What's on your mind, Sarah?

I saw the future in a dream last night; there's nothing in it

From a hotel courtyard in Pasco, Washington. Here’s the song in the subtitle.

I. An illustration

If you’re a person who likes live music, you should take whatever chance you get to see John Darnielle, a.k.a. the Mountain Goats. You can see him touring with a full band or in one of his solo shows, either way. It doesn’t matter if you know the songs—I have never been to a Mountain Goats show where I knew all the songs. You should go because Darnielle is a consummate master of the room. He leads into songs with gorgeous, rambling stories that evolve into spoken-word poems, or digressions about Saint Paul, or banal anecdotes that somehow become music at precisely the moment before you start to wonder why is he telling me this? and which you will remember every time you hear the song thereafter. He gets a crowd screaming on its feet and then pin-drop silent with no need for verbal instruction. At his solo shows in particular, where he works off a handwritten set list with gaps left in it for whatever the room inspires him to do, he performs with a half-manic joy (or a driving melancholy) that the audience absorbs and doubles and feeds back to him. He doesn’t always take shouted requests, but if you shout a request he might take it, or he might tell you why he’s not taking it, and either way you will have received a blessing. He’s one of those performers with the ability to scan a crowd of eight hundred people and somehow look directly at you.

John Darnielle doesn’t like having his picture taken. He’ll put up with it for band promos, but he’s on the record that he doesn’t like it when people take their phones out at shows. Partly this is longstanding personal preference; partly it is, as he has said at shows I’ve attended, that his intention as a performer is to understand and respect and amplify the energy of the particular space he’s in. Taping his shows is one thing—Mountain Goats fans have been taping shows and maintaining online archives of the recordings for decades—but phones are different. Phones get in the way.

This doesn’t stop anybody from taking pictures of him at shows, but it’s nice that he tries.

Once I saw John Darnielle slap a phone out of a man’s hand at a show. He was doing a solo set in between full-band numbers and he’d decided to pull half his set list off the Mountain Goats’ saddest album (this is a stiff competition but there is one clear winner). It was a seated venue, so he walked around among the tables for his final song, playing it slow, staring the lyrics into each individual person’s eyes. A man seated near us pulled out his phone to record Darnielle walking among the tables. Darnielle approached him. The man grinned. Darnielle struck like a snake between chords, knocked the phone out of his hand and moved on without pausing.

I barely remember what song he was playing. I think that was the last time he played it live for a long time. But I remember him slapping the phone down. I remember the phone.

A few weeks ago we stood in the second row for one of his solo shows. It was transcendent. The whole crowd screamed along to the hits, faces tipped up to the stage: There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home! Darnielle bantered with the audience, trading jokes with the hecklers, dedicating songs to this or that side of the room. Nobody in our rapt chunk of crowd had their phone out.

But the woman in front of me wanted a picture. She was a real fan, clearly, up there leaning on the stage; she knew how Darnielle felt about phones pointed up at him from the front row. So she timed it carefully. She clutched the phone in her hand and tucked the hand behind a speaker. When he danced across the stage to turn his attention to the other side of the room, or squeezed his eyes shut through a guitar solo, or stared down at the piano keys while he tried to remember how some ancient deep cut went, she whipped it out to snap a photo, or two, or three. I began to anticipate it: Darnielle would duck his head and I’d wait for the little screen to light up, the hand to shoot furtively forward, the adjustment, the zoom, the blink of the shutter, the blink, the blink, the hand shooting back down as Darnielle opened his eyes and rejoined the room. She watched the show to calculate the moments she could take out her phone. I watched her to calculate the moments the phone would come out. For two hours I watched her watching the phone watching John Darnielle. 

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II. Confession

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was—

—What? You don’t ask that anymore? Oh, good. That makes things less awkward.

So I can just go ahead with the…? Okay.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have not put my phone away for the entirety of a Zoom meeting in four years.

I have shopped for underwear on my phone with the camera off while I was supposed to be taking notes during meetings with people I respect on topics of importance to my work.

I have done so, so many Squaredle puzzles on the clock.

