So, this is unpleasant.

https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/social-media-addiction/

Read this thing and shudder uncomfortably. I’m reminded of those t-shirts that celebrate wine and coffee addiction, and the Onion headline, “I’m like a chocoholic–but with alcohol.”

One can sense a near future where people look back on the social media of today the way we recoil in horror from turn of the century celebrants downing glowing radium cocktails. 

Radioactivity was new, see? Why would anyone think it could hurt them?

So we look back at addiction, at the one we all know about, and see social media addiction through that bleary eyed lens. We’re chocoholics. We do this every day. For quite a bit of time. But we could quit whenever we want. And we know when to draw the line.

And we’re not hurting anybody. Except ourselves, and then… who is to say? Only ourselves. And that’s the problem.

My parents drank enough, every day, to get a decent buzz on for maybe sixty five years.

My Dad quit for a few years, after a disastrous party where he embarrassed my mother suggested his liver was dying. When he started drinking again two years later, he cut out all hard liquor. He downed shitloads of wine. This worked, if by working you mean avoiding DUIs, embarrassing parties, and making it to age 86 in reasonable health. So. Mission accomplished, right?

Right?

My parents did not identify as alcoholics. AA had been founded the year before my father was born, in 1935, but neither of them would have ever dreamed of attending a meeting.

Sixty percent of the country drinks nothing or a drink or two a week. Another thirty percent are somewhere near the two or three drinks a day line we collectively shrug at, and the top ten percent drink about 10 drinks a day or more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/

Where’s the line? Where does problem drinking start? Professionals generally talk about drinking impacting life in negative ways, often health related, without getting at the deeper question, which is what the hell is life for, and what should a drinker be doing instead?

Behavioral addictions often have relatively minor health consequences; professionals look at other consequences to measure the damage done by gambling, say, or sex addiction.

But when it comes to social media? If you’re not looking at the damn phone while driving, or walking, it’s physically safe as houses, as that’s where you do it, often, in your house. What if the real life it displaces was getting soused in bars? Having unsafe sex in bathroom stalls? Skydiving? Hmm?

My parents never missed a day of work from drinking. They never crashed a car. Never got a DUI. Never seemed to suffer social issues. Enjoyed the rock solid marriage, drinking together. They had successful, professional careers, earned Ph.Ds, owned homes, and put an ungrateful kid through college. They left their kids a decent sized chunk of change, after dying in their late 80s after a few weeks of illness, each.

How could anyone say their drinking was a problem?

So we wind our way around to sex, video games, and social media.

As my Mother declined, and I cut her wine to a half bottle a day, which she would sometimes forget she’d had as she asked for more, she told me that drinking was the last thing that made her feel like a person.

So, I think, the hardest part about social media addiction, which addiction specialists suggest about one or two in ten americans could reasonably see themselves as having (the same goes for alcohol, by the way) is what the hell do you want to do with life, really, and why is that thing better, more worthwhile, than Facebook or Instagram or Twitter?

The question isn’t wether you’re addicted to social media. The question is what do you want to do with your life and are you doing it?

Riddle me that, Batman.

Bottom line, you gotta know what you would rather be doing, and you can’t be wishy washy about it;  you can’t hope it emerges out of the fog of withdrawal, because let me tell you, the withdrawal, for some, for me, is real and it’s fucking awful.

I’m unclear what my life is for at this point.

This is a fucking nightmare. The social media, maybe, is just a greek chorus.

As you back away from social media it’s hard to immediately convert that time into useful activity. Because you’ve been using it to fill your socialization hunger, your hunger for connection if not actual conversation, which now, let’s face it, feels a little awkward.

Who wants to eat fruit when you can chug down bubbly corn sweetener?

Recovery people will tell you that you need something to fill that time, the time that opens up when you are off your drug of choice. I think the problem comes in when you have diminished executive function, when you’re tired, and the effort to fill that time up with something nourishing is so great you do something else stupid instead.

Like this blog.

You are substituting something social, but with lower levels of interaction, say a group email to a few friends, one off emails to folks saying, “christ, this is hard, I’m getting off social media,” that you hope will garner instant feedback, texts left with friends and family who suddenly, feel much more important now.

And you wait. And you wait.

What the fuck is taking so long?

Social media has trained you to expect an almost instantaneous stream of connection, if not conversation; the likes that start streaming in instantly. But what are these likes? The nod of a passing neighbor at the compost bin? Or deep involvement, empathy, communion?

You don’t know.

So FB created a series of icons. Hearts and hugs and along with the anonymous thumbs up. To try to create a difference. But what this means is that folks can scan a post for content quickly, say, “fuck, somebody died,” heart that thing and skitter past. “Oh Christ. More cancer.” Scurry away, because thinking about cancer is awful. Heart it! Then–you’re outa there!”

Welp. That’s dark enough for now.

I had three reads, maybe two, on yesterday’s sadly titled post. I’m jonesing over here.

But then, I’m supposed to be.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course social media barely shares your shared blog links to your feed, if you have a blog plug-in that does this. Social media hates your blog. Hates you owning your own relationship without their mediation. Social media sells your friends attention back to you, after all.

Social media creates nothing. It’s a honeypot for harvesting data and selling ads.

