It's such a gamble when you get a face
On TikTok this month, a British DJ bragged about taking a seven-hour flight without using headphones or screens, adding, “The power of my mind knows no bounds.” He described it as rawdogging. That terminology strikes me as unfortunate, but in 2010 I was given a PowerPoint to edit from a California tech client, and I marked the hell out of it because of what I deemed a misuse of the word “disrupt”, so you clearly can’t trust me.
I did rawdog an overnight Amtrak from Boston to Chicago in 1995. The woman in the next seat, also rawdogging it, got off in Rochester, shortly after she told me that the thing about Utica is you never know if you’re Uti-coming or Uti-going. That awareness of time as a distinct and discrete unit, separate from context, that’s the kind of wisdom rawdogging brings.
Elizabeth Willis, from “Meteoric Flowers”
The absence of phones at rehab was glorious. What struck me most was how quickly most everyone seemed to adapt to 30-90 days without constant access to a screen. A few campers monopolized the three screens in the computer lab, but those were off limits outside of a few windows of time. I hopped on them pretty regularly myself, but that was because my wife had gone silent during my stay, so I checked my Rocketmail account for 16 consecutive days, twice per day, wondering what had happened. She didn’t leave voicemails or answer my calls till the last week, when she left a teary message that she couldn’t talk to me, and that I knew why, though I did not learn that till later.
I kept up appearances during those 16 days. I didn’t cry, but I was in a pretty numb early sobriety. The men in group, mostly cocaine users, all lauded me for staying strong. I get that from both my parents.
The absence of phones at rehab was great.
William Matthews, from “Time & Money”
I periodically write about my mom here — she’s a classic Adult Child of Alcoholics, afraid of conflict and largely focused on the need for everything to be OK. The house is perfect, the boys are all doing well, and as long as she keeps her vegan, gluten-free, corn-free diet and exercise routine, all will continue to be OK.
On the other side of the family, my dad is a mix of stoic and ironic. His mom died when he was 16, and he didn’t miss a day of school and no one heard about it. It’s a story my mom tells sometimes.
My dad’s youngest sister has four children, including an anorexic daughter in her 40s who’s been drinking herself to death at her parents’ house. The light of her life was her 14-year old pit bull, who was in decent health, but deteriorating with age. Her mom helped her daughter go to rehab; on her way out, the daughter said, “Don’t you dare kill my dog.” Her mom threw out much of her furniture, made her room suitable for guests and euthanized the dog three days later.
I heard this story last week, on vacation. My mom also relayed a story of how doctors were doing pre-op work on her prior to cataract surgery last month (surgery I was not aware of), marveling at all her numbers — blood pressure, cholesterol, everythingsgreaterol — shocked by her age. So everything’s going OK.
I was visiting my parents with my son, who is nonstop. Constant talking, but conversational, not just yammering away aimlessly. I am incapable of not responding when he wants to interact, and I try to be thoughtful. Same goes for conversations with my mom, which means by the end of a fairly short trip, I’d reached new levels of exhaustion, punctuated by the random, piercing barks of their 65-pound Bernedoodle, who, I was reminded repeatedly, is a really well-behaved dog, even while he tried to surreptitiously hump my 50-pound son.
In a strange way, visiting my family this week disrupted my body image issues. Seeing the source of my obsessive concerns about my weight and imperfect shape in Penguin Heritage Slim Fit shirts is a pretty good reminder that it comes from somewhere.
On the flight back home, my son lamented that we hadn’t plugged in his iPod, so he was stuck reading his DogMan books instead of watching his downloaded episodes of The Fairly OddParents. Thank you lovely woman in 20F, on your way to a conference outside Austin, for doing a MadLibs with him where he wanted to fill in every noun with bodily fluids because “It’s the only gross thing I know!”
I stared at the back of my tray, as gray and slippery as time.
Gerald Costanzo, from “Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard”