He sat at his writing desk, thinking he could write in the precious minutes he’d carved out from his busy schedule—errands, soccer practice, mindlessly scrolling a phone and getting angry, time is always the enemy, of the writer and the life, it was the most valuable commodity, time, followed, in close proximity by attention. Time and attention. And yet, as he sat at his computer, he found his attention was flagging, though he’d prepared the room, turned on the white noise machine, angled his desk, so he was looking out the window and into the reticulate branches of trees, birds scattered, and then beyond them, the tops of houses, clouds, then whatever lay beyond.
Sometimes, he meditated, thinking himself the sky, but the truth was, he wasn’t the sky at all, in fact, what he heard, at the very edge of hearing, almost beyond what was possible, was the faint sound of electronic gunfire, of shouts, his children playing on screens and this sound, the shouts, the ping of the electronic gunfire, interrupted his thoughts, scattered as birds from a tree, the holding point of his thought, demolishing it twice over, first, by ruining his focus, and secondarily, by carrying his thought pattern away from the story he’d intended to write and toward the screens themselves, and by extension, his role as a parent.
He was not the sky, and the writing was all but gone now, his attention now fracturing the precious time, what he was thinking about now, in lieu of writing, was a podcast he’d listened to the week before that detailed the rising mental health crisis in teens, the loneliness epidemic amongst adults, and the very clear line, cleaner than the line of horizon behind the trees, between the use of screens and mental health.
He turned off the white noise and listened at the vent in his room, which was supposed to carry up heat, but which now carried instead, the sound of his child’s game, one where he was firing away at other entrants in a battle royale, all of them wearing elaborate skins from pop culture icons of his youth, Peter Griffin, The Predator, Santa Claus, all blasting away at one another across the void of space time, united by the screen.
And was his commitment to writing, his stealing away of hours, to watch the window and try to create stories an act of selfishness, an act that was consigning his children to a life of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, drug use, and failed marriages?
His parents, of course, hadn’t worried about drug use or mental health crises, the phrases barely existed, and he’d grown up in the blue light of the television’s glare, watching soap operas, or shows about people in their early twenties in southern California, navigating addiction and relationships, he’d played video games for hours, blasting away at aliens or using swords to defeat orcs, but his parents didn’t have the crucial research that he had, they didn’t have the knowledge that all that time spent on the love life of soap operas, the marriages and divorces he rooted for and against, the blasting of aliens and level grinding on Final Fantasy were atrophying his social skills, causing him to feel distant from life, depressed, an anxiety ridden shell of a self.
There was that old phrase, ignorance is bliss, and his parents, in all their imperfections, had been blissful perhaps, he had no such defense, no bliss, instead, he could hear his daughter, thirteen now and depressed maybe, who could say, sort of anxiety ridden, watching a skin care routine on Tik-Tok, which he’d forbidden, knowing what such rituals and routines could do to a girl her age, but he was incapable of monitoring all of the devices all the time, the devices, watches for the safety of the kids, iPad when they were little, computers for school work, a phone for communication on the bus ride to and from school had multiplied like locusts, and it was an impossibility to log into every device, block every website, remember every passcode, and so he was defeated, day after day, by screen time.
And besides, it was important that he too have unfettered time to construct stories, which, he wasn’t unaware of the irony, took place on screens, and it was also necessary that he read and grade student papers, which was an essential part of his job or at least to advancing in his career, which had stalled, he knew, as most careers in academia now die, and his children were very talkative, veritable chatter boxes, chattering with him all the time, pleasant chatter about football or their fights with friends, skin care routines and petty junior high drama, which meant, in a double bind, that even when he was with them, giving them time and attention, he wasn’t able to truly focus, which meant the only time he was able to focus was when they were also on their screens, turning their minds into warrens of sadness and friendlessness.
He knew that he needed to narrow his attention, to turn it into a laser beam in order to write, but lately, he couldn’t quite forget the children, wasting away downstairs, who one day, given the current trajectory of work, would also need to turn their minds into laser beams of focus in order to pass countless tests, get into a good college, and there, achieve solid grades, outwit machines and get a good enough job to join the endless ranks of the middle class.
Without this focus, they might not succeed in the competitive capitalist marketplace or hellscape or whatever people were calling it, he understood this, and so, his writing time, which was essential within the very capitalist hellscape he was describing, but which also made his writing essential in order to help the family survive, which, of course, was also the very thing, his need for time and attention that was undermining the structure of the family, everyone glued to their square of light downstairs, following videos of elaborate dances, vacations, unboxing, all in the name of getting likes, which, if the writer was honest, was also the game he was in to.
You could see the very rot of civilization happening, forget the mind, it was all there on display, and he was somehow, he knew, cosigning it by giving them screen time, hours of it, four, seven, so he could stare out the window and think about a line of dialogue for an imaginary person, someone he’d created in his head, he knew, not of flesh and blood, not, in the end, all that important, except, he could advance his career or enhance empathy for strangers, if he really wanted to extend the argument, enhancing empathy for the few people who might read it while ignoring his own children, lacking empathy for them.
And to what end, his advancements, where would it take them? His children, now anxiety riddled and depressed might blame him for the endless hours on screens, the excessive skin washing and sadness, which he gave them during their childhoods, his neglect, they might not see the giving away of his time and attention to the imaginary space of writing as something essential to the survival of the family unit but as something selfish, something cold, such were the minds of his future children.
And beyond that, the triple bind, which was that the time he spent with the children was also a bit of a mess because he wasn’t every truly an engaged parent, not the type to play blocks or build Lego castles or listen to carefully crafted meal plans with power overnight oats and power muffins, No, in fact, he wasn’t really all that present when he was with them either, which, he understood, would probably also damage them, his far away look, mindless scrolling on the phone, wondering if someone would click on his own link, his precious entry into the online life, a story, people who he wished had empathy for him.
But can you blame him, really, have you listened to a seven minute story from a child about something you cannot care even an ounce about, the interruptions during the dialogue by the child, the intensity of the story, largely inconsequential but told like an epic, as though it were Moby Dick? Pay attention, pay attention, are you listening, daddy? Are you listening? What did I say? All culminating in a string of words who’s point is never arrived at or that is lost between the long gulf between parent and child, and this too, a contemporary problem, parents expected to be friends with their children, to be engaged with Legos and storytelling and applications and supportive of every performance, regardless of the parent’s busy work schedule, lest the child end up struggling through life and long therapy sessions, mostly via Tik-Tok, where they diagnose all that is wrong with them, which turns out to mostly be crummy parents.
He was in a conundrum, not even a bit of sky, nowhere for his attention to go, no place for his presence, birds daring through the air, dark shadows plummeting through a grey sky and downstairs he hears more shots coming from the video game, his son’s voice, rising, louder and louder as he shouted at his friends, and still more birds dropping in the window’s afternoon frame, dropping to swiftly in the reflection of his computer screen, a gray square of sky, a small branch, bisecting out into space, and the birds passing through it.
And he was faced, yet again, with the awful prison of his own making, whether to watch the birds and wait for the spirit to move him, to give him a line of dialogue, the sort that might create empathy in his imaginary reader, months from now, clicking on their own computer screen, finding his words across that imaginary space or he could close his computer, go downstairs, force the children to unplug their devices, to stop their endless skin care routines, their electronic blasts of strangers and to talk with him, to have a conversation, to transform his time and attention from something he hoarded like a miser back into a kind of gift.
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