I have carried my phone into the bathroom with me almost every time I have gone since I was eighteen years old. I have barely taken a piss without my phone in my hand since smartphones were invented.

I have thought to myself, why do you need your phone in the bathroom? You’ll be done in two minutes. Leave it behind. And then turned around at the end of the hall and gone back to get my phone rather than survive two minutes in the bathroom without it.

I have turned off the water to the shower, reached for my towel, and picked up my phone instead. I have stood there dripping to catch up on what I missed in the minutes between entering and exiting the shower, and not put it down to reach for my towel until I’d checked everything. I did that this morning, Father.

I have not allowed my thoughts to wander in a grocery store line for at least ten years.

I have looked at my phone while I brushed my teeth.

I have used my phone to stare at the Internet while I was on the phone with my mother.

I have entertained entire online conversations while someone I love used the phone, which I mostly do not use as a phone, as a phone, to talk to me.

I have interrupted warm, vibrant gatherings with clever people just to take out my phone and show them a meme. I have thrust memes into good conversations—I have dropped memes on a dozen dining room tables in violation of the guest-rite, knowing well what I was doing. Father, I always feel shame when the conversation fails to remain as good after the meme is introduced, every time, and yet I have never stopped doing it.

I have followed my friends on social media and come to hate them. I have unfollowed them and come to miss them. I have followed them again and come to hate them again. I have drunk of the filthy well where I hate my friends a dozen times and at one time, Father, I found I had returned so many times I had begun to like the taste.

I have sat on a couch with a friend I invited over and spent the entire evening beside him texting another friend.

If I sit at table and the person across from me picks up their phone, I have never failed to pick up my phone in turn.

My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart.

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III. A book review

Storytellers these days tend to dodge the question of the Internet. Phones in particular are not where they should be, once you start looking for them. You get to see fictional people call and text, or sometimes access an actual laptop to Google something (or Bing it, if it’s 2010). But as a general rule, people onscreen do not use screens like real people.

In some works the technology is mysteriously fifteen years behind, a wistful look back to a time when people had cell phones but didn’t carry them openly in their hands to go take a piss. In other works it’s mysteriously fifty years ahead, an acceleration to a time of godlike robotic surveillance where somehow nobody seems to know what a meme is. Overall the Internet is a character who walks on and offstage with the rest of them, appearing where it has narrative utility and disappearing when it’s said its lines.

Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novella No One Is Talking About This gets the Internet right. It captures the feeling of being on the Internet—the mismatch between the comforting thrill of being locked in, and the frightening power of its dullness.

The truth is that the Internet is so dull. Phones as they are can’t coexist with narrative agency because they are instruments of willing passivity. From the outside, a person sitting with their head bent over their phone is the dullest thing imaginable, and if they tried to explain to you exactly what they were doing in there the explanation, too, would be dull. Lockwood is willing to address this truth, to observe her own behavior with a phone in her hand, without falling into weak justification or cowardly self-deprecation. No One Is Talking About This captures the experience of watching your own mind change under the influence of something you don’t like even though you behave, day in and day out, as if you love it more than anything else you have ever loved.

Like a well-curated Twitter feed, Part I of the book is a series of short, not-quite-related, infectiously quotable bangers about online life. Lockwood herself was much beloved of a community that called itself Weird Twitter back in the day, and the narrative of Part I concerns the aftermath, for her main character, of posting a viral tweet to “the portal”: Can a dog be twins? The unnamed character’s tweet takes the world so thoroughly by storm that it leads to an international lecture circuit. But no matter where she goes, all her interactions are portal-inflected. All places have the same memes, the same fetishes, the same jokes about the same fetishes. All time is measured in the shifts between objects of mass attention.

At the end of Part I, her character’s sister announces a pregnancy. In the beginning of Part II, the family learns that the baby has a rare, incurable genetic condition and stands almost no chance of surviving more than a few months after birth. The miracle of the baby’s short life, and the total immersion of the family into the baby’s orbit, become the new portal into which the character falls.

