Tools Reflect Their Makers
What will it be like when your phone disobeys you?
You joke that your mind is like a flea market: there are a few pearls, but it’s mostly garbage. Two nights ago, you fell asleep at work and woke up with a brown banana nuzzling up against your elbow. Last night, you slept at a restaurant — or, to be more accurate, at a picnic table near the restaurant, under the flashing red lights of wind turbines.
This morning, there is a message in your drafts that you must have composed while in a haze. It is addressed to Amory, who has been (in order) your fling, your friend, your colleague, your manager, and your brother-in-law. The message is cheeky. You press send. It doesn’t go through. However, you are able to send messages to other people and even a simple good morning to Amory. The phone is exerting its influence over you. A daily quotation (from a service that you didn’t sign up for) appears on the screen: it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing / but you cannot stand in the middle of this. “Aren’t we mordant?” you mutter.
Despite being in the mood for eggs and bacon, you are permitted to view directions only to the natural food store. No matter: you’ve lived here several years, and you know the way to the greasy spoon. You place your phone on the table face up as you tip a jug of maple syrup onto your breakfast. So much for good health. Someone at work mentioned a boozy trivia hour this afternoon in Damariscotta, a town to which you haven’t memorized the directions, but when you try to access those directions, your phone suggests an Andrew Wyeth exhibit in Rockport. And when you search for other outings on this breezy Saturday, the screen locks. Wyeth paintings are the only appropriate education.
On the drive to Rockport, you think of Amory, who, in your brief time together, believed he held dominion over your mind. “My word, you read such trash,” he said once, based on a cursory scan of your bookshelves. When he became your manager at the retirement center, he objected to your sneaking in guinea pigs to meet the residents and he shut down the dance parties that you organized on weekend nights. But you are the only person who tries to bring these old souls joy. You know because they’ve told you so, and because they voted you Most Beloved Employee of the Month, an unofficial designation intended to subvert the Employee of the Month anointed by Amory. Your performance reviews are diplomatic — Amory is your brother-in-law, after all — but you know that he’s dying to pin a word like messy to your profile.
In Rockport, you park near the museum. Your phone pulsates like some scorned boy while you head toward the beach, away from Andrew Wyeth. It wants for you what Amory wants for you, and it was doubtless designed by an equally peevish egoist, someone who believes that he deserves to dictate a program of study to you without understanding the fineness of your mind. You place the phone on the ground, face down, and keep walking.
The limbus between the ocean and the rocky beach arrests you: blue meets gray. Nobody — nothing — is privy to the electrical impulses coalescing into thought right now, only you. The water burbles. On warm days, you take some of the residents from the retirement center to the coast, against policy. The oldest among them have lived a full century. They must possess so much wisdom, and you, even when you try not to, must exude so much condescension. “My mind is not a flea market,” you tell the ocean, and the ocean — which was made by nobody and reflects nothing but the sky — listens without opinion.