It is tempting to step into the trap

Maybe this’ll be weird to hear, but I’ve got shit music taste. I listen to the same stuff I’ve always listened to, with little variation, and always tend to gravitate toward pretentious British math rock bands with New Wave vibes, or American guys who sing in fake British accents, or Brooklyn indie pop you might hear in a twee Zooey Deschanel rom-com. As a result, I don’t really listen to music all that much. Or I didn’t. Then I noticed that a big part of the reason I dragged my iPhone out of the house with me was to ostensibly use it for a music player, only to end up distracted. There’s also the Maps capacity, but even before I started my *Gwyneth Paltrow voice* journey out of the attention economy, I’d been asking myself: what is the cost of convenience?

I’ve got a… history, with my iPhone’s GPS. There was that time, four years ago now, when I got lost in the Poconos on my way home from New York City. I was driving up to Ithaca in the middle of the night when my phone told me to take the next off-ramp. Take it, now. Once I took the offramp, I found myself in a foggy landscape, dimly lit by yellow streetlights, with tall, tall grass and shambling, abandoned barns, about a football yard away from dark clapboard houses. 

Suddenly, my Maps app went from a real-time flat color illustration of my surroundings to a grey smear with a grid of white lines. Alarmed, I realized I’d become so dependent on my phone’s turn-by-turn directions, on my own arrow in the dark of my virtual world, that I had absolutely no clue how to get back on the highway. 

Eventually, I did end up on a highway, not the highway, but a highway, only I was the only car there. The mist was so thick, I could barely see forty feet ahead of me. Then there was a lit flare, and another, and another. Cops put these down when there’s been an accident, so I slowed down to give the flares a wide berth. Instead of an accident, however, I saw a single cop car—small, not one of those newer, militarized cop cars, but a classic small car from an older TV show—with a single cop, pulling and lighting flares, throwing them as far as he could. I passed him slowly. He did not acknowledge me. I tracked the flares. They formed an oblong shape around, well. Something.

When I got home (and I did get home, no thanks to my phone) I described what I’d seen within the flares as “a small, nude, broad-shouldered child, with pointed ears, mottled, grey skin, and its eyes on the sky.” I wrack my brain now, looking for more detail, but it’s just a memory of a memory of a memory. I see the little body, standing bowlegged, and the frightened cop with his hair glowing golden in his own lights. I see the flares, hear their hiss. And I see the wet, glittering road, the mist finally dying down. As it turned out, I drove all the way through Dryden, where I would later go to college and, even later still, another friend would warn me about, in the throes of a bad trip. “Dryden isn’t real,” they texted me.

The author shortly after the Dryden incident

When I was a little girl, I walked and rode the length of my small town by memory. We had all these bike paths leading from my house, through the middle and high school campuses, into the woods and past Marshfield Clinic, where you could ride all the way to the library’s new, inconvenient, and beautiful location. I walked from my house near the daycare to my crush’s house by the pond, without ever leaving the same street. If I wanted to get to my other friends’ houses, I needed only to hop from one street to another. And then, of course, there was Main Street, a one-way that was exactly what it purported to be. Everything was just right there. 

Before I get too nostalgic for the recent past, hit all the normal bragging bingo boxes (I was socially active, I was a voracious reader, I had an attention span), I have to give a few caveats. First, I was already nursing a few internet addictions: fanfiction the foremost, with ASMR a close second, and Tumblr the omnipresent throughline. Luckily, I’d had a few bad encounters with porn already, and didn’t seek it out as a result. My adrenal glands tuned themselves instead to the lesbian grad student in Milwaukee I was Tumblr mutuals with, who, when I was fifteen, begged me to come down and make out with them. To the suicidal blond guy, ten years my senior, who imprinted on me and ruined my mutuals-only Supernatural watch party. To the two versions of me that walked through the world: the bubbly, popular girl who, in Junior year, got voted onto prom court, and the antisocial, moody brat who wanted nothing more than to be the main character. 

But where was I?

Oh, yeah. The music.

When Ozzy Osbourne died, one of my partners went into the stairwell at their workplace and cried. They then set about trying to learn Ozzy’s guitar tune, “Dee,” which they’ve been practicing every night after work. As I was writing this, they found a blister from how much they’ve been playing “Dee.” I wish I could love a musician, or indeed, any public figure, as much as they love Ozzy. 

Driving around, I normally listen to WTMD. It’s our commercial-free music station, which plays the most fascinating blend of all my favorite songs since forever, new songs I’m glad to hear, and then, memorably, the worst songs I’ve heard all year. For the few times when I’m out of WTMD’s range, I impulse bought an MP3 player off Facebook Marketplace. This particular MP3 player is, I found out recently, colloquially referred to on TikTok as a “Purse Kindle.” It’s cheap plastic garbage that runs Android 8 or 9 and goes by Oilsky or INNIOASIS or whatever else repulsive names the factories that spit these out can invent. Mine’s the Oilsky M303 Pro. It looks like someone tried to draw a 2012 iPod from memory. It came with a protective transparent silicone case, which I discovered has its own niche Etsy demographic, pretty much exclusively girls on BookTok who buy cardboard inserts to decorate their Purse Kindles that say things like “Tall, dark, and morally bankrupt” or “be quiet, I’m reading.”

Michelangelo’s David holding the MP3 player / “Purse Kindle”

My cardboard insert was a DIY hack job. There’s a handful of postcards on my bedroom floor (yeah, still, even as I write this) that are black ink illustrations on plain white backgrounds, ugly-on-purpose toons that read “Be safe because I fucking love you” and “I wish I could pull the sadness out of you like this.” The postcard I cut up and put in my Purse Kindle case is a picture of a bare foot next to an open bear trap. The text reads “It is tempting to step into the trap.”

The Purse Kindle (I’m sorry, I’m not gonna keep saying or typing “Oilsky.” It’s doing to me what the word “moist” does to millennials) was the catalyst for my abandoning of my iPhone. It came with Apple Music already preloaded, plus a HiFi audio interface I can load with my music library. I do own some tunes, still, though I mourn, always, the music I lost when I wiped the old laptop I bought with my graduation money. I keep wanting to go back in time and tell that asshole to yank all that music off the hard drive and move it to an external hard drive. That in a couple years, sooner than I think, I won’t own anything and will be buying up other people’s secondhand junk to trick myself into thinking I can still go back to the way things were.

Screenshot from Patient Zero: Tachycardia, forthcoming from the filmmakers