The old portal takes on the feeling of a foreign language. She speaks of it as a body she doesn’t inhabit anymore, a life separate from hers whose heartbeat she hears only distantly. But it’s there, in the moments she comforts herself by stalking old Internet villains on Facebook; in the appearance, in the middle of all their grief, of a Harambe meme. Lockwood describes a moment “so pristine and so meaningful that something must be done to alleviate it,” as her character ducks away from the baby to look at Jason Momoa pics.

The portal and the baby are juxtaposed throughout. The nature of the portal is disembodiment, a half-willful melding into the soupy communal mind; the nature of the baby, whose diagnosis is a disorder of rapid cell growth, is too much embodiment—so much embodiment it’s killing her. The portal is what Bo Burnham, the only other artist of our generation who’s right about the Internet, calls a little bit of everything all of the time; the baby is blind and brain-damaged and so she experiences each sense separately, each sound and touch as an individual, disconnected revelation. She is immune to the very concept of “everything.” Not just the experience of being around the baby, but the baby herself, is at perfect odds with the portal.

It is, maybe, a little too simplistic a moral at first glance. You’re deep underwater in the Internet until something real, something meaningful, jerks you out of it, right? The portal is a great big shopping mall of everything you ever wanted in your life and mostly for free, but it wasn’t built to contain the most basic of human tragedies. That’s how you break out—you find something with its roots too deep in real earth for the Internet to handle, and you make that your world instead. We’ve all seen people come to this realization before, because they’re all on the Internet talking about how they did it and showing you, in a series of YouTube videos filmed in earthy places, how you can, too.

Lockwood says the obvious thing, but she says it like a poet. The truth is not less worthwhile for being simple. People on their phones in books and movies are always getting important information from them. They never sit in front of the camera for twenty-five minutes at a time with their heads bent down, looking at nothing, putting the phone down and turning it over just to pick it up again ten seconds later. No One Is Talking About This understands the compulsive motion of the hand toward the box—what we’re looking for in it, what it gives us, what in the gift is wonderful and what is incompatible with wonder.

The gift of the portal is endless novelty, the ability to passively share a vast pair of eyes always swiveling together toward something new. The antidote, when required, is to find your way back to your own mind, and to be unable to look away from one single, incredible thing.

But what happens when the incredible thing that gave you back your power of attention is gone? Not just online is life fleeting and impermanent. The baby was supposed to grow into a child and then an adult, a being permanent enough to exist alongside the portal and, eventually, maybe, to enter it with everybody else. The fact that she didn’t become a child, that she was never going to, is what makes her the opposite of the portal’s life-devouring normalcy. After this, what else in the world could matter enough to bring you back behind your own single pair of eyes?

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IV. Examination of Conscience

In the summer of 2023 the wave of my self-disgust crested, and I decided I had to do something. I let the thought I have to do something simmer on the emotional backburner, the one that runs up and behind to the left of whatever I’m doing on my phone at any given time, for a few days. I wrote ideas for something in the almost-empty notebook I’d bought the year before to re-train myself to write things on paper.

In the end, I wrote down the rules of a game called You Don’t Have A Phone.

I’d spent a lot of time on my phone reading accounts from people who didn’t have phones about how great it was not to have a phone—how much better you became once you cut the cord. But I was suspicious of a solution as simple as Just get rid of the phone. This felt like misplacing the blame. So long as my human weakness remained, the phone could always come back.

I surmised that the way to live in this world must not be without the phone but in a state where the phone had no power to control me. I knew that this could not be accomplished by willpower or self-denial. The only path remaining was self-deception.

I set a date on the calendar, one week in the future, when the game would begin. Midnight to midnight, for seven days.

The first rule of You Don’t Have A Phone was that I couldn’t tell anyone I was going to play the game. Back then I often told myself the lie that I couldn’t put down my phone because I needed it to be with other people. A week would be long enough to call my own bluff.

The second rule of You Don’t Have A Phone was that I really had to believe I didn’t have a phone, while still having a phone. This would be the tricky part. Some part of me was always going to know I had a phone, that it was sitting in my backpack or on my desk or on the kitchen counter. I had to know that and not know it at the same time, to know it long enough to use it for its approved purpose and then forget it the instant I put it down. If I found myself preparing to reach for it, even if it was right under my hand, I had to look at it and think to myself, with affected bemusement, What are you doing? You don’t have a phone, and believe it was true as I turned my eyes away from it.

