Notes from the tunnel, by the light of an onrushing train

I have fallen down somewhat on my self-assigned brief of keeping a plague diary, so it's time for an update on daily life here at the Oakes compound as we approach the end of Pandemic Year Zero.

I am still working from home, if you can really call it working. I do pass most of each day in the vicinity of the drafting table I use as a standup desk in the back bedroom that is my home office, although I have to admit that, a good amount of the time, I'm just lying under it fantasizing about smoking opium on a beach in Vietnam as a tsunami rolls in and other dreams of oblivion. Most of the rest of the time, I am helping Axl with his virtual lessons, and then here and there I manage to fit in a little of the work my employer expects me to be accomplishing.

Mondays through Thursdays, both Petra and Belle leave the house each morning, Petra for ten-hour workdays and Belle to attend the one-room schoolhouse my mother operates in her garage. On Fridays, we give my mom a break and keep both kids home, and the reason Petra started working 4/10s is so she can have these days off and lend a hand with the children's virtual educations. I am, as noted earlier, hardly a paragon of productivity during the first part of the week, but I wouldn't be able to get a damn thing done with both kids home absent Petra's help.

This is especially the case now because, with the start of the second semester in late January, the children's schoolwork turned from a sad joke into a demanding challenge.

During the first semester, the children were enrolled in our county's "remote instruction" option, which involved no actual instruction and, for the most part, fairly simple assignments. Our biggest headaches that semester came less from trying to help our children understand their lessons than from trying to stay organized with a mixture of paper and online assignments, the latter due each day but the former needing to be compiled and dropped off during weekly "packet exchanges" at their school.

But the county school board terminated remote instruction with the end of the first semester, and—with the start of the second—we shifted the children into what's known as "the state virtual school," a program predating the pandemic that was primarily designed for advanced students seeking enrichment.

We were warned, accurately as it turned out, that this program would require significantly more work of the children. This is a good thing, of course, from a certain point of view. Axl starts middle school next year, and it is hard to see how the flurry of undemanding busywork that was being sent home last semester would have prepared him in the slightest.

On the other hand, it was nice that, back in the fall, neither of the children required an outsized amount of adult guidance or assistance. Now each day is a full school day for everyone, children and adults alike, along with a full workday for the adults, and the constant interruptions and impossibility of concentrating on either the children's instruction or my job for more than a few minutes at a time feels like it is shriveling my brain and bringing on early dementia.

One of the toughest aspects of our current circumstances is not making all of these sacrifices but wondering whether making them is even really necessary, or if an excess of caution has led us to over-react. Over the last two weeks, there has been a steady drumbeat of advisories that, on balance, schools, especially elementary schools, increasingly seem to be relatively safe places when it comes to the risk of virus transmission. Certainly schools seem safe enough, and the downsides of keeping all children home dire enough, that it is easy to understand the pressure state and federal officials are feeling to reopen them as soon as possible.

I'll admit I am readier to hear this kind of thing from the current White House than I was from the former, but there are still a couple of problems. First, this emerging consensus concerning the relative safety of reopening schools only snapped into firm shape a week or so after the deadline for withdrawing our children from virtual school and returning them to the classroom. It would seem we have no option but to lie in the bed we've made for the rest of this school year.

Next, although I look with massive sympathy and not the slightest scrap of envy on the officials who must make these decisions, and although I understand and mostly accept the basis for their calculations, I also know that those calculations go something like this: schools may be relatively safer, but no one is saying they are totally safe; reopening them will therefore result in at least some excess illness, disability, and death at the margins; there won't, however, be so much excess illness, disability, and death that the downsides of reopening will strike most people as outweighing the costs of remaining closed. QED, time to reopen.

Then I come across the story of, say, a 29-year-old whose experience of COVID-19 included 61 days in a coma, "ICU psychosis," and the amputation of one leg at the knee. I know that the odds are in favor of my not being infected at all, that—even if I am infected—my experience of the disease is statistically almost certain to be quite a bit better than that man's was, and that, either way, catching the disease from my children is pretty much the least likely of all possible infection vectors. Yes, yes, of course I know all that—and yet, all things considered, the personal potential downsides of this disease seem dire enough that perhaps a few more months of brain-shriveling work-from-home-while-also-being-a-teacher is worth it.

Besides, so what if I trust the current occupant of the White House more than I did the former? Here in West Virginia, all of the same people remain in charge, and they do not inspire confidence.

I will admit up front that our governor does deserve credit for some of the decisions he has made in response to the pandemic. For example, he closed schools much earlier and delayed reopening them in the fall much later than I ever would have predicted. Relative to other Republican governors, he displayed at least a soupçon of courage in issuing various closure and stay-at-home orders in the pandemic's early months. He issued a mask order, albeit not one he felt able to actually enforce, and he not only urged West Virginians to get vaccinated but received his own shot live on television. Speaking of vaccinations, you may have heard that our state has so far been one of the most successful in this area as well (although I can't help but wonder if this is as much an accident of geography and population density as was the virus's initially slow spread here).

There were moments during the last year, in other words, when I was surprised to realize that I felt at least a little grateful that this man was our governor (at least as opposed to, say, a human-shaped pile of shit like Brian Kemp or Ron DeSantis). It was disconcerting to try to reconcile this feeling with my overall picture of the man, which was less than glowing. This, after all, is a man who, in mid-2017—less than a year after winning the governorship for the first time, his debut in electoral politics—betrayed the voters of West Virginia by switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. By his own account, this reversal of loyalties came not because of an evolution in his political beliefs but rather because of his discovery that Trump's least favorite son, Eric, not only enjoyed hunting and fishing but also knew how to change a flat tire. (Eric is pictured, left, with his brother, enjoying hunting. No photographic evidence of Eric's ability to change a flat tire could be located by press time.)

The only real surprise, of course, was that this man ever considered himself a Democrat in the first place. Certainly he has a great deal in common with Eric's father. A billionaire coal mine "operator" by trade, the governor has ducked paying governments at the local, state, and federal levels many millions of dollars in taxes. He is exhaustingly fond of insisting that—notwithstanding the fact that he accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being a "radical Pelosi Democrat"—he is not "a politician" at all, just "a business guy" who ran for office out of a selfless desire to use his deal-making acumen to help the state he loves.

He speaks in a salad of folksy aphorisms and awkward cliches. Just this morning, I read in the paper his assertion that one of his cabinet secretaries "could probably sell bread to starving Russians on credit." In context, this was clearly intended as some kind of compliment but—just like his amazement at Eric Trump's willingness to risk his manicure spinning a lug-nut wrench—it suggests he is not a hard man to impress.

It should also be pointed out that, since March, his most regular "public" appearances have been in the form of virtual press briefings broadcasted from a private room at the state capitol. The only other people allowed to be present are certain other state officials and whatever staffers are needed to operate the virtual gizmos.

The press is only allowed to join these briefings remotely, with reporters' names being drawn from a hat for the chance to ask questions and no opportunity to follow up if the governor's answer wanders off.

Despite or maybe because of the fact that he received his vaccine shot live at one of these briefings, it was not lost on the state's school-system employees that he and his "coronavirus czar" appeared afraid to be in the same room with reporters and members of the public even as they assert that it is safe for unvaccinated teachers to reenter classrooms packed full of students.

I would also like to point out, just so that it is noted for the record somewhere on the internet, that Lawrence Wright—in his 40-page New Yorker article examining how the U.S. so royally fucked up its pandemic response—gets his one mention of our governor exactly backwards. He describes Justice as "read[ing] out the names of West Virginians who had died of COVID" at these briefings, but in fact the man did no such thing.

Instead, in a kind of ritual incantation at the beginning of each briefing that eventually made me want to bang my head on my desk, he would update the death toll, beseech us "not to let these wonderful West Virginians become just a statistic," and then do just that by reciting a coldly generic litany of, basically, the demographics of the dead: "a 72-year-old male from Boone County," "a 56-year-old female from McDowell County," and on and ad nauseam on.