Trump, with a third of the country worshipping him as a Combed-over God, couldn’t figure out how to monetize his blog, or drive readership or engagement.

That’s right. Trump.

Don’t be sad, if you start blogging to the chorus of crickets and the occasional hooting owl. Nobody can do this, create significant engagement, without some kick ass career, bigger than Trump’s I guess, or one that engages people who read,  or weight loss or get rich quick schemes to sell.

This is a place to come and dry out, a bit, while the hunger for conversational typing dies out.

I hope.

Digital minimalism makes a distinction between connection and conversation that is used to determine what tech tools to use, and how to use them.

Newport borrows this idea from another text–his book is basically the synthesis of a half dozen others he cites plus his reactions to them. I should go dig it up for you but I’m lazy and I want to get in and out of this post fast, for obvious reasons; just be aware, that Digital Minimalism isn’t a Newport invention; it is an amalgam of six other books, plus Newport’s last book, with an extra dollop of opprobrium directed at the tech giants for behaving like tobacco companies thrown on top.

Oh, and his case studies, garnered through his platform, a self selected group of folks he puts through a few experiments, and some other successful people who have shared their stories.

Anyway, social media likes, shares, follows, are connections.

Conversations are one on one, phone, video conference, or in person, with the last being best, the first the worst. The high-bandwidth, real time communication between individuals is supposedly the source of human empathy, the learned component, the training ground, with a few studies mentioned. Conversation is what we crave. What we really need.

Connection, is a poke, nudge, wink, smile, heart, like, follow, mass email, one to many posting, a tweet, whatever.

Connections are okay, but when they displace conversation? Yeah. It’s the corn syrup idea I mentioned in a previous post.

I can’t remember if I’ve said this yet or not, but again, here goes, but the act of doing a one-to-many conversation yourself, spewing something into the world, to a lot of people, and getting feedback, actually feels good and in social media friendly studies seems to be a Good Thing,.

The problem is the one-to-many from the other side; imbibing a ton of the one-to-many posts, reading a ton of other people sharing or venting or bragging? That is NOT correlated to happiness.

This causes FOMO, this is a feeling of inadequacy, the sense that others are having more fun than you, leading more fulfilling or meaningful lives. This is a kind of vicarious living that isn’t really being alive. It used to be you could only get so much of this stuff, a columnist or two or ten. A celebrity life column, People magazine.

Twenty million oversharing quirky quasi columnists of every possible political and social and racial and sexual make-up?

That’s a firehouse of corn syrup. That’s an endless IV drip of comforting noise that leaves you empty and depleted.

This is the the thing I take away today. Sure, I could get a few hundred folks engaging with my social media content. They’d enjoy it. But maybe they have better things to do. If I want them to read books? Leave them alone. Even if they don’t read my books. If all of us writers did this? I’d get more readers too.

You’ll see big name folks who basically post in their feeds and react only to the stuff in their feeds. They don’t have to shop around for interaction. Social media is a bottomless pit of folks chatting them up. With a button that ejects the assholes.

The only way this damages the big name is she is distracted from work; she’s not getting FOMO, she doesn’t feel invalidated, her life is a source of endless fascination and conversation, her work, her opinions. The toxicity is vastly reduced.

The downside?

I am thinking of a beloved author I know who writes, conservatively, 2-3k of social media, Facebook–a day. It is exquisite. It feels _copyedited_. This writer grew up on typewriters. The text is clean, the voice is perfect, effortless, the prose is interesting, the viewpoint is engaging and intelligent, and the topics are topical, up to the second reactions to the news of the world.

Readers have been awaiting the next book in one of the writer’s series since the early 90s.

Converting the social media output into fiction would produce the book in two months.

Let’s say there’s a big research component. Four months? Six?

Anyway. I love this guy. His life and his work is his own, and I have no right to complain. I bring him up as the example, of someone getting as much as they possibly can out of social media… and the perhaps unintended consequence of this enjoyable diversion.

And the time it eats. The words it devours. The eyeballs it catches.

The life that rushes by.

So, we’ll call yesterday day one, as I finally got around to deleting the social media apps from my phone, one of my long-term goals is to not check social media on the phone… hey, let’s throw down a disorganized list of crap I’ve been ruminating on based on the book.

