Although I have a cellphone, it’s nothing to call home about. It’s a hand-me-down from my brother, a flip phone as outdated as the Palmer Pen Method.

Still, it suits my purposes fine. Or more exactly, it suits my purpose fine, since I have only one, which is on-the-road emergencies. Thus it sits in the glove compartment gathering dust, and for all I know, suffering from existential angst.

When people find this out, inevitably they ask me why don’t I get one of those whiz-bang grown-up’s phones? The answer’s simple: It would add nothing to my life but more hours of mindless distraction, which I already have more than enough of.

Trust me — I know myself. If I had a “real” phone (which is actually a computer), I’d be on it all the time. And what would I be doing? not staying in touch with people, so much as either surfing the net or scrolling through Facebook’s myriad postings. In other words, I’d spend as much time outside my house throwing my life away as I now do inside it.

The sad fact is I’m as addicted to cyberdreck as everyone else.

Give me a computer and I’m hooked. I’ll mainline the news; the current whereabouts of has-been stars, jocks and one-hit wonders; the ten day weather forecast, and the answer to every weird question that pops into my head at any given time. The current population of Sri Lanka? Per capita consumption of ice cream in the U.S.? Preferred entree in the Donner Party? And on and on, hour after hour, sans rhyme or reason … or even recollection.

And then there’s Facebook.

Originally I got on FB at the behest of one of my besties, now living a half-continent away.

“Hey,” she said on the phone one day, “you oughta go on Facebook.”

“I should?” I said. “Why?”

“Cuz we could keep in touch more often, send pictures, and chat.”

I told her I’d think about it, which I did. Ultimately, I agreed. I mean, why wouldn’t I want to be in touch more with my friends? Besides, I said to myself, what did I have to lose? Ah yes, famous last words of all junkies before they get the jones in their bones.

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A lost crusade

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At first, since it was just her and me on FB, I spent almost no time on it — maybe 10 minutes every few days. Then, before I knew it, I had more friends than a Megabucks winner, had joined a bunch of groups, and was poring over postings as if they’d reveal the secrets of the Rosicrucians.

Next, I found out exactly what I had to lose — time. And lots of it.

While home, I was glued to my iPad, sifting through FB’s reams of drama and melodrama, with a rare note of delight or insight. If FB has any “real world” equivalent it’s some trashmo bar near closing time, with the talk turning to politics: opinions everywhere, with nary a fact in sight — all delivered with the schmaltz of a high school production of Death of a Salesman.

Then there’s the airing of their dirty gotkahs. It seems no subject is too intimate — or trivial — to post. On the one hand, peeps glibly reveal for all Cyberland to see, things I’d never tell therapist or clergy. On the other hand, nothing is too silly to be kept to oneself. The other day I saw one that made me wonder if I’d been sleeping when the Brain Thieves had swept through This Great Land of Ours.

One of the supposed beauties of FB is your friends can post stuff posted by their friends. Kinda like share the wealth — or in this case, share the poverty. And so I found myself reading a post by someone I didn’t know, venting an issue near and dear to her heart.

It concerned her son, now in first grade. His name is Charles but — Horror of Horrors! — the kids call him Charlie. Can you imagine the nerve? Well, apparently it’s such a crass insult, that Mama aints about to take it sittin down. Uh-uh. No way, Ray (or if you prefer, Raymond).

So what’d she do?

She did what any rational parent, right-thinking citizen, and reasonable adult would do — she sat her dupa down and hammered out a snottygram to the teacher, setting that slacker straight. Her precious cargo’s name was Charles, not Chas, not Chuck, and certainly not Charlie. If she’d wanted kids to call him Charlie, she’d have named him that in the first place. So the very least the teacher could do (because, I guess, they have no other chores) is to make sure all the children in the class (and probably the whole northern hemisphere) address the wee poppet by his proper name.

I read it, then mouth agape, I read it again. Not because it was so well written — in fact the exact opposite was true — but because I was shocked that any parent would make such a big deal out of such a small thing. And beyond that, that she thought her crusade had as much chance of changing Li’l Charlie’s nickname as it did his DNA.

Besides, recalling my childhood, we gave nicknames for a couple of simple reasons. First, they were more informal, and thus more accessible to us. To my childlike way of thinking, Charles, Richard, Michael, Elizabeth, Margaret, Barbara were adult’s names. Charlie, Richie, Mike, Betty, Peggy and Barbie were for kids. It’s what set us apart. I mean, what little kid wants anything to do with the adult world? And second, to us those nicknames were terms of affection.

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Y not?

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When I was a little kid, my family and everybody else called me Bobby. And as happens in a small town, the name stuck — through high school, and beyond. No one called me Bob and I can only recall one person calling me Robert — Mrs. Louise Wilson, my seventh-grade-English-teacher-cum-drill instructor. And in her case I suspect she thought if she called me Bobby I might lose my fear of her (something that never would’ve happened if she’d called me Herr Doktor Professor Seidenstein).

During my teens my mother decided I was too old to be called Bobby — she wanted everyone to call me Bob. And bless her little heart, because she was the only person who did. She never bugged anyone about it, and I’m sure she realized there was as much chance of me being Bob as me being the 5’2″ varsity basketball team’s center. So Bobby it was, and Bobby I stayed.

And what did I think about it? Did I outgrow Bobby? Was it a baby name, unfit for a young man who now shaved (albeit once every two weeks)? Of course not because, honestly, it was the only name I’d ever known.

When I left town, I left Bobby behind. Not by design, mind you, but because in the “adult” world of college and beyond, people rarely addressed each other by nicknames, especially diminutives. So I became a Bob … at least in foreign climes. In My Home Town I was still Bobby.

As the years passed, so did the older people who called me Bobby. Additionally, almost all my childhood acquaintances moved away. So now, aside from Clan Woodward, I doubt there are five people who call me Bobby.

I guess shedding my Bobby handle is supposed to make me feel more mature, or more respectable, or better about myself in some way. But the sad fact is, it doesn’t.