Then there were the maps.

Sometime in the summer, the W. Va. DHHR (Department of Health and Human Relations) launched an online map intended to communicate the extent of infections and magnitude of infection risk in each of our 55 counties. Ostensibly based on the same framework as the Harvard Global Health Institute's "COVID-19 Risk Levels Map," our state's risk map seemed forever to be being "tweaked" throughout the summer and fall.

Where the Harvard map used four color codes—green ("on track for containment"), yellow ("community spread"), orange ("accelerated spread"), and red ("tipping point")—and recommended stay-at-home orders starting at the orange level, West Virginia not only widened these categories slightly but eventually added a whole new color category, gold. It was hard to avoid concluding that the purpose of the gold category, lodged as it was between the better yellow and the worse orange ones, was to make it harder for counties to reach the orange level and the restrictive response actions, including the dreaded cancellation of high school sports practices and games, that would result.

Many were the days when a side-by-side comparison of the Harvard and West Virginia maps showed all or nearly all 55 counties in yellow or red on the former, while the latter displayed a veritable rainbow of all the available colors, even including green. Perhaps there was more to this story than that West Virginia's decision making was driven by political concerns while Harvard's represented pure and unbiased science, but it was hard to avoid this suspicion.

Next came the West Virginia Department of Education's map. The purpose of this map was not at first clear, for it used the same data and color-coding parameters as the DHHR map. One difference was that, while the DHHR map was updated daily, the WVDE map was updated only weekly, on Saturdays at 5 p.m. In counties coded "orange" or "red" on WVDE's Saturday map, instruction for the following week was required to be fully remote, with no sports practices or games.

Some counties never even tried to offer remote instruction (except when infection levels temporarily forced them to), and not a single one that did try turned out to be able to actually deliver it effectively. Even in those counties that made the attempt, parents still had the option of sending their kids to school, either full-time in some counties or—as in ours—on what was known as the "blended" model. In the latter, half the students attended Monday-Tuesday and the other half Thursday-Friday. Wednesdays were reserved for the "rigorous cleaning" of school buildings and/or time for teachers to "plan" (that is, to sob silently at their desks).

One of the issues with the WVDE map was that the parents who would otherwise have been planning to send their kids to school on a given Monday would only learn on Saturday evening that they now had 36 weekend hours to make alternate childcare arrangements.

The other issue was that the WVDE map was based on Thursday data. It was not infrequently the case that, by a given Monday, conditions in a certain county might have worsened considerably, even as its schools were forced to proceed on the basis of the Saturday map's stale Thursday data.

Heaven help the parent who, at such a moment, clicked over to the Harvard Global map and noticed how much worse everything looked there.

For most of the fall, in other words, the ground did not feel solid underfoot. It was unclear whose data to trust and what decisions to make in response.

One question that came up was why students seemed to be the only ones being asked to make any real sacrifices in response to spikes in infection in their respective counties.

This question came most sharply from student athletes and their families. Although I didn't exactly share their reasons for asking, it sounded like a valid question to me.

Since mid-summer, after all, there had been no shutdown orders for any category of business in this state aside from periodically imposed and withdrawn restrictions on nursing home visitations. Even if you found it possible to trust a CDC that was clearly compromised by its own experience of undue political influence, that agency's official line remained that, although in-person instruction could be considered relatively safe, this was only true if—in response to rising infection rates—meaningful preventive measures were being taken in both the building and throughout the community.

Because such measures weren't being taken, and because the decision-making around the state and school risk-level maps seemed so obviously politically motivated and even eccentric—well, let's just say that more than a few of us found we were reluctant to trust our families' health and even lives to a tax-dodging coal-boss governor and the one-time kindergarten teacher and, more recently, rootless bureaucratic drifter who, early in the pandemic, received a sort of field promotion to state schools superintendent.

So that's where we are: tumbling in the barrel, with no clear sense of which direction is up.