Minimalist Goals

• No social media apps on phone DONE!
• Social media Saturdays only (for after the 30 day fast, we’ll see if that makes sense)
• Daily blog posts 500 words or under (this is my conversational typing; skipping the blog and writing one on one emails is probably better. I need conversational typing. It’s like warming up for me.)
• Half hour walk without phone daily (phone in backpack in a zipped bag) I walk an hour or two a day. Dedicated some of that time to silent walking, no books, no possible interruption, seems like a good goal. I do it fairly often, just shut off the audio feed, but sometimes I talk to friends instead, which for me, is a dangerous activity. I can talk to friends for fucking hours.
• Turn off notifications, disable that cruft of marketing emails that grow like weeds in the inbox, one by one as they pop up, unless they seem VERY useful. IN PROGRESS.
• Unsubscribe from underused paid services (IN PROGRESS xbox live went yesterday) Not really digital minimalism, but an adjacent idea that Newport cites without naming it’s souce, the Your Money or Your Life movement.
• Cut streaming channels that are under-used (IN PROGRESS Acorn went, but kept BritBox; maybe Shout goes next, but I keep the Rifftrax friends channel)
• Read a print book or kindle or comics on the iPad once a day. ( so far, so good. I read a new issue of Wonder Woman, which was good enough to make me cry. Very much in the vein of Neil Gaiman, it seemed to me, who I love.)
• Shut off all notifications on iPad.
• Listen to ALBUMS on Spotify. As a kid, it was understood that listening to  singles was a juvenile activity. My school-age brother and I listened to the vinyl Beatles albums my parents bought, lifting up the needle to avoid George. Harrisons weird ass sitar music. I would eventually love the whole Beatle cannon, but as a kid a single off putting song had to be stopped. Immediately. As a teen I realized that the songs I liked on an album often taught me to like others, and even if I liked some more than others, that was Okay, albums were supposed to be like that, songs that drifted to the back of your attention, and songs that smacked you in the face.
• Subscribe to the NYT news I want to read as email. Make those emails the whole written news ration.
• Set up a RSS Feed reader with aspirational reading to satisfy the urge to poke around at links
• Unsubscribe from Washington Post (Trump is gone. We helped save journalism. Now just the NYT will do. Yes, I know the NYT isn’t perfect.)
• IMPORTANT: Log the joyless ticks that fill the spaces left by removing these things, the fresh weeds cropping up, because my distraction problem lies deeper than any technology. I delight in the erasure of my own consciousness. I demand immersive narrative, or a perfect work flow state; almost anything between is excruciating. Also, getting into flow is like getting in freezing water. I avoid doing it with time wasting tics.
• Meditate daily again, using some of the empty real estate

That’s more than enough to think about for now.

If you have had issues with interruptive technology, let me know what you have done to limit the damage in the comments below. It might be fun to share.

So, here I am, I’m doing it.

I’ve been ‘off my feed,’ (hah Hah) for three weeks at Facebook, slowly picking away at Newport’s new book, Digital Minimalism. The full scope of his plan now apparent, I am going to do the full-bore brain reboot until September 26, which will give me seven weeks off FB (my biggest issue) and a month of other interventions which I am still working out.

Newport tells us to classify our use of interruptive technologies into essential and non-essential. Interruptive is my word. CDs are digital but listening to CDs isn’t a problem; same goes with DVDs. Youtube, spotify and Netflix, on the other hand, are digital in the  problematic sense of the word–networked, always available, ie, a feed, with reward mechanisms built in, (likes, shares, and followers.)

Addictive, in other words. The problem is with tech that is addictive.

Were we addicted to vinyl, the radio, broadcast TV, VHS cassettes? Neil Postman said we were in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Now? Watching TV, all together, a family, now seems quaint and healthy, a damn near Little House on the Prairie level of togetherness.

There’s a gen Z (Cap Newport calls them ‘igen’, for ipod and iphone, which is, uh, strange.) meme that derides a clueless boomer blaming the waves of mental llness plaguing young people on smartphones, tossing out other possibilities, including the rise of fascism and the imminent collapse of civilization and mass extinction events around climate change. So you don’t want to be that guy, that out of touch boomer.

But Newport trots this out, that there’s this GIANT spike in mental health issues that corresponds to smart phone usage, and if we take the blame the victim out of the suggestion, if we attribute a lot of this damage to the policies of the tech monopolies which prioritize profits over user sanity, then we can still constructively poke at this idea, look at the research, without being totally dick-ish boomer trash.

Because people do embrace habits and addictive products, that make rich people richer, to their detriment. Tobacco is the classic case in point.

Anyway. Look, I’m an SF guy. I wanted a global computer network a lot lot like the one we now have. I dreamed of it. SF writers have been dreaming it up for three quarters of a century.

Robert Heinlein, (yes, I know you hate him, let me just get this out, because it’s fun) envisioned this wonderfully steampunk kind of wikipedia global library network that consisted of telegraphically linked pneumatic tubes and microfilm.

So you would do your ‘google’ search, which of course, spat out whole books, but still, and a few minutes later, THUNK! A spool of microfilm would arrive in your delivery slot. RAHs steampunk online network morphed into a super-compuserve with fantastically high fees associated with them. In the novel Friday, an agent is giving an _unlimited feed budget_ and discovers amazing things by following her subconscious in areas of seemingly unrelated research; she is awoke in the middle of the night by her superior who asks when the next outbreak of the plague will occur, and without conscious thought she spews out the answer, having run her brain through a lot of this data.

But we all know that wikipedia, by any other name, isn ‘t really the problem with the network. I’m guessing the number of people damaged by wikipedia is similar to the number of people crushed under the weight of their VHS collections.

Not to paraphrase Newport too heavily, but he relates the discovery of a ‘default network’  detected with PET scans during experiments, brain regions that light up as soon as you complete any task.

They put you in the scanner and have you do stuff, math in your head, remember grandma’s pudding, whatever, and when you stop doing that, bingo, back to the default network.

The default network spends its time in rumination on social interactions. IE, when we aren’t thinking about anything else, we are trying to figure out other people, and our relationships to other people. We really are social animals.

