I'm not even close to being cool

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist  |  October 3, 2007

I could write a book about not being cool. But for now I'll just write a column.

How am I not cool? Let me count the ways.

I use a Palm Pilot to keep track of my schedule and phone numbers. That's very 1997, as my friends like to say. Of course, I don't have a BlackBerry or Treo. I saw my first iPhone about two weeks ago. It seemed really cool. It didn't happen to work where we were, atop a hill in West Roxbury, but it was really cool nonetheless.

My Verizon cellphone is impossibly uncool. On the plus side, it works in West Roxbury, and cost me $10 with my bare-bones plan. But it's not a Razr, it's not a Razr2, it's not a Blackprl, either. For three years I have wanted my ring tone to be the opening bars of "Dirty Water," a project that has so far resulted in abject failure. A friend told me I could have that . . . if I owned an iPhone. But then, well, never mind.

Skype me? I don't think so.

I do not social network. No My- Space. No creepy facebook "poking." I had a connection to the founders of LinkedIn, which is a social network for the kind of people who leave their business cards in those big brandy snifters at the end of the bar. I've since been invited to join the site by several other people. But you know what? I'm doing fine out here, un-networked, in my personal republic of UnKoolistan.

My cars aren't cool. They're gay, as I've explained before, but not cool. Unlike the iPhone, they work on that hill in West Roxbury. My bike isn't cool, either. It cost less than $400; how could it possibly be cool? Sure, my children are cool, but that's their job, right? My friends' children are cool, too, in stark contrast to their parents.

How uncool am I? I don't get HBO, Showtime, or any premium channels for that matter. So I never saw the incredible final episode of "The Sopranos," and I'm not watching that haunting, sexually explicit expose of married life, "Tell Me You Love Me." Thanks to our TV critic Matthew Gilbert, I have seen a whole season of Showtime's haunting, violently explicit series "Dexter" on DVD. That was pretty cool, in an ultra-macabre kind of way.

Not getting cool channels explains why I've never had the mandatory cool accessories, like TiVo or Slingbox. Comcast OnDemand? You must be kidding. Soon I will be the only American not to own one of those fantastic, must-have wide-screen TVs with computer-generated names like Aquos and Bravia. It's true what you read in the papers - prices have really come down! Only $1,500! I feel like I am losing money by not buying one.

Is BluRay going to be on the exam? Gosh, I hope not, because I don't have the faintest idea what it is.

I don't read cool books by cool authors named Jonathan or Junot. I did read about six pages of "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer, and thought it was totally ridiculous. I also read Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" and enjoyed it, but then I learned that wasn't the cool book of his to like. It was too, like, conventional. Stuff happened.

Wouldn't it be cool to live in Brooklyn, with neighbors like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi, and Adrian Grenier, who starred in the worst movie ever made, "Harvard Man"? I could never get into Brooklyn; they would never issue me a visa. I'm stuck here in what Newsweek has called a leafy suburb, surrounded by psychiatrists and cardiologists.

I never go anywhere cool, at least not when it's cool to have gone there. I did once visit the most beautiful place in the world, Kale-Simena, on the Lykian coast of Turkey. Naturally, David Bowie got there several years before me.

It's true that I recently visited Barcelona, a city that boasts an online events guide called lecool.com. It would have been cooler to be there in 1936, with George Orwell, during the Spanish Civil War. Of course, then I might have been shot, as Orwell was, and that's a high price to pay for style points.

As it was, I stopped not drinking long enough to have a San Miguel beer with my companion of the moment (my wife of 25 years - how uncool!) in Plaza George Orwell. And that felt pretty cool.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.