The third rule of You Don’t Have A Phone was that if I didn’t have a phone, then I really didn’t have a phone, except that if it was actually a phone it was okay. Calls, texts, sure—these didn’t count as “having a phone” for the purposes of the game. Things like YouTube, my bank account, my email, were easily accessible with non-phone devices and therefore would only be accessed on non-phone devices. But certain apps presented dangerous edge cases. Would I, for example, make an exception to keep up my Duolingo streak?

I wrestled with the permissibility of the Duolingo streak for three days. Duolingo is not a language-learning app but a subscription salesman hawking a sense of false accomplishment, just another algorithm ringing the happy tiny bell in the mind. One might learn some Spanish using Duolingo, but learning a language is incidental to the point of Duolingo. My commitment to my streak was as good as an admission I wasn’t really going to quit.

The day before the game started, I realized that the fact I was wrestling with Duolingo at all portended failure. The point was not to wrestle. I decided to allow myself Duolingo. If Duo led me into greater sin, then I would cast him out. But mostly I would endeavor, as I did with everything else, to forget he existed.

The day came, and the week passed, and another. I played You Don’t Have A Phone for six straight weeks. I didn’t break once.

I avoided drawing any conclusions about my time without a phone while I was still enjoying it. The touch had to be light, light. To examine it too closely would reveal to my mind that I had fooled it; not using the phone had to be as neutral and unremarkable an act as using the phone had been. I could not allow myself to measure my success by any metric. I knew the moment I started seeing my abstinence as virtuous, I was sunk.

No one wondered where I’d gone. I still responded to messages, if less frequently; no one commented on the frequency. I still talked on the phone with my parents. I still read good articles, if fewer. I took lunchtime walks around the lake and left the phone behind me in the office. I went out with friends and left it in the car. Once—only once—I woke up not thinking about it and continued to not think about it so completely and innocently that it was lunchtime before I realized that it had not been beside me all day.

I broke on a three-day work trip by myself out into the eastern desert. My task was to visit prisons, where I would sit down for ten to fifteen minutes at a time with certain young men and provide them with information about their rights, related to work I had been doing on their behalf that they knew very little about. I wasn’t allowed to have a phone in the prisons, of course. They took it from me as I filed out of the waiting room with the other visitors, tired-looking moms who’d put their kids in matching T-shirts reading I LOVE MY DADDY! and young women dressed chastely and to the nines. None of the prisons even got wireless reception, so any drug deals I might have planned would have been thwarted anyway, but I still had to let them tuck the phone into its own little locked cell on my way through the first riot-proof door.

Maybe it was the break in routine that did it, or maybe the boredom of driving three hours a day through bleak autumn badlands, or maybe it was something about the way the air in prisons, even the air outside, reeks of human misery. I don’t know what changed. In my hotel room at night I started scrolling, and I never stopped again.

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V. Act of Contrition

In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against you, whom I should love above all things. I firmly intend to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid what leads me into sin.

I’m ready for my penance.

…A whole rosary?

Like, all five decades?

Yes, I have a rosary. My friend gave it to me in high school. She wasn’t raised religious but she knew it meant a lot to me, so she looked up the order of the beads and made it herself. The beads are pink and white glass. They slide on the string, which always made it way easier to keep track of where I was. When I was in Catholic school they gave us plastic glow-in-the-dark rosaries so we could say them in bed when the lights were out. Not to brag, Father, but I’d say if you added up all my lonely nights K through 12, I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of more rosaries than ASMR videos.

I haven’t said one in years, though. I’m out of practice.

The last rosary I said? It was in 2014. Michael Brown had been shot in Ferguson a few months before. It was all over the Internet still. I was in law school and the public interest program talked about basically nothing else.