This is where the lovecraftian horror of social media clicks in.

Social media gives you a fake, always on, monetizable and thus monetized (Late stage capitalism!)  version of this thing your brain craves 24/7. Likes, shares, and followers are to in person social contact what corn sweetener is to fresh fruits and vegetables.

As we gorge on fresh followers and likes and shares we have a tendency to slowly starve. The corn sweetener lacks nutrients. As with corn sweetener, of course, it is better than nothing. Corn sweetener isn’t poison. Neither is social media.

But it often, maybe usually, displaces something better for you, and this isn’t your fault.

It’s designed to do this.

Thus, the brain reset.

Cut out the non-essential stuff; see how you feel, see what you get done, and then reintroduce the optional stuff, and see if it actually makes you happier.

I’ll keep posting on this I got another month to go.

Ugh.

 

 

So I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, some time ago, and enjoyed it. I wrote a blog post about it, as I recall. That ten people read. Or whatever. One of the things Newport didn’t really tackle head-on was the full-bore evil of social media companies which prioritize engagement over the mental health of their users, and over the continued existence of democracy.

Oh, and of course, valuing engagement, clicks, hits, eyeballs, which means MONEY over, say, hundreds of thousands of extra folks dying in agony from the current plague.

So. Right. Facebook and Twitter are both fucking evil. Full stop. It’s not ‘how you use,’ the tools. These things are intrinsically bad for everyone. You can switch to a low tar cigarette by taking the app off your phone or avoiding your feed and using groups and sticking to small circles of friends, but the apps will resist every single thing you do to lessen the amount of time you use them.

They have to. They give you ‘friends’ but they are not your friend.

Social media is compelled by fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder to maximize short term profits, at the expense of their users time, sanity, privacy, their employees quality of life, public health, democracy, because that’s how capitalism works now, and social media, big tech in general, is as capitalistic as capitalism gets.

Move fast, break things. Democracy? Oops. Public health? Eh.

Anyway. Sidetracked there. Breathing heavily. Hey, you know what? That’s the rage I have welling up in me that hasn’t had an outlet, because I’m a few weeks into a FB and twitter fast. Look, I was never sweetness and light. My rage at my species that could create a paradise that instead actively destroys itself and the planet didn’t materialize overnight.

But the sensation, of living in that rage, constantly, of someone or something constantly poking a stick into the festering wound… that’s sorta a post millenium thing.

I responded to this political rage by writing, and sharing what I wrote, and… I was gonna say ‘building community’ around that but who knows what I was really doing. Spreading a disease? I did have folks tell me I was keeping them sane, back during the Bush administration, before Paul Krugman started saying exactly what I was saying with the NYT and a Nobel prize to back it up, as opposed to my BFA from Syracuse University and freelance design career.

I was addicted to writing mass emails that went out to yahoo groups. I had a few thousand readers. We tried to monetize the lists and use the money to work at lobbyists and got pretty much nowhere, netting a few thousand bucks over the eight years which we turned into trips taken to protests where we sold buttons and shirts and jumped up and down and watched our numbers underreported by the MSM. We tried to stop the wars, see, the useless wars that are finally ending now. We failed.

The wars that did nothing to make anyone safer, twenty years of burning billions of dollars and thousands of lives in vast stupid bonfires, to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and transform Saddam into ISIS.

Me and my people knew these wars were worthless. They were built on lies, that we knew they were lies, and we knew this before the first bombs were dropped. We were screaming at the top of their lungs. The best experts agreed–there were no weapons of mass destruction.

And you know–there weren’t.

Sad basoon music. Rage.

Anyway. So we can see that social media, primitive at the time, was this place where I played at politics, where I performed a political identity. Now I have known people that actually worked in politics, at the local, state, and national level, and so I knew in my heart of hearts that I was mostly doing nothing, sitting in a little virtual bar ranting at people to little or no effect.

But… Jesus, it felt like I was doing something. They wanted me to feel like I was doing something. Social media was designed to make me feel like I was doing something. 

Jumping up and down and bellowing at people, who were going to vote for the right people and donate to the right causes anyway, enjoyed my content, but they all read the NYT and WAPO and The Nation and The Atlantic and everything else, you know, stuff written by people who were paid enough to copyedit what they did.

I did a few real things. Showed up at a few protests that mattered. Shut down a right wing radio program. Worked for Liz Warren, on her first campaign. Donated some money here and there to campaigns, wrote some letters, did some call center stuff. That stuff mattered, and matters, and it is so, so, so boring and hard to do.

Going door to door, again,  you are only ever talking to the converted, trying to get a democrat to vote for the democrat, but in this case? Yeah, every now and then you actually make that happen.

Stacy Abrams did this, right? It mattered, what she did, and actually, it wasn’t just her, she was part of a huge huge effort. Of people doing stuff in the real damn world. If these activities had been confined to social media?

I can assure you, it would have come to nothing. Because social media likes things they way they are.

So we can see, for me, social media was part of a political life that began with listening to my father rant and rave about Nixon and watergate, listen to him dictate angry telegrams to the white house, the supreme court. That political life is significant, and it has counted for something, maybe, but every step forward was also a step back as I donated my time, my effort, my voice, my writing, for free, to comically evil techno billionaires.