The other day, recognizing the increasingly dark place I seem to be in and unable to convince myself that what sometimes looks like the end of the tunnel isn't, in fact, the headlights of the 3:10 to Yuma, I started the intake process for one of those online counseling services but gave up halfway through. I found myself filled with resentment at some of the questions, because they implied illnesses I don't think I have.

I'm not ill, at least I don't think so. I am, instead, living in a kind of hell that is no less hellish for including so many elements of privilege that I know I'm really not allowed to experience it as hellish.

Anyway, I'll leave it there for today.

I think I hear a train coming.
 

##

Border Crossing

 Be advised: this essay refers fleetingly to the topic of suicide.

We recently received thought-provoking news from an old friend in New Orleans. That city, as you may know, still has streetcars. A few months back, our friend—who lives but a few blocks from the St. Charles line, I believe—started sending her son, age 11, on solo streetcar journeys to pick up milk and eggs at the store in between major household shopping trips.

I had conflicting reactions to this news.

On one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse the decision to grant this boy such early independence. We seem to be an increasingly fearful nation, and we all have a part to play in helping children avoid infection by the mewling anxiousness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the alleged adults. Too many of us parents have our eyes out for nebulous harms our children might experience while looking past the guaranteed downsides of all of this parental hovering. In the face of all this, sending children on solo streetcar rides seems an admirable tonic.

On the other hand, this news from New Orleans pulled me up short. Coincidentally, Petra and I had only just begun discussing whether to start letting Axl—who is one month older than the Crescent City boy—start making the ten-minute walk from our house to his grandparents' house alone. He and his little sister, Belle, are frequent guests at that house, and to date neither of them has ever arrived there without being either delivered or picked up by a grownup.

Until our friend shared her news, it had felt as though we were contemplating a big step and should proceed carefully. Now I had to wonder what on earth we had been waiting for.

The days go by, the beard turns grayer, and suddenly your kid stands on the cusp of tweendom without having been trained to cross a real street by himself. Reflecting on our friend's news, I found I was astounded we hadn't started letting at least Axl make this walk a year or even longer ago, and I tend to think Belle, currently a few weeks short of her ninth birthday, is probably now ready as well.  

Whatever reluctance we feel is not easily explained by any obvious sources of danger. In direct contrast to New Orleans—which possesses many of the characteristics of what are called "failed states" on the world stage and where daily life for many residents can approximate a Hobbesian state of nature—Waldhurst is a small, rural mountain city with a population of about 7,000 and an exceedingly low crime rate. If it feels safe for our friend to set her child loose even in New Orleans, what is holding us back from doing so here?

It's not stranger danger, let me hasten to assert. I am no Newsmax-obsessed simpleton, rocking back and forth and gibbering at lurid fantasies of "white slavery" and "human trafficking" and the rest of the sub-variant bugaboo scenarios that are obsessed over in QAnon-inflected wellness-and-yoga-mom groups on Facebook despite not actually existing. I know that the risk of abduction-by-stranger is as vanishingly small today as it was in the 1980s, when my parents apparently had no compunction about letting me range freely in a neighborhood very similar to the one we live in now.

Being not only human but American and perhaps also a little too fond of true-crime podcasts, I am not entirely immune to anxiety on this point. We do give the children free rein in the neighborhood around our house and in a hilly wooded area that lies adjacent, but—before allowing this—I may have considered it necessary to drill them in screaming "this isn't my Daddy" at top, throat-scorching volume and other tips and tricks of the escape and evasion trade. Certainly I never go out on "walks" the only purpose of which is to peer over fences and through hedges to make sure the children are where I think they are. Well, almost never.

Okay, okay, perhaps there is a pinch of this flavor in the larger stew of our concerns about cutting the apron strings, but the dominant flavor stems from something more mundane: the county secondary road that lies between here and my parents' house, a sort of frontier between the two neighborhoods. The streets immediately surrounding both houses are quiet, residential, lined with trees and parked cars. But to reach one neighborhood from the other, one must cross this road, with its higher speed limit (35 mph, as opposed to 25 in the surrounding streets) and total lack of traffic lights and crosswalks.

