By Elizabeth Peavey

Can you read me now?

Luddite that I am, I’m happy to announce that this is my last column to appear exclusively on thebollard.com. Don’t worry. I’m not leaving the fold. I’m just packing up my cyber-undies and Webwear and setting out for a medium that better suits me: stone tablets. (Ha ha. Just kidding. Unfortunately, I missed my ride on Peabody’s Wayback Machine, so I’m settling for the next-best thing: Peavey is returning to print.)

My friends, who actually reside in the 21st century, think I’m nuts. “Ink? Ink?” these whippersnappers cry. “Ink is for tats!” (OK, so no one I know talks like this, but that’s what I hear.) They view this decision as akin to trading in my Blackberry for a land-line phone; my car’s GPS for a gazetteer; my high-speed broadband for dial-up; my iPod for a Walkman; my high-def, flat-screen, satellite TV for a clunker with rabbit ears that will cease to receive a signal next year. (Can you even imagine anyone living like that?) 

But I love ink. Not because I find the bloggosphere and its harpies and chippies so annoying (which I do), but because, as someone who has dedicated her entire life to the written word, I just don’t feel the work counts unless you can pick it up and hold it in your hands and turn its pages, read it in the tub, then set it down and spill a beer on it – which, if it’s newspaper, can serve as its own mopping device. Try doing that with your eBook.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m like that caveman who sat around the firepit saying, “Oh no, none of your new-fangled flames for me. I’m just going to gnaw on this raw and bloody mastodon joint, because that’s the way I’ve always done it.” 

I will grant you that anyone who still does not own a cell phone in this day and age is an idiot. And I agree there are worthy arguments for getting “connected”: running late, getting lost, breaking down, ordering take-out on the fly, pretending to enter a dead zone when you want to end a conversation – to name just a few. And yet, and yet… 

Early on, I had my reasons for not wanting a cell phone. Mostly, it was because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. If someone needed to reach me, they could simply send me a nice letter. Maybe with a check enclosed. I also didn’t want another object to keep track of and/or break. (My friend Byrd recently reported that when she finally got a cell phone, she promptly lost it.) Plus, I knew the minute I relented I would turn into one of those jerks who yabbers into their phone in public, interrupts real conversations to answer calls, and talks on their cell phone while driving. As a columnist, I need to retain a few types of people to make fun of, and since I’m becoming every type I’ve ever denigrated, I have to be selective.

But the real problem was that I felt like society was leaning on me and my ilk to fall in line and Buy! Buy! Buy! that cell phone, along with all the other aforementioned high-tech crap.

And I don’t like to be told what to do. 

Ever since childhood, the act of not conforming was a matter of survival for me. Growing up in small-town Maine in the 1970s, the code of pre- and pubescent conduct was so strictly ascribed it made the Amish seem loosey-goosey. The only way I avoided going crazy was by defying the norm, bucking the status quo and going my own (lonely) way. 

It’s not that my rebellion was a conscious act of social disobedience – at least at first. I just couldn’t get the code right. I could never remember if you weren’t supposed to wear yellow on Thursdays or on Tuesdays, or if it was Landlubber or Levi’s cords you were supposed to have. I did purchase the accepted White Stag-brand ski parka, but in chartreuse. (Actually, I’d love to have that jacket now, but all it did for me back then was elicit a lot of snot comments.) And when I finally got my Schwinn five-speed bike in eighth grade (not one-speed, not 10-speed, butfive-speed), I selected brown. Brown! Green was OK, yellow was good, orange was stylin’, but brown? I might just as well have had a license tag hanging from my seat that read: “Please push a stick in my spokes and tip this turd over.”

Eventually, like the kid who trips and falls a lot and decides to become a clown, I started acting like I was making all those faux pas intentionally. And a funny thing happened. The more I did so, the more all the mean girls left me alone. By the end of high school, they had even started being nice to me. (Well, maybe they were just scared of me, but whatever the cause, it sure made my life easier.)

From that point on, I made a career of rebelling: I didn’t finish college when I was supposed to, didn’t go to graduate school (OK, Yale didn’t accept me into their MFA program), didn’t start my career until I was in my 30s (OK, no one would hire me ’til then), didn’t get married until 40 (ditto), didn’t buy a house or publish my first book until I was 45, but I did it my own way, dammit.

Which brings me back to my return to print. (Point – ah yes, the point.) Everyone is sounding the death knell for newspapers. Steve Cartwright sums it up very well in an op-ed on this “page.” Basically, the end of print journalism signals the end of the world. Yet, I’m happy to report that though other area papers are losing pages and staff, The Bollard is boldly expanding its printing schedule from quarterly to monthly. When editor Busby asked me if I’d like to make the jump, I’m sure he already knew the answer. 

Because though I may be taking a step backward in time, pushing my brown bike up the down escalator in my yellow shirt and purple cords, gnawing my raw mastodon joint and lugging my stone tablets, in my heart I will be following my true path. 

Outta My Yard will resume in all its inky glory in the June issue of The Bollard.