Facebook elected Trump.

Now in a close election, you can say that about anyone, any small number of votes; the leftists too pure to vote for HRC, the POC unenthused by mass incarceration, that stayed home, the men who didn’t vote for her because she was a woman, the people she didn’t bother to court in the swing states that decided the electoral collage, and on and on, but one thing is certain.

The mis-information created by Russia, pushed through FB, elected Trump and Trump has killed us by the hundreds of thousands.

And every anti-trump FB post I wrote was gluing in eyeballs and generating revenue for a company that shrugged at white supremacy, at best, if it wasn’t an active campaign contributor. This company prioritizes its bottom line over everything else. This is what most companies do all the time, but when that company is an unregulated monopoly?

Yeah. That’s when we get epic tragedies on the scale of Trump.

So, Facebook and Facebook products make up, what, 20-40% of all internet traffic? You can’t get off Facebook if you’re a business, not really; we’re yolked to this thing. I can’t blame anyone for being on FB who has to be there. I’m not judging anybody but myself.

But you know? I don’t have to be on FB. And I blame myself for Trump, a little bit. I fought for HRC at the end, but not hard enough, and not for long enough. I didn’t think Trump could win, and if it hadn’t been for social media… he wouldn’t have. I didn’t know sick we were.

I didn’t realize the way the right-wing disinformation machine had dovetailed with facebook and youtube to sell white supremacy and conspiracy theory. Some science fiction writing, technology loving, naive fool remembered Google’s motto–don’t be evil, remembered the dream of an internet that made us smarter, instead of one that drove us mad and empowered idiots.

Oops.

So. That’s enough for now. That’s why we leave FB. Sure, it’s bad for us, blah blah blah. Ruined attention span and being intentional and whatever, I’ll talk about that later. But the one two punch… bad for you, and bad for everyone else? Bad for the country? Bad for humanity?

Yeah.

I gotta stop being part of this problem. I have to.

 

 

 

 

 

I have been amazed, over the years, at my love for Sue Grafton’s work, because so much of it consists of minutely observed details that have no bearing on plot whatsoever. Theme, tone, of course, is reflected in every part of the world, or rather the parts of it a POV or narrator chooses to call out, Grafton spends perhaps 10-20% of each of her books describing the interiors of spaces.

I’m one of those readers that let the specifics of a space wash over them, but tune into the details. I will not remember which wall the bookcase is shoved against, whether it’s opposite the king sized bed or the broken window, at all. There are readers that do, though.

But I do love me some details.

The interiors reflect the characters of the people that inhabit them; bring them into tighter focus.

The average private investigator in fiction will tell you the job is mostly boring details; Grafton makes you live every single one. The plot coupons, the stuff she uses to put her cases together, are completely invisible to me on every read. There’s so much detail to lose the important ones in. She has never once telegraphed an ending.

I have, at times, wondered how the hell she figured out what was going on; I have at times, been confused during the climax, because I have been mesmerized by all the ashtrays and tatty slip covers.

There’s a thing, where a writer describes some perfectly ordinary thing that you can’t recall anyone ever describing in prose before, and it makes you weirdly happy. I remember this during my first Salinger readings. I get that from Grafton a lot, in an among the turns of phrase we’ve all read ten thousand times.

Still, it’s an odd recommendation.

“Wanna read endless descriptions of rooms, houses, faces, lonely spaces, a made up stretch of coastline this detective runs every single goddamn morning?”

Turns out? You do.

My family read the Grafton Alphabet series end to end.

I’d revisited the first few books a few times over the last thirty years, but most of them I’ve read a single time, generally the year of publication. We started giving them to each as hard-covers on Christmas, or for birthday presents. Audiobook versions percolated through the family, as boxes of rental audio cassettes, packs of CDs, purchased or borrowed from libraries. Sometime after my father died two years ago I started re-listening to the Sue Grafton mysteries on Audible, starting with A, and going on from there, with the goal of rereading the entire series. I was reading H when my mother died on the first day of 2021.

I’m pushing sixty, so it’s not like the loss of my parents is anything but an ordinary, foreseeable tragedy. But the deaths have hit me hard. I have enjoyed escaping into these books as I walk an hour or two or three a day.

Sue Grafton died in 2017 at age 77, getting ten years less life than my parents had, but having almost completed her alphabet. Z is for Zero, her family tells us, will never be written. Sue’s alphabet ends at Y. and that is oddly appropriate, I think. A Work of Art Is Never Finished, Merely Abandoned, as the saying goes.Still, Sue got a ton done, before vanishing into that other country where my parents now reside.

The series consists of the internal monolog of Kinsey Milhone, a twice divorced, former cop private detective living and working mostly in fictional California city she calls Santa Theresa, a place I thought was real for thirty years. Toward the end, Grafton throws in a few new viewpoint characters, non-recurring,  having perhaps gotten tired of the rendering the single voice for decades.

If you’re interested in Grafton and her life and work, the Wikipedia link here is a good place to start. This post isn’t really about her, or the mysteries, but about my family’s experience of them.

