I didn’t have power for three nights the other week because of a storm. Three nights, two days, like a vacation, kind of. When I was in college in Florida we used to use school cancellations caused by hurricanes as the occasions for parties where we drank hurricanes and, you know, that was never really right, even if cheap rum and fruit juice are a pretty foolproof combo, and so maybe it’s not right to call a power outage caused by a destructive storm that downed trees and ripped away the roofs of people’s homes a vacation but still, it felt like one, kind of, after the damage had been done. It’s probably not right to call it a vacation, but I guess it’s not any worse than getting drunk in the shallow end of a swimming pool with your friends on Memorial Day after you’ve gotten your power back without once thinking about the fact that your country is involved in wars in which people are suffering and dying in horrible and painful ways, which is another thing I did last weekend and enjoyed. From the edge of the pool, I texted with a friend who had left our party and gone to another one across town and when at the end of a message I typed “haha” by swiping my finger over the screen in a proprietary digital shorthand called Swype which has become an subconscious gesture for me, a muscle memory, my phone autocorrected it to “baghdad.” This particular auto-typo happens often enough that, without really thinking about it, I deleted the baghdad and retyped my laughter manually; my message then went through successfully, whatever it was I was trying to say, I don’t really remember, to be honest.

The power went out on the Wednesday evening before Memorial Day during a strong summer storm which the local paper the next morning would classify in a subhead as severe but, officially, “not a tornado.” That evening, five tornado warning alerts and four cancellations to those alerts were e-mailed to me automatically from a server somewhere at my school; in the lead-up to the “not a tornado,” there had been so many alerts and seemingly so little actual cause for alert that I had put my phone on silent because the constant beeps and buzzes were distracting me from the TV show I was trying to watch. When the storm finally eventually crashed in and the power cut out, my girlfriend and I were curled together on the couch under a fleece blanket in the air conditioning in the middle of watching the second episode of Game of Thrones, that HBO show about warring kingdoms and dragon eggs and non-consensual rear-entry sex. I wasn’t sure about starting the show because I’m not really into that kind of fantasy but we’ve been trying to find more TV shows to watch lately because we don’t like many of the same TV shows and the few that we used to watch together ended their seasons recently and so we need new ones, ones we can watch together. We’re both writers so we spend a lot of time reading books and magazines together but it’s not same as watching TV together because we’re not experiencing the same thing at the same time, we’re each in our own distinct literary worlds and so in some way we’re disconnected. It’s almost illicit, sometimes, like cheating in the same room as the person you’re cheating on; even though we’re on the same couch, her feet in my lap, it’s as if I’m in Oaxaca getting high with Geoff Dyer while Anne Carson whispers into her ear about eros and the nature of desire.

Early last week, in a post below this one on the page, I wrote about thinking about hiding in the bathtub during another storm which might have been a tornado but turned out to be not a tornado but the truth is that back then I didn’t actually think about it in that moment, I wasn’t actually scared, that was just something I thought of after the fact when I was word processing and added to heighten the drama of the post, to make a minute into a moment, whereas on Wednesday night when the apartment went black and hail slammed sideways into the windows like bullets, we ran fast into the bathroom and slammed the door and sat down in the basin pantsless, our asses damp. There was no light in there; all we had were our cell phones and unless we rubbed their screens with our fingers to remind them of our presence, they would time out after thirty seconds and go dark in order to keep themselves from dying. This state of affairs left us in complete darkness too often for comfort, so I crept out into the flashing and crashing of the living room and grabbed my laptop, which was the only other working light source I could find. Back in the tub, I opened the computer and stroked the touchpad to wake it up; it blinked and then glowed and we could see each other’s faces. The building rumbled around our little room; the peals of thunder were so unnaturally long it was like someone had timestretched them in a digital audio workstation. Something hit the roof and the small towel she wraps around her head after showering fell off the rack onto the floor.

We didn’t yet know that it was not a tornado which had cut the power and shaken the building and was making these horrible noises around us and we had seen on the Internet the pictures and videos of the places taken apart by tornadoes lately and in that moment we were both kind of afraid we were going to die, maybe, and not quite sure of what to do about it, if there was anything we could do about it. As we sat there in paralyzed terror, listening to the storm and waiting for something bad to happen, I eventually had the idea that maybe, instead of just using the laptop as a source of light, we should to try to use it to distract ourselves. It was open there in front of us, after all, just waiting to be tapped and clicked. Every tool has its uses and my laptop’s primary use often seems to be to distract me from whatever thing it is I want or need to do on it by presenting me with the possibility to do an exponential number of other things I might want or need to do. I often think of this as a problem, as something that makes my life worse or at least more difficult by getting in the way of the “work” I want to do, and I try to combat it by doing things like writing and reading things on paper, by following popular blogs about how to hack my life into more efficient routines and subroutines, and by using programs which shut down the more appealing and likable features of my computer in order to help me focus on the boring ones like the “distraction free” word processor that I’m writing this in right now.

As the two of us sat there wondering if the roof was going to be torn off above our heads, though, the attention deficit enabled or created by my laptop suddenly seemed like it was a good thing, a bit of luck; not a bug, as they say, but a feature. In your everyday life, when you have a list of things that you have to accomplish either for work or for “work,” distraction is a problem, but when you’re feeling like there is a possibility that you may die or some other horrible thought and that thought overwhelms all other thoughts in your head and all you want to do is find a way to stop thinking that thought, to push past it for a moment, distraction can be a balm. There are limits to distraction’s medicinal qualities, of course; when, in the past, I was alone in the dark and my anxiety caused insomnia, I listened to podcasts and audiobooks and recorded radio shows on my MP3 player in the hope that they would help me sleep, but, as it turns out, if mental illness is creating an echo chamber of stress and self-doubt in your head, adding more voices to it is not really helpful, especially if those voices are David Foster Wallace and Spalding Gray and someone reading The Trial in a clipped British accent. During the storm, though, it was different, kind of; I was anxious but there was a fairly rational reason for my anxiety, which was that we were stranded in my bathroom and the world was being torn apart outside and there was nothing we could do about it, no way to act. Maybe, I thought, despite our powerlessness, we could be made a little less afraid because of the fact that we had the laptop, a veritable Swiss army knife of distraction, open on the ledge of the tub, glowing.

There was no Internet, though, no Tumblr and no Twitter and no YouTube, which are the first places anyone I know goes for the kind of aimless grazing that most easily numbs the contemporary consciousness. I opened my iTunes and started playing some Billie Holiday (I have the ten disc Columbia box set on my hard drive, 320 kbps) but my girlfriend didn’t find the bleat and honk of her voice comforting. I tried playing a Britney Spears track from her new album, a song which I knew my girlfriend liked, but it is hard, I found, to soundtrack a natural disaster; against the rumbles of thunder and the storm sirens blaring outside, my laptop speakers sounded tinny and weak, all my playlists played out.

Listening to music, even good music, was too passive an activity; we needed something more involving, something we could do in order to feel like we had some kind of agency, maybe, and so we decided, ultimately, to play a video game. Actually, I decided we should play a video game because of the aforementioned reasons and she humored me and went along with it, but whatever, we ended up playing one all the same. We both like playing video games but we’ve found that we each like playing different kinds of video games and so lately we’ve been trying to find one that we both might like, one we can play together at the same time while sitting on the couch after dinner and finishing our glasses of wine. When the storm hit, we still hadn’t found one, though, and I only had one game on my hard drive, one she hadn’t played before and I hadn’t played in months, this thing called Minecraft.

In Minecraft, you wake up in the middle of the wilderness at high noon and you’re all alone. You have nothing but your bare hands and the world around you with which to survive. Soon it will be dark and the night is dangerous and so, before then, in order to make it to the next day, you have to build a shelter. To do this, you start by pulling down the trees around you with your bare hands. The graphics are angular and simple; the harvested tree segments form boxy logs which you collect in piles in your inventory. From the logs, you can make boards and from the boards you can make sticks and from the boards and the sticks you can make a number of simple tools, picks and axes and shovels and ladders, the things you need to use to save yourself from death. Time is accelerated in the game and by the time you’ve stripped the landscape of enough wood and done the work you need to do to make these tools, the virtual sun is fading and you have just enough light left to carve out a small shelter for yourself and wait for the next day to begin. When it does, you go out and gather more supplies — wood, sand, stone, gold, coal, clay, dirt, mushrooms, animal flesh — and begin to build a new life from the land. As a simulation of life, as an open world experience, the game is simplistic and cartoonish and it gets old quickly enough, but when you first start playing, it feels weirdly empowering. There’s a sense of accomplishment, however illusory and artificial, in gaining mastery over your surroundings, in finding a way to survive in the digital wilderness.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. The problem with playing the game during the storm was that my girlfriend was awkward and slow at simultaneously using the W,A,S, and D keys to move around in the environment and the touchpad to turn our avatar’s head and look at things and also it had been so long since I had last played the game that I had forgotten the specific ways in which you combined the boards and sticks to make the tools you needed to make a shelter and so we couldn’t make one and by the time the sun slipped behind the horizon, we were nowhere, we had accomplished nothing, really. We had all this wood that we had harvested, a whole torn-down forest, but all the logs were just waste products that we couldn’t do anything with. Minecraft is best known on the Internet for the elaborate castles and forts and tree houses that people build with resources that they have painstakingly cleared and mined from the virtual earth in its game world, but we didn’t really build anything in our game, we just wandered around aimlessly and tore stuff down. When it got dark in the game world, before our character died of exposure or was killed by a wild animal, I closed the window and then we sat in the tub in the real dark for the rest of the storm, talking and refreshing the weather radar on our phones and listening to the wind.

The screaming sound faded out eventually and when the radar seemed relatively clear, we left the bathroom and, after surveying the rest of the apartment to make sure there was no damage, got into bed. It was nice, kind of, because with all the power out, there were no streetlights and so my bedroom was actually well and truly dark for once and if it hadn’t been so cloudy out we probably could’ve seen stars through the window. It was only about ten then, which is a bit earlier than we normally go to bed, and we were still pretty wired up and adrenalized from the storm, so, to pass the time and calm us down and commemorate the experience through a variation from our normal nightly routine, we read the first few chapters of Winnie the Pooh to each other with a small flashlight. I had found the flashlight and the book under my bed after having shoved them there a few months before; I had the flashlight because my mother had bought it for me when I moved into this apartment last year, to have in case of an emergency like this, and I had a copy of Winnie the Pooh, my own childhood copy, actually, because I had tried and failed to write an essay about it a few months before, about how reading the stories teaches children a really horrible lesson, that you can be lazy and greedy and selfish and stupid (as Pooh is) and that it doesn’t matter, that no matter what trouble you get yourself into everything will all work out okay in the end anyway because you are loved by someone else and that love, from Christopher Robin or Piglet or the unnamed narrator of the stories, is powerful enough to redeem all your awful qualities, to save you.

It wasn’t a very fun essay to write and eventually I gave up; I’ve found that I’m most happy as a writer when I’m recording and reporting narrative and detail in order to create some kind of indescribable feeling for the reader, that writing makes me least happy when I’m trying to prove something to someone, to make an argument, to persuade. I can’t really decide with much constancy or certainty what my own positions are on most things in the world today and so it seems wrong for me to tell other people how they should live, what they should think about stuff. The problem I’ve found with this position, though, is that even if I start an essay just trying to describe some simple lived experience of mine, like reading my childhood copy of Winnie the Pooh aloud to my girlfriend during the aftermath of a storm, I have this subconscious tendency to keep reaching out from those details or that story toward something larger, to try to find a pattern or a metaphorical hyperlink to something else in the world, and then I do it again and again and that leads me eventually to subconsciously start writing the kind of argumentative thing that I’m not happy writing, the thing I didn’t want to write in the first place and that I don’t even believe in, and then suddenly it is thousands of words later and there are fifteen tabs open in my browser and my eyes ache from over-focusing and all I have is a dense mess of sentences in my word processor, clogging the blades and keeping the motor from running.

And anyway all that is beside the point because, despite all of the problems I supposedly have with Winnie the Pooh as moral fiction, reading it aloud and having it read aloud to me in the soft halo of the little flashlight my mother gave me for emergencies was sweet and comforting and, after a few chapters, put us both gently to sleep, the book dog-eared beside my pillow, and this would be a nice neat ending to this particular part of the narrative except shortly after we fell asleep, something else fell outside, there was a loud noise and more wind and the sound of an ambulance in the distance. I live on the same road as the hospital, a few blocks away, and though the streetlights were still out, someone had put a pair of red road flares at the next intersection. Because of some kind of damage to the road in the distance, something we couldn’t see, cars kept pulling into our parking lot to turn around and go back the other way and every time they did, the ceiling of the bedroom filled with their high beams. We couldn’t sleep and we didn’t want to read anymore, but we had to do something. We were both naked and touching and we could’ve had sex, I guess, but despite what everybody says when you ask them what they’d do if the world was about to end, feeling afraid of dying from flying glass and debris and winds that could rip off your limbs is really not that much of a turn on, in my experience.

So instead of having sex we played Angry Birds: Rio on my cellphone, which had around 30% of its battery left at that point in the night because I had forgotten to charge it after dinner. Angry Birds: Rio is a sequel to the original Angry Birds, and, I’m finding out now, is a promotional tie-in for some animated movie called Rio but I had played for weeks without knowing I was being advertised to and so I guess it’s not that successful as a work of branding but it is as a fun little game to play when you have some time to kill. My girlfriend had never played Angry Birds before but it’s a casual game and so it was easy for me to teach her how it worked. The plot is simple: the titular birds are angry at a clan of pigs who have stolen all their eggs, but for some reason which is not ever explained, the birds are wingless and thus can’t fly on their own. You, as the player, help to redistribute the wealth by shooting the birds out of slingshots at the evil pigs in order to bring down their (power) structures and kill them and get the eggs back. Angry Birds: Rio replaces the pigs with monkeys, which blunts somewhat the social satire of killing the fat greedy pigs who hoard resources that they didn’t create, but then Angry Birds has sold more than twelve million copies from the App Store in less than a year and its Wikipedia page quotes a review that describes it as “one of the most mainstream games out there right now” so I guess that satire isn’t very strong, anyway, if it exists at all. Not that it matters; the game is both intense and relaxing, like all my favorite drugs, and though there are enough levels in Rio and the other editions that we probably could’ve continued playing until the sun rose, we only played for like an hour until the screen of my phone flashed a warning about needing to be plugged into its charger and then I turned it off and we slept.

The next day of our powerlessness passed easily enough; we roamed through the surrounding carnage in shorts and sandals and, though my phone had died overnight, my girlfriend took pictures with hers of the splintered limbs and broken boughs around the neighborhood, framing them carefully in her viewfinder for the best angle and exposure. It was a sunny day and so we wore sunglasses and strolled. She called in to her office and said she wouldn’t be able to make it to work, which, because of summer Fridays and Memorial Day, meant she had a five day weekend ahead of her; I have no office except for the Microsoft program suite in the dead laptop on my coffee table and was responsible to no one except the people who follow me on the Internet, so I was “off” too. Instead of working, then, we read books, we rode bikes, we ate at Wendy’s; for lunch, I had a sandwich called the Baconator which was nowhere near as appetizing as it looked in the beautifully lit photo on the menu board, a disappointment I had expected but a disappointment nonetheless. It was a sandwich for people who don’t just dislike the presence of vegetables, but reject the concept entirely. From the parking lot, I used her phone to call the power company’s automated customer service number; a canned computer voice told me that power was expected to be returned to my service area by 11 PM on Saturday; it was Thursday afternoon. We passed a certain amount of time after the call discussing whether or not we should clear the spoiled food out of my refrigerator; we thought it might be best to go ahead and get it out of the way before it became any more rancid but decided to wait, based on the theory that whatever horrible smells must have already permeated the interior might fade somewhat once power had returned and the refrigerator had re-cooled.

Early that evening, before the sun went down, we walked to the grocery store closest to my apartment, which had been closed that morning but had gotten its power back in the early afternoon, and tried to buy another flashlight. I had the one flashlight and we had bought some extra batteries for it but we wanted to get another one so that we could each read our own books and magazines when it got dark, so we didn’t have to share and read aloud anymore, and so we went to the grocery store. The grocery store didn’t have any flashlights, though, because people who were smarter and more responsible than us had already bought them. We strolled up and down the cool fluorescent aisles, trying to find consumer products with lights in them which might substitute for flashlights, which would be bright enough to read a book or small literary magazine by. It started as a fairly serious search but quickly degenerated into a silly ramble involving Helman’s Light Mayonnaise and Crystal Light. We ended up leaving the store with a handful of candles: a Virgen de Guadalupe from the ethnic foods aisle, a vanilla scented citronella, and a discounted box of white tea lights, which we put into a glass baking dish when we got home and called a light pie. We also bought a jug of cheap spiced rum with a picture of an eye-patched pirate captain on the label (we were on vacation, after all).

I had the idea that night, after a couple of drinks, that I was going to write by candlelight about the storm, about the experience of writing by candlelight after a storm and drinking warm rum mixed with Diet Sprite and being addicted to technology and being withdrawn from it by natural forces beyond my control and also maybe about that New Yorker article I had read a while ago by Jonathan Franzen about going to a desert island and being addicted to technology and being withdrawn from it and reading Robinson Crusoe and being sad about David Foster Wallace’s death and birds and et cetera. I wanted to write about the article even though it was published eons ago in Internet time and nobody cared about it anymore because I wanted to respond to this Tumblr post I had read around the time of its publication which had criticized the article for the way Franzen had represented certain things about his experience on the island with the birds. I wanted to respond to the post in part because I thought the critic was being needlessly harsh but, really, maybe he had or has a point, I don’t know, and I guess if I’m being honest with myself, which means being honest with you, whatever that means, the main reason I wanted to defend Jonathan Franzen is because I like him a lot and I didn’t want people to say mean things about him. For some reason, I found, this person on the Internet saying mean things about Jonathan Franzen, justified or not, hurt me, personally, and I guess this is because I like him, I can’t think of any other good reason why.

I first started liking Jonathan Franzen almost exactly two summers ago, on June 4th, 2009. I know the date because I wrote a blog post that day called “mr. difficult” and it’s still archived in the place I put it on the Internet, a record of the person and writer I was at the time. In the post, I describe how I was surprised, given my fairly negative idea then of who Jonathan Franzen was, given the fact that I thought I disliked him, to find that I really liked reading “Good Neighbors,” an excerpt of Freedom which had just been published in the New Yorker that week. My post is written as a single 1,400 word long sentence (a stylistic decision sure to attract lots of readers, I thought!) and has, in retrospect, an unfortunate conclusion in which I awkwardly segue from my appreciation of “Good Neighbors” into a brief discussion of the zeitgeisty reality TV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. That June, I was trying to write and publish as many posts as possible about that show, in which a group of “celebrities” like Heidi Montag and Stephen Baldwin and Lou Diamond Phillips were “stranded” on a “desert island” in the Caribbean. It wasn’t really that great of a show and I knew that even then but I was writing about it because all I ever wrote about then was reality television, because that was all I really knew how to write about and all I knew how to get anyone to read. I wrote about reality television because I figured back then that if I just wrote about myself and my own experiences, no one would care because I was just a normal person and my life was boring and unspecial, unlike the people on the reality television shows, whose normal lives had been made into something else by the attention paid to them. I wasn’t even interested in my own experience, to be honest, and so why would anyone else be, I figured.

I started liking Jonathan Franzen back then and then I began to like him a lot more last summer when I moved to a small town in the Midwest where I knew no one and found myself feeling both physically and emotionally landlocked. One thing I did in order to try to not feel that way was to read The Corrections and Freedom back to back in a self-indulgent binge of literary pleasure. Reading Freedom in the early fall of 2010 probably made me feel more connected to the culture, whatever that is, but, really, mostly it made me feel more connected to Jonathan Franzen and the characters he had created. So, long story long, I liked Jonathan Franzen for those reasons and some other ones which maybe I’ll get to eventually and so when, before I had even gotten around to reading the article he had written in the New Yorker about the desert island and the effects of being withdrawn from technology and birds, I read this post on Tumblr, entitled “The Hateful Jonathan Franzen,” I got angry. When I read it, I wanted to defend Franzen somehow, even though as a writer I don’t really like arguing all that much and I don’t think I’m very good at it and maybe the critic had a point, I don’t know. The Tumblr critic pointed out that one of the islands Franzen had stayed on during his trip had been ripped apart by a tsunami a year before Franzen did his little bit of literary adventure tourism and that Franzen didn’t even notice it and that this, in addition to the way Franzen rendered his personal understanding of his friend David Foster Wallace’s suicide, was further proof of what a horrible writer and human being Franzen was and how he was “boorish and narcissistic” and “worthy of unalloyed hatred” and et cetera. Maybe that’s an uncharitable paraphrase of the critic’s argument, but then his post was filled with uncharitable paraphrases of Franzen and so I don’t feel as bad about it as perhaps I should.

And anyway, I’m not sure about the argument either, as if just because you don’t write about something means that you don’t notice it. I mean, I think the critic has a point, to some extent, but then I noticed a lot of things lately and I don’t know that I should mention them here, whether they have a place in this essay, if you can even call it an essay (if essay means “to try” then I guess it counts, I guess there’s room, but there have to be limits, right?). Should I have, instead of going on earlier about the mechanics of Minecraft and Angry Birds, offered some factual details about the people in my town who were displaced and injured in our storm, the ones who had their roofs torn off and their barns destroyed and their yards torn apart, those for whom the storm wasn’t a vacation but the occasion for hardship and suffering? Should I mention, instead of describing how a Baconator tastes or what I choose to mix with my Captain Morgan, the fact that Joplin, Missouri suffered exponentially worse storm damage than we did here in my town, that, unlike in our storm, which, again, was not even a real tornado, people died there, real human people with families and feelings? Should I note the much more local (to me, at least) fact that when we came out of the bathroom the first night and looked outside, we saw that the back windshield of my girlfriend’s car had been shattered by a fallen tree and when we took it to be repaired the next day, it cost her almost a month’s salary? Should I temper the pathos of that anecdote by mentioning that both of us are students in a fully funded graduate creative writing program, in order to make clear my awareness, in whatever small sense, of our privilege? Is there a litany of things I should self-consciously invoke in order to be considered a good person, even if those things feel somewhat extraneous and tangential to what I set out to write here in the first place? I already mentioned Memorial Day and the troops and everything, but should I mention something I noticed just a minute ago here at the computer, which is the weird blank neutral way that its Wikipedia entry describes how Memorial Day, which “began as a ritual of remembrance and reconciliation after the Civil War,” evolved, by the early twentieth century, into “an occasion for more general expressions of memory,” and then “became a long weekend increasingly devoted to shopping, family get-togethers, fireworks, trips to the beach, and national media events.” I don’t know, I mean, I’m aware of all those things, I noticed them and I felt things in response to them, but just because you notice something and feel something doesn’t mean that if you’re a writer those noticings and feelings fit into the form of what you’re trying to say. Even in prose as digressive and hysterical as my own, there have to be limits, you can only get so much information into the words and so many words into the work.

Anyway, to at least try to get back towards the narrative, I didn’t end up writing the post about Franzen and candlelight and the way in which the form of the essay is like a kitchen-sized trash bag and this was in part because, like I said, I don’t like writing that kind of post because it never makes me happy to argue about things and in part because I was reading a good novel which I liked a lot and I wanted to keep reading someone else’s words instead of trying to write my own but really actually mostly to be perfectly honest I didn’t end up writing it for the simple physical reason that it’s pretty hard to write by candlelight. Have you ever actually tried to do that? Maybe I just have bad eyes, but I found it nearly impossible. On Game of Thrones, the candles in the castles flame as if their wicks are knitted from flash paper (maybe they are) and in Minecraft, the polygonal torches you make from sticks and mined coal burn eternal, never needing more fuel, and maybe back when candles were made of the rendered fat of dead animals instead of paraffin wax, people could read and write by candlelight every night, but for me, now, to be able to read with my Mexican virgin candle, the brightest one in the house, I had to hold it directly against my issue of the New Yorker and even then I could only see one paragraph at a time; the flickering beam was wide enough, at best, to cover a single column of text. Reading in this way was hard enough and so I didn’t even bother trying to write.

We spent the last day of our vacation from power in a kind of serene peace; we had still been experiencing withdrawal symptoms the previous day, but, by Friday, it felt like were on the other side, that the electricity had left our bodies and we had reconnected with nature’s energy sources or some other kind of hippie bullshit like that, I don’t know. To put it in terms I understand and maybe you do too, it was as though the pollen filling the air had been replaced with a low dose of Xanax crumbled into breathable dust. I’ve never been a napper but after lunch that day I took a nap with her for the first time I can remember since childhood and it felt amazing to wake up in the middle of afternoon, surrounded by warmth and light. By the fall of our third night, we had been shopping and were well prepared for what awaited us; we had found another flashlight, one which had straps on it like a miner’s helmet and an LED beam as strong as fifty candles. We had bought crackers and cheese and apples, a plastic bottle of piña colada mix and a bag of ice to put in the sink; the ice would melt and be wasted by midnight, but in the meantime we would have cold tropical drinks and that was worth a dollar, we figured. When it got dark, we lit the candles and read with our flashlights and fooled around on the couch; she had an old Polaroid camera and a few frames of film and we took blurry, underexposed pictures of each other to remember the day, the time we had spent together, how special it had been.

Just after ten, as we sat on the floor slowly pouring the candle wax onto things and watching it harden, the room filled with light and the air conditioner shuddered back on, breaking the silence. We were so happy that we went around the apartment, turning things on and off for the sheer novelty of it. I went into the windowless bathroom, which had been pitch black since the storm, and could see myself in the mirror there, the stubble on my face. I plugged my laptop into the charger back in the living room and said that this was great, that now we didn’t have to read any more tonight, we could watch a movie or something, and then she kissed me and I forgot about the movie and we went in the bedroom and had sex with the windows open to let in the breeze and the orange glow of the streetlights and then fell asleep with the window still open and when we woke up the next morning, I didn’t even plug in my cell phone or check my Google Reader or e-mail, which are the first things I do most mornings, because I had decided I didn’t want it to be over yet, I wanted to just stay like that with her for as long as I could. I stretched my vacation from power out through the rest of the weekend and into Memorial Day and it was pretty great but it couldn’t last forever, no vacation can, and so now I’m back here, reducing my life expectancy (according to a study that someone I follow reblogged) by sitting down all day, all week, in one place, leaning over this screen.

This is not a statement about technology, against or for or whatever. I don’t want this to be a statement about anything besides this is the last week or so of my life and the stuff I have been doing and reading and feeling and thinking about lately and here you go. On Tuesday morning, when I reentered the world, I read that Jonathan Franzen op-ed, which is titled both “Liking is for Cowards. Go for what Hurts” and the more dumbed-down and web-friendly Times What’s Popular Now alternate headline, “Technology Provides An Alternative To Love.” The op-ed, which I am assuming you have read already or had digested for you by your feed of choice and so don’t need this stupid precis I am half-heartedly doing here, is a version of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in late May. I read the op-ed and then listened to an MP3 recording of the speech and, even though I really like Jonathan Franzen a lot, even though Freedom was one of my favorite books last year, I didn’t really like the speech that much. I don’t have Facebook and nobody I follow on Tumblr posted it as far as I saw, so I didn’t get a chance to not “like” it, but still, inside my brain, I didn’t really like it very much.

Maybe that’s not Jonathan Franzen’s fault, though. To be honest, I don’t know why people ask novelists to do things like give commencement speeches and I don’t know why novelists choose to ever do them. Modern novels come in many different shapes and forms and can do a lot of different things and let’s not get into Status and Contract and all that business all over again, but I think personally I like them best for the ways in which they can render in microcosm the immense complexity and rich texture of contemporary experience. Commencement speeches, though, tend to be detail-poor, composed of, as David Foster Wallace self-consciously described in his own Kenyon commencement speech from several years ago, before he died, “didactic little parable-ish stories” and “banal platitudes.” People don’t remember that part of his speech though, the self-conscious bet-hedging; what people remember is that at the end of the speech he said “this is water” several times and it was really powerful and inspiring and doesn’t it make you think about your life and how you’re living it. My girlfriend’s dad is a pastor for whom English is a second language and the other night after we watched another episode of Game of Thrones and ate the apple cobbler she had made hot out of the oven, he e-mailed her a sermon to copy-edit. I didn’t read it, but over her shoulder in bed, I saw the title, which was, in large bold type, “DON’T STOP BELIEVING.” Almost all commencement speeches are simple variations on this same theme: they’re secular sermons delivered to a convocation of robed disciples about to be released from the cloisters of academe into the rough and complicated world outside.

The best novels aren’t reducible to simple arguments or messages like this, though; if you can describe in a sentence or a paragraph or an op-ed what a novel “means,” what it’s “trying to say,” then I bet it’s not a very good novel, it’s just the literary equivalent of a sermon or a song by Journey. A great novel is great because maybe the novelist starts with certain abstract ideas like “DON’T STOP BELIEVING” but then has to try embed those ideas in characters and those characters in plots, and, in the complex process of making a working fictional world, the simple abstract ideas get muddied and slurred, get scraped across the concrete like so much chewed gum. Near the middle of Freedom, there’s a scene in which one of the characters, the ex-rock star Richard Katz, answers a few banal questions from a teenage “journalist” about “the MP3 revolution” by ranting about false consciousness and the nature of liberty and how fourteen-year-olds have been persuaded by endless marketing that “the look and feel of Apple Computer products is an indication of Apple Computer’s commitment to making the world a better place” and, you know, to be perfectly honest, basically a lot of the same ideas that are contained in Jonathan Franzen’s commencement speech at Kenyon and in the subsequent Times Op-Ed which was one of the Times “most-emailed articles” and which thousands of people have passed around on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and, you know, “liked.”

But in Freedom, it was different because the rant was delivered by a character who had just decided, prior to delivering the rant, that he was going to fuck a high school girl who the teenage “journalist” interviewing him was in puppy love with, partly for the pure physical pleasure of witnessing “the million subtly different faces and bodies she might turn out to possess,” but mostly in order to “squish” and “disillusion” the kid giving the interview, the “hotdog soloist…waiting in his practice room with an Apple laptop.” One of the main criticisms I’ve heard from people who don’t like Franzen’s fiction it is that it’s didactic, that it’s full of rants but, again, in Freedom, the didactic anti-technology rant isn’t coming from a guy who’s been painted as some paragon of virtue, it’s coming from a directionless loser of a middle aged man who’s in the middle of being a total asshole to an (admittedly also obnoxious) teenage boy and who thinks of having sex with a teenage girl (who “he already hates” without even having met her) as an “acquisition,” as “exercising his mastery.” Even though the content w/r/t the sleek and empty façade of technology in each rant is pretty similar, the form is different; the commencement speech elevates Franzen and privileges his speech, whereas the novel compromises Katz and, to some extent, what he’s saying, too. Instead of the way we at a commencement speech are exhorted to simply nod along with the sage wisdom of the canonized speaker, to stand and clap in robotic response when he stops speaking, to be sure to not stop believing, to remember that this is water, instead, the novelist places the speech inside a character and the character inside a narrative in a way that forces you to maybe actually think about what’s being said, in a way that make you examine in some small way your own beliefs in order to understand how you really feel.

To be fair, I think Franzen understands this distinction; maybe I’m just making excuses for him, but I like him so I’ll do that. In the commencement speech, before he begins talking about his Blackberry and the insidiously cool graphics of Facebook profile pages and liking and loving and all that stuff, Franzen offers a brief preface in which he tells the crowd that as a “literary writer,” he’s going to do “what literary writers do,” which is to “talk about myself in the hope that my experience has some resonance with your own experience.”

The literary blogger Edward Champion did a post last week in which he dissected the differences between the recording of Franzen’s commencement speech and the subsequent op-ed; he found that there were a number of things that ended up getting cut from the speech. The main thing that’s cut turns out to be, funny enough, a narrative, a love story Franzen tells about a woman he fell in love with when he was a senior in college, in “the first seminar the college had ever offered in literary theory,” and subsequently married and subsequently divorced. The story is, at first, a sort of weird personal parable about literary theory, and is entertaining enough (“My soon-to-be wife once memorably remarked after an unhappy scene in bed, ‘You can’t deconstruct and undress at the same time”). Then, though, just like the rest of the speech, it steps away from our glimpse of Franzen’s personal experience (with the woman, with his Blackberry, with birds) and enters the realm of the abstract, of the rhetorical; it reaches toward a vague and general discussion of the way the culture loves and likes and the superiority of literary fiction to a Facebook profile and the difference between being a “texting zombie” and someone who yells at someone else they supposedly love in public and what’s better and what’s worse and that’s where he loses me. I don’t want and am not convinced of anything by the Franzen who goes on and on about love and like in the general and the abstract, I believe in the Franzen who gives me a character reaching into a toilet to dig through his own shit in the bathroom of an Argentinean hotel room so that he can find the wedding ring he swallowed, because he’s realized that that was a horrible mistake. I don’t want love as a notion, as a concept, I want it as an action, because, in fiction and in life, action reveals character. I want details.

The detail that really made me like Jonathan Franzen is not the one about the shit and the ring or any of the stuff I talked about before but something I read in some interview after I read and liked The Corrections last summer, where he described how he and the woman in the parable about literary theory and love were living together in Boston after they graduated and how they used to buy value-sized packages of chicken thighs from the supermarket in order to stretch their budget and be able to afford time to write. I guess the Jonathan Franzen of 2011 who loves birds probably doesn’t buy value-sized packages of factory-farmed chicken thighs anymore and that’s probably a good thing, for him and his cholesterol and the birds he loves and the world we all live in, but I remember when I read that detail, I started to instantly not just like but really like Jonathan Franzen, because, in order to live on my $12,000 a year salary as a graduate student, in order to afford time to write, I buy value-sized packages of chicken thighs all the time; I’ve eaten hundreds of chicken thighs in the last year. I know it’s bad to eat them, that the birds suffer horribly from birth to death and that dark meat is fattier than white meat and a lot of other reasons that make them bad, but, you know what, I am not perfect, I am a person living in the real world and I eat chicken thighs I buy in large styrofoam trays from the supermarket. I can’t really afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner very often, to show her how I feel about her by buying her expensive goods and services the way the culture tells me that I’m supposed to, but what I can afford are chicken thighs, which are delicious and feel kind of like a luxury if you roast them in olive oil with salt and pepper in an oven hot enough to crisp their skin; in fact that’s what we ate last night, roasted chicken thighs with a spinach salad and corn on the cob, which is ten for two dollars at the Kroger down the street this week. The chicken thighs come in trays of eight or nine, but only six or seven of them will fit into my roasting pan and so I put the extra ones in sandwich-size Ziploc bags in my freezer to save them and this is exactly the kind of detail that people who don’t like Franzen’s fiction criticize, arguing that what kind of Volvo a character drives or the variety of hoodie he wears doesn’t really matter, isn’t really important, but you know, I think it is important because these little details, even while they’re just the result of meaningless consumer choices, like Apple or Android, make up the fabric of the world around us and if someone, a novelist or a poet or a blogger or whoever, can make us focus on the little things that during the course of our everyday lives can sometimes blur into undistinguished sludge, if a writer can defamiliarize those details, that’s a good thing, I think.

I was at a pool party on Memorial Day and after a few hours in direct sun and an unknown number of faux-gold cans of warm Miller High Life, I started to tell the people in the pool this anecdote about how, even though we’ve been dating for like six months, I haven’t told my parents my girlfriend’s name. I talk about her all the time, I just haven’t told them her name. I told my friends how funny it is, how when we’re on the phone, my dad gets annoyed and calls her “whatshername,” how he did it at first, I think, with the hope that I would be dumb enough to slip and say what her name was and how now it just comes in this bitter, resigned tone, this barely submerged annoyance about my reticence to share. When my friends asked me why I wouldn’t tell my parents her name, the reasons I gave were that I thought it was funny that my dad was so annoyed but also that I didn’t really think it made any difference if they knew her name and so I didn’t want to give it to them, that a name was just a word and knowing her name wouldn’t change in any real or significant way what they know about her. A name is an arbitrary word assigned to a person at birth and a person, especially a person you’re in love with, is so much more than a word, I felt, that to reduce their representation to such a low resolution would be a sin of omission.

That’s true, I believe that, totally, but to be honest I think the real reason I didn’t tell my parents (until now; I had to tell them because she got annoyed at me that night for drunkenly sharing a weird fact about our relationship at the pool because I thought it was a funny story) is that I thought if I told them her name they would try to find her on Facebook and for some reason that just seemed weird to me. I don’t know why it felt weird but it did. A lot of things feel weird about Facebook to me. My dad has a Facebook account which he updates regularly and I don’t read it because I don’t have one but I find it weird that he has one, even though for him it’s not really weird, it’s just a natural part of being a person of his age and social class in this part of the world right now. His friends, his friends in real life, have Facebook pages, and so he does too, and they write things to each other and post funny videos and et cetera.

I haven’t been on Facebook for more than two years because it doesn’t feel like being a natural part of being a person to me; I think it’s weird and unpleasant and bad for a lot of the same reasons that Jonathan Franzen does. That said, just because I’ve opted out of it for now because it feels wrong for me personally doesn’t mean that escape is as simple as a button you press on a computer keyboard. I haven’t been on Facebook for more than two years, but the last time I left Facebook, I didn’t ask them to delete my account, I just asked them to freeze it, to save it for later. I wasn’t ready to delete it, because deleting it felt like deleting a part of myself and deleting all the links to the people I knew then, the ties that bound us, and I didn’t know if I was ready to do that then and I’m still not sure I want to do it now, so that part of me is living in digital limbo and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The reason I’m not on Facebook right now even as they hold on to a collection of text and images which constitute in some sense some part of some prior version of “myself” is not because I’m trying to escape being a cog in the great consumerist machine or that I don’t want to read my dad’s conversations with people he went to high school with during the bicentennial. To be honest, it’s because turning it on again after having it off for two years would force me to have awkward conversations with a lot of people I used to know and care about in real life and haven’t seen in years, people who used to be friends and then, when we moved apart, became “friends” and then, when I turned it off, became memories or not even that, and I don’t know how to do that, how to be the person I am now who is still linked to these people I used to know when I was the version of myself I was back then. Other people I know seem to have no trouble resolving this contradiction, to shift between the past and present tenses, but I don’t get it, it’s like I’m missing a chip in my brain or something.

It’s not that those people wouldn’t be nice to me, either; those people love me or loved me and just want to know how I’m doing, to say what’s up. An old friend who lives across the country and who I haven’t talked to or seen in years sent me a really nice e-mail out of the blue the other day about my writing, saying some very sweet things and inquiring after my life, and it’s been over a week since she wrote me this simple little e-mail but I still haven’t written her back because I just don’t know how to do it, how to bridge this digital divide between me and this other person, which is maybe a true feeling I have but is maybe also just an excuse for being a bad human being to a person who, when we were friends, was wonderful and supportive of me — I remember once, during my senior year of college at the swimming pool in our apartment complex, I made a collage with sticks and grass and cigarette butts on the concrete representing a friend of ours vomiting over a porch railing onto a small dog with a Russian name (which was an actual thing that had happened at a party the night before) and another friend had taken a picture of it and posted it on Facebook, one of the first pieces of “digital art” I ever did, and she had posted a comment about how amazing it was and it made my day then and still does a little now, in my memory — but I don’t know how to respond to her e-mail now and I can’t imagine being friends on Facebook with her or anybody else I used to know.

This feels wrong to me, like I’m missing out on something, that I can’t figure out how to be a person online like a lot of other people I know can, but I’m not perfect, I’m just trying to do the best I can, to be happy. To be honest I’m off Facebook not because I want to live as fully as I possibly can but because, in some sense, I want to avoid the full force of life the way we live it now; it’s, to be honest, because my “real” life in the small Midwestern town where I live is a hell of a lot easier for me to deal with and get squared away in my brain than the complicated analog digital techno-consumerist life thing whatever that everyone I know is immersed in today. It is, for me, very hard to participate in something like Facebook but, all that said, I don’t think that makes it valorous for me to stay off of it or that it means, on the other hand, that someone who is using it is somehow escaping from real love and real life.

Modern technology isn’t always hard like this, of course, and in a lot of ways I love it. I’ve been listening to the BBC show Desert Island Discs in the afternoons when I go running lately; the whole archive is free on iTunes. The premise of Desert Island Discs is that they ask a celebrity guest what eight songs they would take if they were to be stranded on a desert island and would have listen to them for the rest of their lives; on the show, they play the songs and then discuss the celebrity’s life and feelings in a bit of gentle British pop hagiography. At the end of each show, they ask the celebrity two non-musical questions: what luxury item they would take with them to the island and, given a Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, what book they would bring. It’s always interesting to hear how people answer this: the luxury item answers are usually just jokes, but answers about the book almost always seem sweetly sincere because, however debased our culture is by social media and other technologies, a lot of people still think books are pretty important. Clive James, sure he’ll be rescued before too awfully long, decides to take a book of opera singing lessons by Caruso so that he can work on his voice, but most people are resigned to their isolation and decide to take novels in the hopes that the novels can capture some part of the world that they’ll be disconnected from. Tina Brown says she would take Middlemarch (“I think the bustling life she creates is something I would miss on that island”), Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says he’d take Moby Dick (“a great yarn, a book full of lovely things”), and Jarvis Cocker says he would take Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan, even though it’s short, because “it’s kind of funny and sad and…life is like that, isn’t it? It’s kind of funny but it always turns out to be a tragedy because the main character dies in the end.”

If I was going to be stranded on a desert island, I would probably take a laptop with a solar powered battery and a satellite modem as my luxury item (JK, LOL), but I don’t know what book I would bring. After we had been dating a few months, my girlfriend e-mailed me this .PDF file that an app on her iPhone had made of all our text message conversations since we first met. The email was titled “archive” and the texts were laid out on virtual pages, as if it was a book. The “book,” at that point, was two hundred and fifty pages long, and I’m sure by now that if we laid it out with all those texts and all the ones we’ve written since, it would be at least five hundred and sixty two pages, which is the length of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in the first edition hardback I have. If I was going to be stranded on a desert island, I don’t know how I would choose between the two; the novel represents the world in a way I find captivating, that has gotten me through a lot of hard times, but the text made of text messages, well, is the world, to me, right now, kind of. That’s a stupid and overly simplistic binary, but then so is the one Jonathan Franzen sets up between liking and loving, between “text zombies” and couples in “real love” in his op-ed, between my girlfriend and I and the people who supposedly “get down in the pit,” whatever the hell “the pit” is. I’m looking at the archive right now—the first text I sent my girlfriend, not from a pit but from across a crappy bar downtown, was “I have your phone number now so I can do annoying shit like this. be afraid!”; the first one she sent me, later that night, was “hah. I refuse to cower! I am an expert with random texts.” (A few texts later, she asked “also: no facebook for ethical reasons?” and I replied “not ethical, just complicated and weird. it would take longer than a text to explain.”)

The .PDF is an annoying file format; for some reason, probably my own technological inadequacy, I can’t search the one she sent me for instances of the word “love,” though even if I could I don’t think I’d find many. I think we are in what you would call love with each other right now but I don’t think either of us have used that particular word more than a handful of times; we feel the feeling that fuels it but I would depart from Franzen and argue that it’s pretty obviously the idea of “love” and not “like” which has become over-commodified and too robbed of its meaning by the force of the culture industry (not that this is any kind of new idea, of course). I can say “I love you” to my mother with a straight face, but when I say it to my girlfriend, the few times that I’ve said it, I feel like I’m a character in the dénouement of a bad romantic comedy, I feel like the song “This Will Be” by Natalie Cole is about to start playing from invisible speakers embedded in the trees and credits will any minute begin to roll across the sky above me. But the thing is, I’m in love with her and she’s in love with me and we need to express that to each other somehow, and so, probably almost every day when we’re apart, in response to something the other person said or just for no reason at all other than feeling the feelings inside of us, we text each other the emoticon of a heart, which is made by typing a < and a 3 together.

The heart is the same symbol that is used by my blogging platform, Tumblr, to represent “liking” something but the two of us use it to represent love; somehow, we don’t confuse the two. On Tumblr, I’ve clicked the little heart icon to like someone else’s blog post 16,078 times. I like to click the little heart because I know that if I do, the person who made the post will receive a notification that I liked it and I like to think that such a notification might make that person’s day or hour or minute just a little bit better, the same way that a lot of the time I feel just a little bit better when someone likes one of my posts. There are obvious downsides to this sort of emotional circle jerk; one is that you can become addicted to the bite-sized doses of affection offered by the tiny hearts in the way that Jonathan Franzen thought his friend David Foster Wallace had before his death. But in safe doses, I think “liking” does for positive feelings what those sites like freerice.com do for food; it’s not going to really change anybody’s life, I don’t think, but if I can make some stranger’s day a little less bad by way of a simple click that costs me nothing, I want to do it, I want to “like” things. For me, “liking” things in the world is part of liking the world.

On Tumblr, this clicking motion, which fills the onscreen heart with red pixels to signify my “like,” is internalized, is subconscious, is inside me, somehow, because of all the thousands of times that I’ve done it, but again, somehow, still, I don’t get it confused with the way I tell the one person who I am in love with that I love her. The two things are different and obviously if I had to choose one I know which one it would be and so do you, but, the thing is, I don’t have to choose between her and “you” or between novels and text messages or anything else and anyone who tells me that I do is offering a false choice. The machine code which drives all our computers is binary, composed of 1s and 0s, but that code, if it’s long and complex enough, allows us any number of possibilities in terms of how we might use it; we can take or leave what we want. I like “liking” and I like blogging, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable on Twitter (obviously I have a problem with brevity); Jonathan Franzen thinks Facebook is bad and doesn’t want an iPhone but can bear a Blackberry, okay, good for him. Most normal people find their positions on these issues fairly intuitively in the natural course of living their lives, without having to write or read a commencement speech or twelve thousand word blog post about it, but then here and there are freaks like me and Jonathan Franzen (and maybe you?), who for whatever reason have to think about it really really hard and express our feelings at length to others, not because we think we’re more important or smarter or better than everybody else, as that one critic on Tumblr implied, but because we have these feelings and we think we can express them in a certain way and we think that maybe other people feel something like them, too, but can’t or don’t want to take the time to express them and therefore it might be important or good to share the feelings with those people and/or the world because they might get something out of it, because reading the feelings might help those people’s days and/or lives be a little better.

Or maybe it’s all just a huge waste of time, I don’t know, you can figure it out for yourself. Including our three day, two night vacation from power the other week, my girlfriend and I spent six days straight together over the last week, which is a record even for us, but then she had to go back to work the day after Memorial Day, and I had to go back to “work” too, “work,” which is this screen and the program I’m writing this thing in. I’m writing this thing and have been every day since the day after Memorial Day and as the days go by, even though I’ve cut a lot of things, it just keeps getting longer and this is a quality of the medium of the word processing program, even the “distraction free” program, that I can write and write more and more, probably more than I should or than you want, and yet waiting for me inside my computer there are just an unending series of sheets of blank paper made of 1s and 0s, more than I could ever fill.

The day that I started this, a few hours after I left the apartment and went back to work, I was wanting to text my girlfriend to tell her that I miss her but feeling weird because of that op-ed I had read by Jonathan Franzen and because of this post I was writing about the complicated effects of social media on people and relationships and et cetera when my phone chimed and I saw that she had sent me an e-mail titled “body of water.” Inside the e-mail was a link to the website for a lake in our state that she had heard about from an intern in her office; she had written “future day trip?” underneath it.

The website for the lake is this horrible thing, both ugly and unintuitive. From the homepage, you can’t get directly to any of the information about the lake; what you have to do, before you’ll even be allowed access to any content, is choose a category (like “What to Do” or “Where to Eat”) and then, within that category, click checkboxes regarding the type of goods or services you might wish to rent or purchase (like “Ski Boat/Ski/Tube/Jet Ski Rentals” or “ Casual Dining & Deli Style”), and then, finally, click a button marked “submit.” Submit as in submit the form data to the server, but also submit as in submit to the forces of naked, shameless capitalism. It is such a horrible website, like Facebook and so many others.

But still, like, somewhere beyond the homepage, there’s the lake, and, after having filled up your tank at a gas station which supports unrest in the Middle East and genocide in the Sudan and ecological disaster everywhere and then, an hour later, stopped for a Big Mac or a Baconator, the sandwich that is literally causing America’s hearts to harden, the lake, when you finally get there, I would assume, is filled with water, real fresh water, and you can go swimming in it or read a book on the shore or check your e-mail on your phone or kiss the person lying on the towel beside you on the mouth and taste the sunscreen on her lips. There is a lake and there’s water in it and this is all part of the great and varied experience we call living. Maybe you don’t love it the way you love a person or you love the idea of being alive, maybe you only like it as much as a vacation picture that someone posts on her Facebook wall or a sandwich you get at Wendy’s for $5.99, but maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s enough just to like it, the way the water feels when you’re hot and dry and it covers your skin with cool and wet. She sent me the lake and the water and I sent her a ❤; I could’ve e-mailed her back but I texted her instead, because I wanted her to get it faster.

In a final attempt to give this post some small sense of formal coherence, I will conclude by telling a short story about birds. When the two of us were walking to the grocery store on the second evening of our vacation from power, amid twigs and fallen leaves and near a set of downed lines which stretched dangerously over the road, I saw a bird dying on the sidewalk. It was a bundle of ruffled feathers, twitching and shuddering, bent in on itself at awkward angles. I figured it had gotten hit by a car; it was trying to flap up into the air but its wings were broken somehow and it couldn’t get more than an inch or so off the ground before it fell again. It made me so sad to see it and then, for some reason, within the span of a second, angry, angry that I had to be sad in the middle of a nice walk on a sunny happy day with a person I love. I said this to her, I said, in a stupid, whiny voice, “Oh god, it’s dying, why?” I mean, it was a rhetorical question, I knew why, birds die, everything and everyone dies, that’s a fact of life, but I guess what I meant is more why now, why near me in the particular place and time where I am living, why do I personally have to be confronted with death and sadness right here, in the middle of this nice walk, and I knew the answer to that question too, the answer is obvious, okay, but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t feel it.

My girlfriend just laughed at me, though. “What are you talking about?” she said. I looked at her, hurt and confused, and she said, smiling, “No, look,” and pointed down at the sidewalk.

When I looked again, I saw that the dying bird wasn’t actually a dying bird at all: it was two smaller birds who were pressing their bodies together very tightly for some reason. I pushed my sunglasses up onto my forehead and looked closer. I had seen it wrong: it wasn’t one dying thing, it was two living things. The two birds split apart and flew together in close formation toward a flowerbed and then rejoined into their ball of energy and feathers and rolled around in the dirt. “They’re either mating or fighting,” my girlfriend said. She couldn’t tell, we couldn’t tell, neither of us knew enough about birds to be sure. “They’re mating,” I said, “I hope they’re mating, at least.” That sounds like stupid made-up dialogue in a bad novel, but I really said it, I swear to whatever you believe in. We watched the birds fly at each other and roll around in the flowerbed and then, when I had seen enough, I grabbed her hand and we started walking again, off into the evening. That’s all, that’s the end of the story, there are no more birds, this is not a parable, this is not water, this is not me trying to prove anything to you about anything, to tell you how things are or should be or to make you not stop believing if you don’t want to, this is just me describing some stuff that happened to me lately, in the hope that my experience has some resonance with your experience.