access to all of your social circle at home, to your email, your Facebook, it's just like dragging your same situation onto the highway; you barely notice the changes in scenery when you're waiting for a text back, for a response to your Facebook post, for an email from your job.

The road trip-era in my life spanned about a year from 2002-2003: even discounting all the DC <-> Florida trips, and the myriad little wanderings around the Mid-Atlantic, I think I ended up driving through something like 45 states in that year. And we had cell phones, but when you have to step out and make a call, you still can step back into your world away from the world. There isn't the intrinsic violation of "see you guys in a week!" as when your social communication is continued unbroken.

But it is imfuckingpossible to resist. The entirety of the internet is there in the doorhandle: it's like, what's it going to matter if I check this text; if I scan this email; if I browse my social networking sites (tm). And it does matter; you're locked into a little bubble with whomever you're off gallivanting, and it drives a wedge into the bubble when you're off in your Real World of which I am not a part, or I'm off in my Real World, of which you are not a part. But the ability to maintain our social lives without anything but cell phone internets -- it's just no longer realistic to expect anything.

And this makes me sad.

I know that the relationship I was in over the course of those trips was something that, in all honesty, most people probably haven't experienced -- and the better for them, considering how brutally unhealthy it was pretty much from the get-go. But the immediate, speechless intensity of connection was a prime setting for a pair of screwed up transients to take to the highway; it's not fair to compare other things to that.

On the other hand, most road trips that are taken for the sake of taking a road trip are ostensibly taken with someone, even if it's not somebody with whom you're maybe falling in love as above. I don't think there's a possible balance anymore, when we have the world literally at our fingertips no matter where we are, where we can be nowhere and can be everywhere we need to be at the same time.

Or maybe I just have home issues: maybe where other people want to be in their homes, and don't crave escape from that life, I am perpetually aching, aching to be anywhere but here.