The books are about mortality, for me now, about what a life work should look like, about the length of time I got to spend with my parents, from my birth in 1963 until their deaths the last two years. The alphabet is a yard stick, stretching from the beginning of my college years to my late fifties.

The series begins as contemporary detective fiction set in the early 80s when it was written. She publishes a book a year in the series until M in 1996, as she turned 56 years old, and thereafter it takes he two years per book. She wasn’t able to quit her screenwriting until G is for Gumshoe, which gives you an idea of how hard it is to make a living writing novels, even in popular genres.

The series turns into a period piece relatively quickly, as time passes more slowly for Kinsey than it does for her readers. Y is for Yesterday book ends the series in more ways than one. It contains staged events (in other viewpoints) from 1979, with the action of the book’s present, 1989.

Grafton had no interest in writing about the internet or smartphone culture. Born in 1940, she was a decade younger than my parents; in this she was like my mother, a more extreme technohater. My mother earned a Phd, and wasn’t sure why one had to rewind a video tape. Her cellphone’s ring made her jump a foot in the air–she never learned to answer one. The batteries went dead and they ended up in a pile of newspaper.

So, the Kinsey Alphabet-minus-Z, written from 1982 to 2016, 44 years, span only 7 years of Kinsey’s life, taking us from her mid twenties to her early thirties.

Most non-YA protagonists are in this age range. Old enough to be doing something interesting, to be out of adolescence, but young enough to avoid having to get up three times a night to pee, or experience hot flashes. Each alphabet mystery spans a few days or weeks, with a month or two between books, working gigs Kinsey doesn’t consider worthy of sharing any details.

So Kinsey is falling into a singularity, time slowing, living six times slower than you and I.

And so, Kinsey remains, always, in her prime. On most days running three miles a day, except when she’s too beat up to get out of bed.

My father said, about the late sixties and early seventies, that that was his time, their time, my mother and him, and this struck me as sad, to feel like a creature out of time, on the sidelines, watching an increasingly bizarre game play itself out in their endless wash of twenty four hour news.

So Grafton drifted into her own past, as the years went by, and never had to learn new private detective stuff. Kinsey went to libraries and looked at microfilm and made calls from phone booths and listened to her answering machine and did all these things we now think of fondly.

Unlike my father, a one time computer programmer gradually infuriated by ever new release of Windows. He once owned three computers at once, but by the time he’d died had only a few tablets without keyboards that he hated typing on. Our communication faded away during this time, without email, to the occasional phone call, very brief, as if that generation could never fully understand that long distance phone calls didn’t cost anything anymore.

So I fall into my past, my time with my family, because these are among the only books, certainly the only series, that all of us read. Not sure they both got to Y.

We read them, and spoke of them in no great detail, ever. “That was a pretty good one. H or G. I can’t remember.” But we lived in Kinsey’s head together. The first few paperbacks lived in the stacks of books that never made it into the bookshelves in our house on Westerly Terrace, in the post war boom suburb of my dying home town.

The books are rendered in sometimes excruciating detail, the camera almost always on. They are immersive. They become repetitive. A person doesn’t change all that much, usually, in only seven years. We see Kinsey as a complete human being, frozen in her era.

Living her best life, on her own terms, in her time, the 80s.

What forty and fifty something Kinsey might have become we can only imagine. But we got to live so long ourselves, my parents and I. We avoided being shot in dumpsters or buried by bulldozers, just like Kinsey.

I miss Grafton, even though her work is done and you can really ask much more from life, to find good work to do and to be able to do it. Seventy Seven seems less and less like old age to me, though.

I’ve written and published a stack of shorts and novellas and a few novels; Grafton was ten books into the Alphabet at my age, and just a few years into making her living as a novelist. I feel sometimes I have daydreamed my life away, as I re-read Grafton rather than leap into the literature of this moment.

I have my news addiction for that, as did my parents.

I miss Kinsey. Never knowing what her next story might have been. I dream about Z is for Zero. I have imagined a book where a romance arc sticks; she marries someone again, third times the charm–but dies saving him, heroically. The lover, male most likely, as we never get any sense that Kinsey is anything but heterosexual, gets sucked in to the game looking for her killer, and becomes a vigilante, and finally, a PI in the 90s, as the internet changed everything.

I imagine writing these books, this series, using numbers instead of letters. In fact, I wrote a novella about a writer trapped in a weird dystopia writing these books at gun point. (

I’m trying to remember the titles I gave them… One for the Money, Two Steps Ahead, Three’s a Crowd, Four by Four, Take Five, Deep Six, whatever. You get the idea. Seven Up.

My companion series never has to end. Because I hate endings. Even fulfilling ones.

I miss Grafton, and my parents, and my past, and the worlds that could have been.

So. Now it’s time to write. I will fade away completely, then, not be me, and not miss a thing.

Wish me luck.

The home health aide’s number lights up my phone and she says “you need to come now.”

For a moment I imagine that Mom has come around and is asking for me, even though I saw her a few hours ago, and she was unresponsive, and this seems unlikely.

Sometimes I am told they rally, and there’s one of those last conversations.

“There’s the Happy lamb hot Pot,” my Mom would say, as I drove her home as we hit Mass ave, back when she was eating dinner with us every night, before the plague.

“Do you think the lambs are really happy?”