I was on the red line home looking at my phone. Headed north. There was a young black woman with two kids sitting across from me. Both small, one with a school backpack and one still toddling around. The older one was reading a book out loud to himself while the younger one hung off his mom’s knees. The station announcement came on over the loudspeaker and the mom started gathering things into the stroller, and the little boy kept reading. As the door opened she scolded him: You just sitting here, you got no idea what’s going on, you’re not helping your brother! We’re getting off the train and you don’t even know, you still got your stuff lying everywhere! She was furious, slamming chapter books into the stroller. You have to know what’s going on around you! You were a man, somebody could shoot you!  

I swear, I swear it is true that she said this: You were a man, somebody could shoot you.

I stared at my phone for the rest of the journey, feeling dismay spinning in a cloud on the backburner, the glass wall of Twitter between me and my grief. They were talking about police brutality on Twitter and I used this to distract me from the look on the face of the mother, the contrition of the little boy, the growing baby wails of his brother echoing up the station steps. I would not alight too long on any one thing. When I came home I lay on the bed for a while and then I said an entire rosary for Michael Brown.

Anyway, Father, I don’t think I could say a whole one now. You know why I don’t have Netflix? It’s not because I’m too good for it. It’s because I don’t have the attention span to sit through an entire episode of television.

I quit social media, Father. I deleted it all. I haven’t been on Instagram in three and a half years. I have not made a Facebook post since 2019. I deleted Twitter in 2020 and never looked back. I have constructed an elaborate system of Bene-Gesserit mind tricks to make myself forget that Substack Notes exists and most of the time it works, but when it doesn’t I lose ten minutes, fifteen minutes, as long as it takes to see something I revile and remember that I was trying not to look. But otherwise I don’t even lurk.

And still, every Sunday at 10:00 am, my phone informs me that I spent an average of three to four hours a day on my phone in the previous week. Over the years I have reduced the number of things my phone is capable of ruthlessly and methodically, yet that number does not go down.

Could I say the rosary in pieces? One decade per day for a workweek? I could probably do that. I’d set an alarm on my phone and then I’d remember. If you think about it, isn’t it better to do something important in pieces? Then I could meditate on each decade for a full day instead of just fifteen minutes, or whatever. If anything that would be more penance, right?

I feel sorry every time I do it, Father, but contrition has not helped.

What penance will bring that number down? What else can I throw overboard to make this ship float?

What part of my body can I cut off to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven?

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VI. The rest of the book review

I’ve read No One Is Talking About This four times. Every time I cry through the final third of the book. I don’t know if it would hit me so hard if it were fiction and not autofiction, but it’s dedicated to the baby, who was a real baby and not just a metaphor for embodiment.

The point of the book is not to explain the Internet. It’s to explain the baby. The Internet is a necessary jumping-off point. We are shared with all the time now; we are desensitized to the intimate details of private life. People broadcast their children’s temper tantrums on camera for zillions of followers every day and the market will not bear another sex memoir by a popular blogger. A hundred pages inside the portal are required to set up the moment that breaks the narrative out of it, to explain why, in the book, Lockwood’s character takes hundreds of pictures of the baby, but does not mention posting them even once.

I hunted for a quote from Part II that would help explain how it made me feel, but nothing I picked out worked. It was all too bound to what came immediately before and what immediately followed. It’s the second-by-second story of a family, together, watching a baby die—out of context I’m afraid any individual second feels overwrought and sentimental. Bitch, this is the shit that made you cry? Or, even worse, that without the hundred pages of the portal fresh in the reader’s memory the narrator’s voice sounds silly and pretentious, an idiot millennial squawking memes at a funeral. We’re talking about a dead baby, here!

If I’d come across the baby’s GoFundMe on Twitter, I wouldn’t have donated to it. It would have been nothing personal—just a necessary rule of engagement. Once you start getting financially invested in strangers’ sorrows, it’s hard to stop. There is a surfeit of sick babies on the Internet, and if you start donating you will have to develop a horrible calculus to determine which ones you pay attention to. The rarest diseases on Earth are all right there, competing to be something you never saw before and might be persuaded to learn a little bit more about.

My mind will never recover from what I’ve done to it. I loved the book, and I recommend you read it.