Clearly one part of our reluctance involves our worry that perhaps the children might, as a matter of unavoidable developmental fact, not yet possess the judgement and perception capabilities necessary for good decision-making about when to cross such a road. In our defense, I'll point out that—whatever other hazards our friend's son might encounter on his solo strolls in New Orleans—at least every major street he might need to cross can be depended on to have a traffic light and crosswalk at both ends of most blocks.

There seems to be something else going on, though, and what it might be only glimmered into dim shape just after it occurred to me to describe this county road as a boundary or frontier. That's exactly what it is, of course, and it doesn't only demarcate a physical divide. It lies between not only two neighborhoods but two stages of life, and I am beginning to suspect that I am not as eager to cross that boundary as I always expected to be.

Anyone who knows me (and, perhaps, a few strangers who have chanced to pass outside my house during one of my high-volume screaming fits on this very subject) will be aware how intensely and long I have wished to be done with "kid stuff." I long ago reached my fill of a home carpeted with little plastic toys and an emotional climate dominated by superstorms of petty, selfish irrationality. No, thanks, I'd really rather not hold or even frankly hear your baby, because there's a good chance I'll be plunged right back into the mental hellscape I inhabited for at least the first five straight years of my career as a parent, stomach clenched with nausea and fighting the urge to hide in a dark closet with my fingers in my ears.

The thing is, though, it has lately occurred to me that much worse stuff is coming down the road. The teen years will be on us before we know it, and with them the even more intense rebellions and conflicts those years will surely bring: the boyfriends and girlfriends selected for shock effect, the possibility of pregnancy and drug addiction and drunk driving, the experiments with felonious antisocial behavior, and the wee-hours wondering about where the children are and whether they're safe.

And then, at the end of those years, the departure.

In my darkest hours as a parent—that is, for most of the last 11 years—I have openly longed for the day my kids would leave for college and could only smile in disbelief whenever anyone expressed the slightest negative associations with the words "empty nest." Lately, however, I have begun to understand that that moment will bring its own kind of pain after all. Yes, I'll finally have the peace and quiet I've longed for, the solitude with my thoughts that is currently impossible for more than a few seconds at a time. But what will those thoughts look like? I am starting to suspect there will be strong elements of regret and self-recrimination concerning all of my tirades and screaming fits, my own selfish solipsism, the mean streak no one but my children has ever discovered in me, and the intensity with which I had longed for it all to be over.

When I was a new parent, I occasionally had the experience of some decrepit codger cornering me and prattling that I should enjoy it while I could, it all goes by so fast. I would smile, nod, fantasize about slapping their dentures out of their fool mouths, and think but not say something like "not fast enough by far, asshole."

I promised myself I would never, ever verbally assault a new parent in this way. In fact, I decided I would go so far as to warn childless young people not to have kids, and if—in my dotage—I ever chanced upon a young mother or father dealing with a toddler's tantrum in public, I would slide up and observe, in a warm and sympathetic voice , “It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from, isn't it?"

You see, the dominant experience of my first years as a parent was utter astonishment, not only at how unrelentingly awful it all was—at how, for years at a time, the best day I could realistically hope for was one with only a few hours of tantrums, three hours of uninterrupted sleep, and less frequent suicidal ideation—but also how secret everyone else seemed to have been keeping all of this awfulness, as though participating in a broad conspiracy of silence. The result was a profound and overwhelming sense of lonely failure that plagues me even today. So many other parents seemed to be enjoying themselves—so much so that, in some cases, after having one child, they actually, honestly wanted more.

What was wrong with me that I experienced it all so differently?

And what, therefore, could there possibly be not to like about this "empty nest" situation that parents of college students seem always and inexplicably to be moaning over?

By now, however, I have observed that my assumptions and predictions about each upcoming phase of parenthood always turn out wrong, so it seems safe to assume I'll be wrong on this point as well. I am finally starting to understand that the only safe prediction is that, at each stage of parenthood between now and the grave, the only thing I can count on is that I'll continue to be buffeted along by forces I neither understand nor control. I've bought my ticket, in other words, and must now simply take my ride, doing my best to keep all body parts inside the vehicle.