“Not really, no.”

“Maybe we’ll eat there some day.”

She would sing out the landmarks as we drove past them, proud that she knew where she was and where she was going, even though she was 89, mostly drunk, and suffering from severe memory loss.

The drive to Mom’s assisted living is over in an eye blink and I’m clumping up the stairs and then I don’t want to go in, but if it’s that rallying thing then I should keep moving. I listen at the door. I hear muted TV news. No screams, like the day before yesterday, thank God. But no human voices.

The door is unlocked and the overhead light is far too bright and the aide stands in a cloth mask and bandana, looking up from her phone, and in the other room Mom’s mouth hangs open in the same way my father’s mouth hung open when he died eighteen months ago. There’s some drool on her chest and she doesn’t really look like my mother, but some age-made-up version of her. She aged twenty years in 30 hard days.

I go to her. Her skin is still warm, damp with the exertion of her fight with death, her body perfectly still, and I lay my hand on her forehead, the way I comforted her while she was dying, and it feels the same, really, as if she was alive, but she’s inert. So still. So I try to hug her, an awkward leaning over the hospital bed thing,  and I say the stuff you say. Her eyes are closed. I kiss her between the eyebrows.

I stand up.

“She’s at peace, now, Jay. She’s at peace.”

“Yeah. I know. This had to happen. It’s good. It’s a good thing.””

I turn back to the body, lean in again and whisper  all the things as the aide retreats to the other room. I love you, Mom. You were a great mom. I will miss you. I am glad you aren’t in pain anymore. All the things you say. There aren’t that many.

I go and turn off the overhead lights and turn on the table lamps. MSNBC mutters continually in the background.

“I have called the hospice nurse.” The aide says. She doesn’t tell me to be strong, like she did a couple of times, to stop me from crying and upsetting my mother. When I had to tell Mom she was dying. Over and over again, because she couldn’t remember. I explained to her the cancer out of nowhere, the shadow on the lung, the blood clots, the surgery that failed to save her arm, her blackening necrotic fingertips.

Over and over again, in and around the morphine and ativan.

“They have to pronounce the death,” the aide says.

“I’ll call the funeral place. I picked one out.” Wait. What order do we do this in?

“Yes. Call them now. They will make you wait, so don’t worry, the nurse will get here before.”

I’ve already picked out a cremation place and I click on the link on my macbook but I have not filled out the pre-payment form. I meant to, but the fucking e-commerce was broken in the mobile app. Idiots. So this will cost us more. Well, me more. Who cares. But fuck.

I pace around the unit. I return to hug her again, wordlessly, eyes filling with hot tears. I walk over to the desk and pick up a photo of her holding up a glass of wine in a restaurant in Asheville, Christmas lights shining out of focus behind her. She always smiled best for my father. He took the shot.

“They should use that one,” the aide says. She means for the memorial table downstairs. I remember from my father that you get one week on the table.

Seeing her so alive and so happy in the photo hurts in a way it is impossible to describe. She will never be that way again. Never drink another glass of wine. She will be ash sometime soon. She is very still now.

I text my family. They knew when I left what was happening.

“Do you want me to go with you?” My wife asked as I put myself together to make this trip.

“No,” I said. No reason really. My wife wasn’t very close to my mother. My wife isn’t overly sentimental about death. She’s a rock, in the good and bad sense of that word.

My mother never got that close to my kids, or my brother’s. My parents chose to live 1000 miles away from us. My mom was nice to her grandkids, and they loved her in that way you love your grandparents, but she never talked to them for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. The way I talked with my mother.

“You were a great mom,” I told her, two days ago, when she could still speak.

“Why do you say that?” She asked. Details. I’m dying Darling, give me details.

“Because I could always talk to you. And you always listened. And I never thought I was boring you.” I bored my Dad.

“You were never boring, darling.. Never boring.” She pauses, groping for what to say next. “You were my favorite person to talk to.”

It’s been two years since I could say the same back to her without lying. Her broken memory made conversation a challenge for both of us. But it was one we met, every day, as I walked her around the building. Her mandatory exercise.

“Where are we going,” she would ask. “Just around the building,” I would say.

Like Pooh and piglet walking around that tree, alarmed at the ever increasing numbers of footprints.

“When I was one,” I would start.

“I had just begun,” she would answer.

The sun has set, I came too late, put the visit off, and it’s twilight and nobody in his right mind would be walking this old woman at this hour, in this cold, over the rutted asphalt and raised parking lot speed bumps, around the dark puddles.

But sometimes the sunset was so pretty, and she noticed it over and over again, and remarked on it. It was new to her every time.

That was fun, really. It made her happy over and over again.

“There is our blue dumpster.”

“Truly a beautiful sight to behold.” This was the blue dumpster that had replaced the red one with the Hillary for Prison sticker which we had covered with a Biden bumper sticker a few days before the election.

“When I was two,” I say.

“I was nearly new.”

I’m doing the easy part, the numbers.

“and when I was three–“

“I was hardly me…. where are we again?”

“Just walking around the building.”

“I live here?”

“Yes, when we turn the corner you’ll recognize where we are. You always do.”

“I know. I’m just old, that’s all.”

“You’re not that old, really. You should stop complaining.”

