Craving the Analog

Or Trying to Avoid Distraction

Still of Addison Rae from her music video for “Headphones On”

There’s no better time or place to listen to music than when in transit, specifically, in the car or on an airplane. In the car, music accompanies the passing landscape like a cinematic score. An ordinary grocery run becomes romantic. A road trip becomes a metamorphic adventure. Listening to music in the car on a good day is like turning the saturation on life up a few notches - the landscape is brighter, the pedestrians more agreeable. There’s no time I feel more like the star of a bespoke sitcom, the day unfurling for me like red carpet on concrete.

Listening to music on an airplane is pleasing for the opposite reason - for the absence of stimuli. Sitting on an airplane for several hours is one of the emptiest sensorial experiences there is. Close proximity and stiff seats render you physically uncomfortable. There are no desirable smells. The steam from reheated chicken parmesan or takeout airport Chinese wafts through the cabin, suppressing any kind of appetite. You stare straight ahead at the seat in front of you, the plastic tray table inches from your face. Even if you have a window seat, your aerial view of the city will turn to monotonous white clouds in minutes once the aircraft reaches its cruising altitude.

All you hear on an airplane is the muffled hum of the engine and the scattered sounds of upset babies. There is no better time than this to sink into a meditative practice, and incidentally, no better time to listen to music. Any album I listen to on an airplane quickly becomes one of my all-time favorites, if it wasn’t already to begin with. Closing my eyes, I can feel every percussive sound flow through me like blood. I swim in every bass riff. Every chord, every strum, every note - I can suddenly understand it all, as if I were in the studio with the artist, composing the track alongside them.

Most airplanes also have those screens on the back of the seats where you can watch movies and TV shows and even stream live sports. For some reason, I feel a real sense of righteousness about these screens. Even on long-haul flights, as soon as I sit down, I turn my screen off, switch it to black. There’s something about the sight of everyone being immobile and dazed - wired in - that’s perturbing. WALL-E-esque. You see it as you walk down the airplane aisle, back from the bathroom - everyone staring, mouths slack, eyes glazed over. Tray tables sticky from ginger ale. Kids, teenagers, adults, the elderly - all tuned out, tapped on the shoulder for a refill of Sun Chips

I guess I find the airplane screens disturbing because they’re a quite public, physical reminder that we are all constantly seeking distraction. Stimulation. Ways to make the time pass faster. But is that such a problem on an airplane, a location where it’s reasonable to force a faster passage of time? Do the mind-numbing minutes not count when they’re spent in a liminal locale? If everyone on that plane had access to teleportation, I’m sure they would opt in - myself included. Teleportation device in hand, I wonder if I would reach for my phone in the few seconds it would take to zap me across the Pacific. Convenience doesn’t mitigate impatience - it stokes it, like coals in a fire pit.

Aside from the airplane, I’m most aware of my propensity for distraction when I’m home alone, which I have been for the past five days. As a teenager, I’d relish nights alone at my house. Not because I threw a house party or went on a solo bender, but because it allowed me to bask in a finite resource, more precious than drugs and gold, and maybe even some friendships: quiet. Growing up in a house of five, quiet is a luxury. Moving around your house without feeling eyes on you, walking downstairs to get a snack without getting peppered with questions, comments, and complaints, taking full control of the TV remote - it all made me feel queen-like. I’d cook elaborate meals, host solo movie marathons, and slink around the house, pretending that it was all my own. That I was an adult woman with a job who could afford a house of her own - a wealthy novelist, publicist, screenwriter, dusting off her trophies before retiring to her California King. Was there anything more glamorous?

Now I am an adult woman home alone, and instead of catwalking through my mansion, I’m skittering around my apartment, tiptoeing to the kitchen to inspect a creak in the floor, to triple-check that the backdoor is locked. I am an adult woman dragging herself to the hardware store, asking where the earplugs are kept (my neighbors won’t stop blasting Tame Impala at 1 AM). “Have a nice sleep,” the hardware store clerk jeers. Little does he know, these bags have been under my eyes since I was six.

Before I leave the hardware store, I slowly survey the aisles. Cole Hardware is a San Francisco-based chain of hardware stores with the motto “Cole. Hardware for the soul,” which may seem overly mushy for a hardware store on the surface. But, incidentally, I would describe my visits there as “soul-fueling.” When suburbanites, like myself, move to a city, they cling to these burb-like institutions. I remember a frenzy ensuing when Wegmans, an East Coast grocery chain, opened a location in Lower Manhattan. NYU students and Greenwich Village millennials flooded Astor Place like Beatlemania, eager to purchase a rotisserie chicken or pre-tossed salad that reminded them of home.

