When I was a kid, my parents always got the paper.
I thought it was a Dad thing, but my mom still got the paper
in our post-divorce apartment, and People Magazine.
Even if she read it front to back, every last article,
I could be sure that at some point she’d finish it.
***
When I first got Facebook, I had email notifications.
I remember grinning, that first day after signing up, every time I got an email about someone being my friend there,
or better yet, posting on my wall.
I felt loved from afar.
Best of all, though I didn’t know it was best of all then because everything naturally had a stopping point, you’d exhaust what you could look at there.
***
A few years later, I marveled at the Endless Scroll feature on 9gag,
the first place I’d seen it. You could go on and on and on and on
and never come to the end.
You can never come to the end, and I, a compulsive finisher.
Oh, no.
***
About the same time, my then-husband told me about a thought-experiment
from a class in his Master’s program, Inteligencia Artificial (oh god):
Let’s say you had a big computer screen, with, say, 2 million pixels. And let’s say too that you had…4000 colors and shades of colors, about what the Behr paint company has.
You could ask it to randomly put together different combinations of colors whenever you wanted. And if it did so forever, it would eventually show you every possible image that could exist.
So you’d see a lot of nonsense, sure, but you’d also see your house, your face at every age with every hairdo imaginable
and also your house with the lead singer of Kiss,
and also your house upside down, with a camel in the corner,
and the exact same one with a slightly bigger camel in the corner,
and a camel in pretty much every spot.
If I ever completely lose my marbles, it will be thinking about this.
***
In the book Infinite Jest (written in the 90s), one side in a war deploys a secret weapon
More successful than any bomb:
It’s a DVD, kind of, that you send to people.
They put it on, and they’re transfixed, mesmerized
They can’t stop watching it
Disarming the enemy not by physical defeat, but by hypnosis
An addition that like all addictions feels good at first
so that’s why you start it in the first place
but then you have to keep at it just to feel normal
forsake all else.
Did David Foster Wallace fucking predict the twin birth of notifications and endless scroll? Or did someone read about the villains and shout “Eureka! I’ve figured out how to make people too addicted to look away!”?
***
I don’t know about the rest of you,
but I’m Sandra Bullock in Gravity
untethered and unsure of how to get back,
floating in space, looking for a way to get back to what I know I need,
which is being not untethered in space.
***
The choices seem like too many,
but it’s all slop from the same places.
How do you escape the water you and everyone you know swims in?
How do we doggy-paddle our way back to the ship?
I wrote this after spending all week both hating my phone, and to some extent my computer, and being utterly unable to stay away from either of them, even when I wasn’t working or solving problems.
I have not yet figured out how to turn off that goddamned DVD from Infinite Jest, and taking my dog for a walk without my phone feels revolutionary, which is truly, truly pathetic.
Yes!