Tuning in
There are words everywhere but they're coming at you the wrong way. You start to resent everything you meant to consider. Who's to blame you?
My phone flashes with these kinds of arguments. I’m planning to get a stupid one so the flashing stops.
For example:
I can do the job well. Let’s face it. What? Well, I can do the job well. What’s the job? Right. Well, it’s just for now. Good! I know. In the end, I’m bringing in, like, X a week. How much a year? Y. Keep up the good work. Right? But don’t get too comfortable. I know. OK!
Words like these are everywhere, in different sequences and inflections. They interrupt me when I’m sleeping; I wake up and they’re dotted across a screen. I spoke to an old friend last week in what felt like a town square. (It was in fact just a small park that favored stone to grass.) I showed my friend the phone and asked What is all this. I looked my friend in the eye only to see more flashing. The shock. It took a second to recognize the it was coming from the phone I held up. I had been the one to implicate. My friend answered Well.
So I go to one of those stores that has phones that vertically fold and do almost nothing. They’re ugly and I realize that I want a stupid thing that is beautiful so that it has some use. I go online.
Online I find out that what makes any mass consumer product beautiful is devotion plus if the devotion came from maybe a German or a Belgian or a Swiss (i.e. time). And this mass beauty via devotion via western European society is expensive. An American could work, too, but politics play into it in ways that make devotion difficult to measure and price difficult to predict (we know what this is). It feels safe to go Swiss though I wonder if indulging a cliche (Swiss neutrality, not European socialism) will compromise the beauty of the thing because so many people have talked about it in the same wrong way.
I want something stupid that feels soft in my hands and stays very still and matte and that only a few weird people talk about. A crayon or square of textile or basic calculator. A dark lipstick or card wallet or empty notebook. But it has to have call and text. Maybe a map and compass. A way to procure a cab in the boonies. But flashes of many angles, takes, and proposals, stitched together in the most perfect, wrenching UI — no more.
All my friends who have entered and/or exited my life must file a claim. The ones just hanging around in the wings, heads dipped into their fantastic phones as the performance rages on, must take a number and sit quietly at the DMV. The devoted ones can have my money. I would like the channels of information and methods of communication to be quite daft and for all of us to transcend them.