I am here to confess. I am guilty. In fact, I am more than guilty. I'm a danger to society — and, no, not for the reasons you've probably guessed.

I'm a serial phoner while driving. Yes, I've read the studies that say it's not actually dangerous to drive and talk on your cell phone simultaneously, but I know better. And so do you.

Phoning while driving is your gateway drug. Soon, you're checking your e-mail — first at stoplights and then only in residential zones. But before you know it, you're doing 70 on I-25, dodging trucks while sneaking peeks at the latest from your e-mail buddy in Nigeria who's got another million bucks for you.

And then, it only gets worse. I recently texted from behind the wheel, although I swear the car was stopped. But I know I'm only this far from TWD (texting while driving), and I desperately need help.

I've looked myself in the mirror — and what I've seen looks way too much like that person in the Whole Foods parking lot with the phone in one hand and coffee in the other guiding his Lexus SUV into traffic. It's enough to make you scream, which can be a problem for the person on the other end of the phone.

Yes, I need help. And although I never thought this was remotely possible, it looks as if the state legislature is my refuge of last resort.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I'm not a techno-geek, which is to say that I don't have an iPod, plasma TV, a zip drive, a PDA, a GPS or a PS3. My best friend used to have a GTO, but, as you know if you're a certain age, that's a whole different deal.

But I do have a company BlackBerry, meaning I am one of those people, the kind I've spent my entire life mocking, certain that I'd never become one myself.

My name is Mike and I'm a BlackBerry addict. You can laugh. You can insist it's not a real disease — but only if you don't have one of your own. It's a disease of the mind and, of course, the thumbs. Who knew that opposable thumbs would lead to this much trouble?

Look at Barack Obama, the most powerful man in the world, so powerful that he was the first president to use the words "I screwed up" on FoxNews. He can give up smoking (or so he says) but not the BlackBerry. He's got it so bad that the Secret Service had to come up with a secret encryption — and all so he could safely text his friends during the Super Bowl.

This is change, all right. Remember Hillary Clinton's commercial about the 3 a.m. phone call? She had it all wrong. With Obama, it's going to be 3 a.m., and Vladimir Putin is going to be sending him an R U Awake-gram.

The legislature isn't worried about Putin, although the state Senate is willing to spend its time debating about the Middle East. But our legislators also found time to take up a bill banning the use of cell phones while driving. This seems like an easy, uh, call.

The technology is not tough here. You can get a no-hands set for your car, although some studies say they're not any safer. I don't believe those studies, either. I do believe you risk looking like you're talking to yourself, which is only slightly stranger than you look singing along with the radio.

The legislature wants to save lives, a worthwhile goal. And then there's the whole issue of self-respect. Do you really want your obituary to run with a headline: Text in Peace.

Let me tell you a story about a friend I'll call Sara. She tells me about this guy she's seeing. She has a BlackBerry, but he doesn't. She tells him she'll never turn into one of those people, even though when she goes to sleep, the last thing she does is check her e-mail and then tuck the BlackBerry in by her pillow.

Eventually, as these stories go, he gets his own BlackBerry. A better BlackBerry. A cooler BlackBerry. And one evening, when they're together, she looks up: She's on the couch, texting. He's on the couch, checking his e-mail.

Sara sees what they've become. She tells me now that she tests herself, seeing how long she can stop herself from checking her e-mail once the red light blinks. She says she has lasted as long as 10 minutes. I don't believe her, either.

And then she tells me she has texted while driving and that it's getting worse. And when I tell my editor about it, he tells me he has texted while driving, too.

And I'm wondering what could be that important — I mean, unless you just found out your broker is also Mike Rosen's broker.

And yet, I get it. When I'm driving, particularly on a long trip, I spend the entire time on the phone, mostly talking to people — you know this — that you don't want to waste regular phone time on. Besides, you're easily bored. The radio's not enough any more. Hell, you can watch a movie while you drive — and even that's not enough.

It's the temptation of the gadget. My wife got a GPS recently. The GPS, as you know, is made to be seductive. If you make a wrong turn, it doesn't make a fuss. It just recalculates. You love the recalculation. You make wrong turns intentionally just for the recalculation.

About 95 percent of the fights my wife and I have ever had have been in the car. I have no sense of direction, meaning I'm always lost. And she can't read a map. You can guess the rest. Once we were in New York, on the island of Manhattan, and I was looking for my turn off the West Side Highway, which she couldn't find on the map. I told her it was near the river. She couldn't find the river. I grabbed the map: "It's the bleepin' blue thing."

We took her GPS to Washington for inauguration week and it guided us over bridges and around traffic. It was magic.

It was so great that I grabbed my BlackBerry as I drove by the Capitol. I couldn't wait to call everyone I knew and tell them all about it.