So I also understand that, the first time we let Axl walk alone across that road to his grandparents' house, he won't actually be alone at all. He'll be carrying us on his back, taking us into new territory whether we are ready or not.

That might be the whole explanation, the thing I'm really afraid of. I know I need to teach my kids to cross streets safely, just like I need to teach them to drink whiskey and write poems and use profanity properly. Then, once they are properly equipped to face the world, I must simply let them go, to make their own way as best they can.

Maybe I’m just not in as much of a hurry as I always thought I was.

I'll start tomorrow, I swear.

Sowing Discord

A few weeks ago, I was texting with Spike, one of my eleven-year-old son's friends.

There's a sentence worth dwelling on for a moment.

Exchanging text messages with a prepubescent child was a novel experience in and of itself, but I realized I was in new and disquieting territory about half a second after I pressed "send" on a message suggesting that he lie about his age so that he could finish setting up his new Discord account. Discord wants you to be at least 13, but I really wanted Spike to have a Discord account despite being only eleven years old. We'd lied about Axl's and Belle's age while setting up their Discord accounts, so why shouldn't Spike do the same?

Discord, if you didn't know, is a communication platform that originated among gamers who wanted to be able to communicate with each other while enjoying online multiplayer video games together. If you've seen pop culture images of kids—or perhaps actually seen your own kid(s)—chattering on headsets with friends to coordinate battle plans in an online video game, there's a good chance that Discord was carrying the conversation.

I'll let you research Discord yourself if you are curious about more of its particulars, but for our purposes think of it as "a way for Otto's kids to chat with friends while playing Roblox in different locations together without either monopolizing a parent's iPhone or having to ask a parent to set up a Zoom meeting."

This is one of the two main ways people use Discord—that is, for direct communication among a group of friends, known to each other in real life (IRL) and gathered into what Discord calls a private "server," which no one can join unless invited. Used this way, Discord is, again, just a place for friends to talk, a glorified conference call or video conference like so many of us have gotten accustomed to using for both work and play during this plague year.

There is, however, a "dark side" of Discord, as the moral-panic-style headline of a 2019 Wall Street Journal article put it. The WSJ's concern was directed at the landscape of thousands of Discord servers organized around specific games or other topics that anyone from anywhere in the world may join, and which—being crowded, anonymous places on the internet—are naturally fertile grounds for "racist memes, vulgar talk, and bullying."

As soon as I pressed "send" on that message to Spike, I had a vision of his father—who by the way is a very wide and tall, badge-and-gun-carrying state probation officer—coming across the new app on his son's phone and/or this very text-message exchange, recalling a fleeting memory of some similarly scaremongering report about this mysterious thing called "Discord," and wanting to know just what gateway to hell I'd been encouraging his son to step through and why.

My intentions were pure, I swear! My goal was only to give Axl and Spike a simple way to meet up online that would be less parentally mediated—more self-service—than parentally arranged Zoom meetings or borrowed phones. Back in the summer, I'd made a halfhearted attempt to move the children's friends' parents in this direction, but the response was lukewarm, with only one or two households installing the app, and I didn't push it.

Then one night, upon receiving my phone back from Axl after he and Spike had been FaceTiming and texting each other while playing Among Us [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_Us], my eye fell upon a chat history full of silly and/or gross GIFs. As usual, I was depressed by the lazy banality endemic in the corners of the internet my children are for some reason drawn to, but, you know, whatever. The real problem that struck me was not that Axl and Spike had been exchanging this stuff but that, because Spike already has his own phone but Axl had been using mine, the chat history made it look as though I had been the one sending this stuff to Spike.

I was already weary of having my workday interrupted by regular texts addressed to Axl from Spike, who—during one of the periodic hiccups in school scheduling/opening created by a massive local infection spike—was apparently being left at home alone all day with nothing to do but play on this phone of his. The text message exchange I was scrolling through was the last straw. Not only did I not want anyone to think I might be the one chortling with Spike over, well, the kinds of things that American boys on the cusp of middle school chortle over, I was repelled to even have this stuff on my phone. It was like the mental or rather digital equivalent of finding greasy little-kid fingerprints on my computer screen.

I immediately reminded Spike's parents that Discord was free and easy to install, and I even typed out a brief bullet list of the steps they would need to follow, but there was no response. A few evenings later, I was at the bottom of a couple of glasses of wine when Spike again texted me to see if Axl were available. Before I had quite thought things over, I had sent him the App Store link for downloading Discord and was importuning him to misrepresent himself to a tech company. This is something, like jaywalking and drinking whiskey, that all children must one day learn to do but which most parents would probably prefer to be the ones providing instruction, but what else could I do?

To paraphrase Tolstoy (whose novels would have been a lot shorter if his characters had only had the ability to text one another, come to think of it), families that are happy with their children's screen/device usage are all alike, but each family that is unhappy on this point probably has all sorts of highly specific and particular reasons why. I'll spare you the details of the Oakes household's steps and missteps in shepherding and/or submitting to the inevitable passage of its children along the path to full digital citizenship and instead point out something that was already bothering me even before the pandemic but which has now been cast into even sharper relief.

To wit, among the many other reasons why the 21st century is an awful time to be a child, kids today have no easy way to get in touch with each other.

Sure, if they live in the same neighborhood, they can walk over to a friend's house and just knock on the door, but then that's never not been so. For a brief window in time—from, say, the mid-twentieth century until about ten or fifteen years ago—they could also make independent use of a simple remote communication tool if, say, they didn't feel like walking over or, perhaps, they were being asked to shelter in their homes while a deadly pandemic ran its course. I speak, of course, of the landline telephone.

That window is now closed or at least almost closed. The age of the landline phone is, to most intents and purposes, over. Yes, I know landline phones technically still exist, but fewer and fewer households have them anymore. We do, but the only reason is to give the children an easy way to call 911 if Daddy falls down the stairs and can't move or Mommy "won't wake up." Like most households with landlines, we are forced to leave the ringer turned off so as to avoid the constant barrage of calls from scammers, robots, pollsters, and the other untermenschen who are the 21st  century's landline dead-enders.

As a result, one can't just ring up another house's landline and reliably expect an answer anymore. This is all well and good for the adults, who have their own mobile phones and can effortlessly reach each other this way, but what is a child to do? Long before the pandemic started, I was already frustrated by Axl or Belle asking me to text the parent of one of their friends to ask the parent to ask the friend if the friend wanted to come over or something like that. This was annoying not only because of the time and attention it sucked away from my own narcissistic solipsism but also because of how obviously infantilizing it must be for all of these children to have all of their parents involved in every little communication of theirs.

All of us who believe children should be forced to wait until at least, say, 14 before being issued their own phones loathe and despise those parents who crack earlier, but when it comes right down to it this is the only obvious solution to the question of how to enable one's children to communicate independently and autonomously with their friends. The problem is everything else that comes with a smartphone and the many downsides they introduce, with the biggest one being the increased likelihood that they will reach chronological adulthood with no experience at or comfort with being bored and/or alone with their thoughts. Another way of phrasing this problem is that, essentially, they will never actually grow up.

In the popular conception of how technological "advances" unfold, there is a narrative arc in which the "shortcomings" of something people use today are recognized by some inventor or company and then addressed in a new product offering, which in turn will only sell if consumers—who many economists still laughably insist usually act in their own rational self-interest—see it as responding to their needs. It is possible to list all sorts of "downsides" to landline phones that first cell phones and then smart phones "addressed," but increasingly I see many of these not as downsides but benefits, at least when compared to the state of things today.

Yes, it is easier to reach someone directly today, using a smart phone, than it was in the 1980s, when the choices were limited to phone calls and maybe faxes. On the other hand, was it such a bad thing when kids trying to call each other might end up speaking, however briefly, to their friends' parents, who might be the ones to answer the call? You can learn a lot simply from how a teenager asks to speak to another teenager in your household, I would imagine, not to mention the opportunities such serendipitous contacts pose for actually getting to know your children's friends, one small nibble at a time.

