Our attention used to come at a premium. You’d line up at bookstores (imagine). You'd expend it on one monoculture VHS for months.
Your cruddy headphones crackled music in the general direction of your ears. On the school bus, ten tracks served as an angsty soundtrack to your aloof glances at a former-friend. She told everyone your secrets.
A waiting room with Finding Nemo on a constant loop like a fever dream. In the hospital room, a CD player, a notebook, and a fuzzy TV that sometimes played Seinfeld. I remember Ugly Betty playing during the worst headache of my life.
Anyway, sating the boredom gremlin in each of us didn't take much. A lollipop at the bank on a parent's errands day.
Technology used broad, lazy strokes to appeal to you like “teens probably like this" and that was what you got. A blunt instrument. You'd hear a song on the radio and never learn what it was. In Dublin in 2011, a single text on my cheap vodaphone changed my whole day. Replying took like ten minutes.
Then it was decided that we should never be bored. A shift to lights and sounds, more and more of them. Our attention is targeted with precision. For commerce and other reasons that are unclear.
We alternate between being flighty butterflies (who should be admired but not emulated; they're at the apex of their life cycle, a symbol of beauty and finesse in decline. Only meant to last a week) and hardened intent sleuths.
We’re not built for this is my point. A word that starts with E and ends in ngagement —once a novel concept— bruises us with overuse.
We're asked to ante up 100 times a day. To fragment ourselves in as many directions.
It takes deliberate thought to conserve attention, and to shore up more of it.
Our yesterdays
I'm not one of those people who’s in love with the past. I romanticize it, sure. I'm just mining the junkyard museum of our yesterdays for what got me through in quainter times.
Connection is a throughline for me, to others and to ourselves. We've been missing each other: real person to real person without this heavy gauze that most people I know seem to be feeling. If I could lift it, I would.
Real talk, I miss everyone. I miss Alan and he's upstairs. I miss theme parties and Trivia and laughing until it hurts. I miss unending summers (the kid kind, not the global warming kind) and seeing new places. I miss abdundance even when it was things I don't care about like the Super Bowl and board games that take four hours.
I miss that electric spark feeling (though I no longer drink. It was usually a night out thing) of “anything can happen":
You're out dancing until 3am in Madrid and you tell your friends you love them (a decade later, you still mean it).
You play pool at Flannery's against a guy from Belfast and can't understand a word he says and his girlfriend, who tells your Australian friend to his face that she HATES Australia (because her then-boyfriend stole all of her money there). “Life is so ridiculous!” you both think as your laughs echo back to each other. I want to laugh like that. I miss not being serious. I'm not a very serious person actually (this is a song that AP and I like). It doesn't suit me, or maybe any of us.
You spend two extra hours in Blarney and explore old witch huts and waterfalls and giant tree root archways that feel untouched (and give you a little twinkly feeling you can't define like maybe magic could be real even though that's stupid). You buy knit sweaters and decide you will be new people who will wear them, like an older person aesthetic but it could be cool maybe, and then at home they're so itchy and gosh what a foolish idea but good on us for trying something new!
In a sleepy seaside town, you go to a wine bar with live music and are accidentally at a wedding. The couple and their also-talented musician friends perform all night and everyone is so nice to you even though you're underdressed in denim.
You have two turkey tenants. They're beady-eyed and oddly charming. If they see you they lope away, all spindly legs and shaggy feathers. Like clumsy prehistoric beasts.
Watching a lake and being content
On a hike yesterday, I felt the things I felt before. (Communing with nature ones.) We watched the ducks in the shifting light. He kicked up dust.
I'll let my boy lead you on a cold, beautiful day. You're welcome to join us if you want. I hope that you find a day like this, that stirs the things you felt before.
Share this post