Wake up. Get dressed. Remove phone from nightstand charger, put phone in pocket.

Brush teeth with sonic-grade electric toothbrush, using organically sourced, sustainable toothpaste, which your wife purchases at Whole Foods. Toothpaste which is antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-whatever else.

Enter kitchen. Greet three dogs who are dutifully waiting by refrigerator. And even though the clock reads 5:33 a.m., they are already giving the refrigerator the paralyzingly serious death stare. This is because they know the refrigerator contains cheese.

Your phone dings. The phone is already notifying you about your highly sophisticated security cameras, which have just picked up movement by the neighborhood cats. Don’t ask how, but somehow these cats are intelligent enough to know that whenever they walk past the motion-sensitive cameras your phone dings and they get food.

Make coffee. Use high-tech electric coffee maker, a device which—even though you never asked for this feature—comes equipped with a digital screen capable of connecting to Wi-Fi.

While coffee perks, you check the news on your smartphone.

You do this by consulting a highly curated list of trustworthy media websites. These outlets are reputable organizations, sites from which you KNOW you can absolutely trust at least 4 percent of what they say. Maybe 3 percent.

Because every reporting organization is, more or less, full of equestrian excrement. But you live with it. Because that’s how the global news cycle works.

This is the reason that, even though you read the news, you never actually know what the hell is going on in the world. You never know which information to believe. Neither would you know how to even validate the “truth” if you WERE to stumble across it. And above all, you don’t have the energy or the time to comb through an internet full of bovine scatological offerings looking for facts because you have a life, and your dogs need cheese.

So, as you watch the space-age machines do their work, playing on your artificially intelligent phone, you start to feel like a stranger in your own era.

Namely, because you remember mornings from another epoch. You remember an analog childhood. Devoid of digital technology. Absent of personal entertainment devices and media wars. Back before American kids huddled together in happy groups, shoulder-to-shoulder, silent as church mice, texting each other.

You remember paper newspapers. Rotary phones in the kitchen. Toothpaste that was not organic, not sustainable, but full of chemicals, and stained your shirt blue.

You remember stovetop aluminum coffee percolators, or Corningware percolators with toxic, black plastic lids.

You remember nutritive dense, sugary breakfast cereals, made expressly of puffed rice or corn, laced with DDT, whose only dietary quality was that it was guaranteed to give you cavities.

You are actually old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, reporting the nightly news with a Joe Friday-style delivery, delivering few opinions over the air, if any.

He might have been full of beans for all you know, but at the time you were too busy playing with your sister’s EZ Bake Oven, seeing what would happen if you placed her naked and helpless Ken doll inside it.

You still remember when Superman fought for the “American Way.” When dads changed their own oil in driveways, and car engines didn’t have multiple computers you had to reset after changing a brake light.

When nobody knew or cared what gluten was. When Little League was the center of the universe, when bacon was considered nutritious, when the Schwinn corporation manufactured the only product a kid needed to survive this trying and harrowing existence.

You remember when music on the radio had melodies you could actually hum. When nobody’s house had security cameras, or needed them. When people really DID leave front doors unlocked.

When kids played Army Man, Davy Crockett, Cowboys and You-Know-Whats, Cops and Robbers, and weren’t told they should be ashamed of such things. When houses had front porches instead of back ones.

When elderly people still sat on such porches, reminiscing about ancient times, and griping openly about how the modern the world was becoming heartless, shallow, and how everyone’s kids got spankings when they were little.

I remember listening to my elders ingest the dangerous narcotic of nostalgia, and talk about the good old days, which were probably neither good, nor old. Kind of like I’m doing now.

I promise, I’ll stop.

Now if you’ll excuse, me my dogs need cheese.