Yes, it is more "convenient" (although this should be a definite reach-for-one's-revolver word, at least when heard from marketers) when all the members of a household have their own phones, but on the other hand a single landline line at least limited overuse. I remember a point in high school when I was having girlfriend trouble and my father, who worked at home and needed access to our phone as well, finally had enough of my hours-long telephonic colloquies on this subject and put his foot down. And so, yes, I did end up going to a payphone down the street from our house more than once as a result, but I would say this was a better option than being able to sit in my room and just endlessly text about things throughout the night. At least I had the chance, in between walks down to the payphone, to think about what I wanted to say, at least my quarter didn't last forever, and at least talking in semi-public forced me to think a little about how I wanted to present myself.

Speaking of infantilization and what seems the growing unlikelihood that the United States will ever again produce a generation of adults, let's not overlook how, as children grow into teenagers and—one prays— eventually leave for college or otherwise move out, modern digital tools encourage way too much communication between them and their parents. It is hard to imagine any parents of college students in the 1980s or 1990s thinking that, having finally gotten their houses back, what they really wanted to do was not start having sex on the kitchen table again but rather exchange little messages with their supposedly almost grown children throughout the day.

In retrospect, one of the most "educational" aspects of my first college stint, which took the classic form of residential student-hood on a campus a day's drive from home, was that—down to both inconvenience and cost—I hardly ever spoke to my parents or anyone else who wasn't actually on that campus with me. It's not that I never turned to my parents for help or advice, but I was perforce selective about when I chose to do so. Sometimes I even did it not with a phone call but a letter, which gave me time to better reflect not only on what I was asking but—while waiting for a reply—sometimes gave me time to devise my own solutions.

I realize all of this sounds like nothing more than a totally boring middle-ager's standard-issue complaints that things were better when I was a kid, and I realize that what follows is not original to me and might even be old news to many of you, but it bears repeating that just because 2021 comes after 1985 in the calendar doesn't mean everything now is better than it was then and that we are all the beneficiaries of some nebulous thing called "progress" that automatically unfolds as time goes by.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that humanity's march is ever onward and upward, but there is actually no such thing as "humanity" and just because new gadgets and apps are being invented all the time doesn't mean we really need or ever even wanted any of them.

For an example, consider Amazon, which likes to boast that it is "laser focused on its customers' needs." This isn't a lie, but "customer needs" is a term of business art in this context and doesn't carry the meaning that the dictionary definition of "need" would lead one to expect. When companies like Amazon talk about responding to customer needs, they aren't referring to conscious, explicitly expressed desires on the part of their customers. If they were, it would be a lot easier to understand Amazon charges on one's credit card statements. "Customer needs," in this context, are better understood as opportunities, increasingly discovered through the use of massively powerful artificial intelligence tools operating on huge amounts of customer data, to sell us more than we would otherwise consciously decide to buy. As the old joke goes, if a customer leaves your shoe store carrying only the laces he came in planning to buy, you haven't sold him a goddamn thing, and no one realized they smelled bad without deodorant until they were informed of this fact by the inventor of deodorant.

Way back in the 1980s, how many mentally healthy parents of college students found themselves longing to be able to continue communicating with and micromanaging them throughout the livelong day? What child, cracking wise and giddy with a friend on the upstairs hall phone—its cord stretched to its limit to reach under her closed bedroom door—found herself thinking that her "user experience" would be improved if only she could see her friend and apply image-warping "filters" and silly stickers to their video images? Can we really say we "needed" any of this?

In the way of such things, we did not realize how wonderfully simple and essentially unimprovable landline phones were until they were gone. It never occurred to us to worry that they might go away—that an age might come when we would have actual dozens of other options for communicating but would do everything we could to avoid simply talking. How can it be that, with so many tools for connecting, so many of us feel so alone?