“But that’s what I’m best at. Complaining.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t complain much at all. Now, where were we?”

“What?”

“Four. When you were four.”

“Oh! I was not much more!”

I know the rest. “When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six–“

“–And I’m clever as clever,” she says.

“So I think I’ll be six now–

“–For ever and ever.”

We say the last words together.

As she lay, struggling with the pain, I read to her from the Milne poetry books, When We Were Very Young, and the other one, Now we are six. But I couldn’t get through many of the poems because when you are dying you don’t have a lot of energy for such things, which is really too bad.

I skipped past this poem, that first day I was reading, and went back to it, the second day, the last day, I read, avoiding this, the best one really, because of the name… which was, which is, The End.

I don’t want it to be the end, even if it’s time.

But it is.

And now I’m in the other room writing this, and Natalie the Catily has left her post at my mother’s feet, her mission done, and she won’t let me type. She demands to be petted and the funeral man knocks and he’s in the hall pushing his shrouded gurney and the hospice nurse is sitting at the love seat doing the paperwork, after removing the morphine pump and catheter and the health aide, Francis, stands behind me, and we all wait, because there is more work to do, still, tonight.

Promises to keep, right? And miles to go before I sleep.

Goodbye, Mom. Good night.

Forever and ever.

Losing my father all-at-once, and my mother by degrees to dementia has been hellish.

My parents are in their mid-eighties so, you know, it’s just one of those things, but it seems like, no matter what the age, this is never just one of those things. Long expected deaths, or short sudden ones, like my father’s. It’s impossible to say which is worse, I guess, unless you’ve been around both.

Dear God, don’t let me have both. Though it looks like that is the direction we’re heading.

All this has produced a gap in fiction output. I know that Sheila Williams at Asimov’s will do her best to keep me in print should I get her stories worth publishing, but production schedules mean that I’ll have nothing in print in 2020 most likely, which is too bad, as 2020 is a seriously science-fictional year. At least, to people my age.

Story-telling, which compresses the creative act into a half day producing and performing a five minute bit, has become my substitute for the sustained mental effort of writing fiction. It resonates with the memoire work that I generated spontaneously as I processed all that paperwork.

And all that emotional stuff, too. Not that it’s fully processed. Or ever can be.

I wrote and illustrated a hundred pages about parents life in the 40s through the 60s. My mother’s illness meant all the paperwork, the nitty-gritty of coping with my father’s death, fell to me. And I felt an urgency to extract the stories that might soon be lost forever. Wanting to know my father, more, and better through her, and to escape the endless grinding estate work.

I am really really bad at paperwork. Well. I’m better at it now.

The memoire gathered a small but devoted readership in my FB feed. I may do something with it. Or maybe it’s therapy. I’ll give it some distance to figure that out.

There’s a lot of this dead parent content going around. It’s a generational thing; late boomers, early gen-x’ers parents are dropping like flies.

My parent’s, who had us a few years late by the standards at the time, were a generation known as the lost generation or, less popularly, The Lucky Few, a name they resented as they were born during the great depression.

” As it turned out, we really were very lucky,” as my Mom says.

A small cohort, they moved into job markets that welcomed them with open arms, and open wallets. Being white and educated, they benefited from post WW2 stuff, a GI bill, a booming housing market as the suburbs continued to sprawl, sucking middle class whites out of urban cores. Into that already fading suburban American dream, tracking the rise and fall of mall culture, the tail end of TV as king, phones as immobile objects, computers as props in SF movies or big business machines mailing you inscrutable bills.

My parents were professors. I staggered through my college years… tuition free.

I have been, and continue to be, wildly lucky.

But death has a way of leveling the emotional playing field. I’m a wreck. I feel so much so strongly now. Maybe it’s the bipolar. I struggle now for balance, composure, perspective. I flash back on the death bed, again and again, and long for a chance to really clear the air. Instead of clutching a still warm body ugly-crying out the things I’d never gotten to.

My mother slips away before my eyes and I struggle to remember her as she was, proud and intelligent and independent. A professional, a professor, an intellectual, always one of my best friends, a fact I only admit to myself as she becomes my charge. My responsibility.

My friend is mostly gone, and when I talk to her, really talk, dig deep, half the time there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s lost the thread. She fades in an out, like a ratio station receding from your speeding car on the interstate. Fuzzed with static, then clear, then unintelligible.

The strong, loving, flawed ever-s0-slightly distant, and beautiful people they were are gone for good.

I’m left spewing cliches. Life is precious. Time is limited. Say things while you can, and if I didn’t really listen then you won’t either. I can’t help but repeat them though, now, for you, wise and gentle reader. This reader that somehow I feel closer to than ever.

I feel closer to everyone now.

You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Other than that, there’s literally nothing to be afraid of. And eventually, if you do the work, maybe, you’re not even afraid of that. But I’m happier, in this sadness, knowing the first thing. I’m going to live as if my life matters.

I’ll get back to the writing. Or something even more important, and it will be full of writing stuff no doubt.

But for now…

If your family isn’t a toxic presence you have wisely cut yourself away from, give Mom and Dad a call. Say what you need to say. Now.

It can all change in an instant.

And you’ll wish you had.