Cold Hardware has the aesthetic of a neighborhood hardware store that would sit in a plaza with large parking spots, sandwiched between a Blockbuster and a UPS outlet, with its neat rows of snow shovels and batteries and fliers for “Hardware Happy Hours,” held on Friday evenings. I walk down the aisles, evaluating the kitchen supplies and buckets and power tools, which all hang on walls out in the open, while shampoo lives behind clerk-manned plexiglass at Walgreens next door.

Cole Hardware, love it here

After I’ve covered all the aisles, the employees are beginning to eye me. If one of them asks if I’m finding everything okay, I’ll tell them that I’m just browsing, but no one browses hardware stores. So I pop over to Luke’s Local next door, which is another San Francisco chain. Luke’s Local is a more upscale grocery store, a cross between Erewhon and a pre-Amazon Whole Foods. The produce is perfectly orbital and unbruised, with evenly toned spheres of orange and green sitting in wooden crates for customers to put in paper bags and place in their carts. There’s local bread and a refrigerated section that contains lemongrass and turmeric root. Expensive fish and meat are sold in a small butcher area, with young butchers twiddling their thumbs on the other side of the glass. One time, I asked one of them if he could skin a halibut filet for me, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to attempt a backflip.

Luke’s Local, love it here, don’t love the prices

I am trying to kill time because I’m home alone, which is spurring some kind of desperation to make the days pass faster. Instead of plugging my corded earbuds into my airplane screen and measuring my flight via movie lengths, I’m considering how long it will take me to walk up and down each aisle of Luke’s Local. I can probably stretch each aisle out to sixty seconds if I walk toe-to-heel, extra slow, and there’s about five or six aisles, so that’s about five or six minutes killed. I can stretch the walk back home out to twenty minutes if I take an extra lap around the park, and when I get home it’ll be around five o’clock, which will only give me another hour until six, which will place me in the safe zone - free to keep myself busy with the operations of preparing dinner and watching a movie and washing the dishes.

I wonder if other people are this methodical about their time - they probably aren’t. Many are plagued by the curse of always being late - I am chronically early. I’ll allot myself an hour to do my makeup and hair and get dressed, and always end up sitting by the door with my shoes on, scrolling my phone for fifteen minutes. My hours, my days, my weeks are all a sprint, which I complete reasonably, only for me to sit and wait. I feel like I’m always waiting, and in the absence of a co-dweller - being home alone for as little as five days - makes the wait feel indeterminable. What I’m waiting for, what I’m hoping to seek with my speed - it’s all a mystery.

Along with the more chic half of Gen Z, I long for more analog living. I ogle at the novelty of print magazines, handwritten notes, corded earbuds, and even the clickwheel of an iPod. I always chop my onions, I’ll never purchase pre-cut garlic. My grandparents roll their eyes at me. After spending so many minutes and hours of their years on tedious tasks, they don’t understand why I’d want to exude more elbow grease. They don’t know what the opposite is like - what it’s like to forget that you have hands. What it’s like to slip through the day like a raindrop on a window pane. Blink and you’ll miss it. They could digitize my consciousness and my day job would never know.

An iPod I was recently gifted. AirPods in picture not compatible.

I try not to use my phone while waiting in a queue or while riding the bus, but it’s hard. Not just because of my distraction addiction, but because not using your phone in idle moments means breaking a social script. Unless you’re above the age of seventy, riding the bus without using your phone is a kind of provocation, almost threatening. I don’t know where to put my hands or face. Looking out the window, reading a book, allowing my eyes to glaze over, staring ahead - it all feels like a kind of performance, like I’m trying and failing to play the part of a person who doesn’t know what Instagram is. Everyone can see through it, including me.

I don’t know why I try so hard to stamp out my desire for diversion. I’m only human, and at a primal level, this is what it means to be human, I suppose. Succumbing to a carnal kind of desire. A lab rat guzzling its cocaine water. My bus arrives at my friend’s apartment twenty minutes before we agreed to meet - chronically early, as per usual. Next time, I’ll just walk, allow my small footsteps to eat up more of the minutes, like they did in the hardware store and the upscale grocer. I trudge up and down the street, not wanting to arrive at her doorstep while she’s still blow-drying her hair. I come across a park where teenage boys are playing basketball.

I circle the court’s perimeter several times before I remember my hands again. I take my phone out of my purse and snap a picture of the flowers on the outskirts of the court. They’re lilac-colored with a deep purple center and poke out of the holes in the fence, as if to touch pedestrians on the street. They might not be anything to behold, but they are real. They’re something to concern my attention with. I’ll take what I can get.

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