I'm going away. Sort of. Think of it as an Irish Goodbye. A French Exit.

Call it my protest song. My "Message in a Bottle", like Sting belted through the radio in 1979.

I'm not completely checking out or going off the grid. On the other hand, I'm not taking a break either.

For 10 years, along with hundreds of millions of others, and you, I quietly slid into the Upside Down that exists in the tiny little screens on our mobile devices. The first/last things we see and touch every day.

As seconds turn into minutes and minutes stack into hours, I lament all the days I've wasted allowing billions of light-emitting diodes to pass through my retinas in the form of news, information, entertainment and status updates. All the while, I've become less and less social and more and more discontent.

It's time for me to trade Facebook for faces and books ... Instagram posts for a camera and stamps. I understand this may seem a bit extreme. Then again, so is detox. So is chemotherapy.

Soon I will ride over the Andes with friend-friends, all the way down through Patagonia. All the memories will be captured in my mind, not on my phone. Colorful images to be shared using only words over tables of homemade dishes and bottles of wine from Chile and Argentina ... fire pits and cups of coffee.

I remain convinced you may want a way out, too. Like most, you just can't seem to swim against the undertow. Go into Best Buy and ask for a dumb phone. Use a map on your next road trip. You'll soon find out what I mean.

Over the next year or so, I'll check in from time to time and let you know what I discover untethered.

If you're my friend, you know how and where to find me. If you'd like to be my friend ... well, you will likely need to find me on foot.