This morning was a fine, sunny morning. I sat out on the front porch swing watching the world go by across our front lawn while enjoying a healthy breakfast. Organic nuts, seeds and berries with organic soy milk in an organic bowl.

I was smugly content that I was getting my minimum daily requirement of organic riboflavin, bioflavinoids, vitamin F, phyto-nutrients, proto-miscreants and other essential, important sounding stuff.

Tasted like the box it came in. Good roughage, I guess.

Like many minds, mine tends to wax philosophical before I’m completely awake.

A woman walking her dog passed on the sidewalk. She was both literally and metaphorically walking into her future, I mused. She carried two potent symbols of going into that future: in her right hand was an e-book or something similar, about the size of a stenographer’s notebook. (For you younger readers: “stenographer” — from the Greek steno, “scribble,” and grapher, “scratch” — was a job title in the distant past for highly skilled persons who used a cryptic code to manually record the spoken word using a wooden stylus with a graphite core which made grey markings when scraped across the surface of a thin rectangular membrane made from the pulp of murdered trees.)

I interpreted the e-book as a symbol of the promise of technology, leaping ahead at a pace some of us find impossible to keep up with.

In her left hand was the dog’s leash and a plastic bag of dog poop, which symbolized to me our current political climate that we must find a way to dispose of responsibly.

As I watched, she succumbed to the siren song of technology to read her device and walked into a lamp post.

A cautionary tale, to be sure.