MISSING FRIENDSHIP

The Illusion of Involvement

Driving around the country a couple of years ago for a book I’m writing, I noticed an odd and frustrating phenomenon: people baffled about their own location, confused about their own coordinates. In Louisiana one evening, not far from Shreveport, I stopped at a rural mini-mart for gas and to buy snacks for the next leg of my trip. I was avoiding the interstate – so boring; the tail-ends of semis all look alike -- and piecing together my jagged route state highway by state highway, visiting towns whose names I liked the sound of. (In Louisiana, that’s a lot of towns.) I set down my barrel-size cup of Mountain Dew and my pouch of beef jerky on the counter and asked the young clerk in a half-unbuttoned blue dress shirt with a Rorschach Blot ink stain on the pocket how to get to Friendship, a town that I knew to be twenty miles away or so. I had a road atlas in my Jeep Cherokee and didn’t need the cashier’s help, but I hoped to make conversation and grab an anecdote. 

“Not sure,” he said. “Friendship? Don’t you have a map app?”

“Phone’s dead.” The truth. “Have you been to Friendship?”

“Sure.”

“It’s east of here. Slightly northeast of here. Correct?”

He frowned and shrugged and gazed off to his right at a kid in a ballcap skulking in the candy aisle, a possible shoplifter. “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

Two days later, in Arkansas, it happened again, and not for the last time on my trip. On this occasion I merely wanted directions to the freeway from a crossroads town about ten miles south of it. No idea. Didn’t I have a phone? In rural gas stations, I would have thought, clerks were asked for directions constantly; as a teenager, I’d worked in one myself. But we’d also pumped customers’ gas for them back then, and checked their oil and squeegeed their bug-smudged windshields. 1978. You stored your location in your head back then, mixed in with phone numbers and handy metrics such as sixteen ounces make a quart and the equator is something miles around. 25,000? (Got it! Just looked it up.)

Skip to last summer. Another drive, another sort of ignorance. This time, mine. I’d been booked to appear on a podcast in Los Angeles and I thought I would drive there from my Montana home as way of relieving Corona cabin fever. I was apprehensive about the journey. On the news and on social media it appeared that the City of Angels had gone to hell, with mobs of spitting, shouting rioters snatching designer boots through shattered windows. I’d bought a new Dodge truck three months before and was still babying it with wax and chamois cloths; I didn’t want it dented with a hurled brick. Nor did I wish to catch the dreaded virus, said to be rampant in these parts. Nor be trapped in a closed city, shut out of restaurants and other urban pleasures. If the podcast hadn’t required on-site recording and been hosted by a writer I admire, I might have stayed put. Though I doubt it. I do like drama, so long as it doesn’t ding my doors and fenders.

Los Angeles appeared mellow, the same old place. Sushi everywhere. Old folks walking chow chows. Decidedly mellow, but fairly bustling, too. I had my truck detailed. I’d been misled. At my hotel an attendant in the business center heard me mention my home state and offered her sympathies for its tragic condition as a pit of contagion and needless death allowed to fester by cruel Republican leaders. (Our governor then was a Democrat). I reassured the lady: “It’s not that bad.” She looked skeptical, clearly convinced that she knew better. “It’s all over Facebook. It’s on the news,” she said. Her concerned look made me question my own experience. “It’s an awfully big state, so I might be wrong,” I offered. She brightened, her faith in her sources reaffirmed. “I’m surprised by how nice it is here, in fact,” I said then — a gentle suggestion that we’d both been misinformed. “It’s always nice here,” she answered. “It’s LA.” We parted by telling each other to “stay safe,” but I felt a bit melodramatic when I said it. She did not, I sensed. She knew I’d soon be returning to Montana, that reputed mass grave in the mountains. I think she pitied me.

                                                            ***

Ever think about the names of tech products? How very backwards and upside-down they are? Zoom. For a product that requires you to sit. Windows. For a product that has you stare at an opaque object. IPhone. For a product that merges you in the herd. Not only are such names inaccurate, they are premeditated outright lies. The question is what, exactly, is being lied about? Why confound immobility with motion, open vistas with pixelated screens, and independence with entry to the hive? Why the bait and switch? It must be because we’re attracted to the one things but don’t as much desire their surrogates.

Ah, but just give the conversion process time. Soon, you’ll forget that soaring isn’t sitting and that in windows one sees trees but in Windows one just sees pictures of them. Soon you’ll not know that your I is not a We. But most of all what you’ll not recall, eventually, is where on earth you even are, or what on earth, or that you are on earth.

And reports on the situation in Los Angeles will be the situation in Los Angeles. So no need to go there -- and in fact you probably shouldn’t, because it might alienate you from the imagery. And that will prove painful, a conflict, a kind of fracture. It will threaten your illusion of involvement.

Tremendous events are happening as we both sit here – political crises, clashes of crowds and cops, economic shifts, a health emergency – but they are happening most acutely elsewhere, igniting local repercussions, yes, but at moderate levels that can be ignored in ways that the main events, on our screens, cannot be.  I know certain French philosophers have explored this, the triumph of representation and simulation, the displacement of the primary by the secondary and the subsequent rise of the tertiary and so on, and you may already have read their treatises and digested their playful, penetrating ironies. But even if you have, so what? You still have to pick a dimension to exist. You still have to rest your physical eyes on something, or at least your aching butt. You can’t just float in a dream ether of byte-scapes.

And you certainly can’t if you want to get to Friendship. 

Whatever it’s like there. I never visited. I got irritable and tired that humid night and checked into a chain motel and watched the national news and fell asleep, then woke up the next morning and hit the interstate. Truck bumpers. Numbered exits. No intersections. Satellite radio streaming in from space and playlist that might have been chosen by a computer but was hosted by a woman with a deep voice who never revealed her location, not that it mattered. She had to be out there somewhere. Didn’t she?

 All I know about Friendship is its name.