ANNE HEFFRON

View Original

The High Price of Scrolling

I can’t focus. 

It’s like my brain is Teflon and events, thoughts, names, sounds, skid right over it, leaving me with the flavor of something happened, but nothing concrete. I feel the most in control when I’m scrolling my phone, bouncing from Facebook to Instagram to my bank balance to my book sales on Amazon back to Facebook to emails to Twitter to my credit card balance back to Instagram and then to emails because someone might have sent me an email that will change my life in the twenty seconds since I checked the last time. 

I used to be a writer. Now I’m a scroller. 

Finishing a paragraph is a time for me, on my computer, to jump onto email and then Facebook and then Amazon and then to get sucked in by Google until the next thing I know I’m buying cowboy boots from the Sundance website even though I’m living on the East Coast and will never have occasion to buy blue boots with birds stitched onto the sides, but when I’m on my computer none of that matters. What matters is that I need those boots, and I won’t be able to focus until I buy them. 

 But, of course, I won’t be able to focus then, either, because suddenly I am a woman who owns blue cowboy boots and I have to figure out what to do next. Do I buy a flowy skirt that tells people I live in the desert? Do I move? Did I really spend over four hundred dollars on something I won’t wear? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my life that I would do this? Am I okay? Am I lonely? Am a dying? 

Did COVID do this to me? Is my phone to blame? I feel as if I’m sliding down a cliff with nothing to grab hold of to stop the slide. Days slide by. Weeks. How long have I been putting a mask on in public spaces? When was the last time I kissed a man? Am I okay?

I am writing a book about writing your story. (Note to self.) The impulse just came over me to look at properties that are available in Sebastopol, California. I’ll be right back. 

What the internet has taught me is that I can escape the present moment over and over and over until, I assume, my life ends and I can’t scroll anymore because I’m dead. 

What would happen if I sat for a couple of hours (or fifteen minutes) at my computer and stayed on one screen only and wrote? I feel like that would be like putting a piece of mercury on a tipped board and hoping the glistening silver dot would stay in place. I don’t think I could. I think the universe would force me energetically to jump to another screen! I don’t think I have free will any more. I think I’ve succumbed to the master plan of Let’s Find a Way to Get People’s Time and Money and Make Them Think They Are in Control.

I don’t like it. I feel like I should find religion or something so I have to put my phone down to enter a sacred space and bow my head to, not a screen, but to…nothing!

It’s all over so quickly. I think about that. And then I pick up my phone.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

BY JAMES WRIGHT

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.