My Electronic Vacation

My Electronic Vacation
by Michael Mark & Tom Chapin
© 2000 HCD Music & The Last Music Co. (ASCAP)

I was stressed out, burdened and bugged.
I yearned to get out
To where life was unplugged,
A getaway far from the hacks.
With no cell phone, no pager, no e-mail, no fax.

A low-tech vacation, was all,
Some time to reboot, do a clean reinstall.
My mem’ry was RAMmed to the max!
No cell phone, no pager, no e-mail, no fax.

So I booked a place hidden upstate,
An analog town that was way out of date.
I could slip through the digital cracks.
No cell phone, no pager, no e-mail, no fax.

I stepped in my cabin, I put down my junk.
Smelled pine trees and lake shore,
The faint whiff of skunk.
My new mantra floats
Through the Adirondacks,
“No cell phone, no pager, no e-mail, no fax.”

I swim in the deep, I hike to the heights.
I swallow up nature in great gigabytes,
With blue sky and meadow so green
It looks like my screensaver,
Calm and serene.
But late every night I start having attacks:
No cell phone, no pager, no e-mail, no fax.

My dreams become nightmares,
They’re beeping and paging.
Trying to find me,
They’re phoning and raging.
Adrift in the Ethernet, losing my mind
I try to reply but find I’m offline.
Next thing I know
I’m face down in the morgue
On my tombstone,
“Screen frozen. You’re logged off, dot org.”

Next morning I race to the mall,
Bought pager, Palm Pilot,
A cell phone to call,
I return with a sense of elation,
Now this is my kind of vacation.
A true Shangri-La where a man can relax
And answer his e-mail
That’s piled up in stacks.
A place in the woods
With some telephone jacks
And my cell phone, my pager,
My e-mail and fax.

This song appears on Tom Chapin's Common Ground CD.

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