i went mostly offline and then all this happened

without the internet, my family steps into it; our wild and crazy offline Friday night

We're moments before dinner now and Wilder wants to watch TV. Normally, this would irk me - all we do is watch TV this is all part of the problem of our screen addicted time we are screen addicted and disconnected and blah blah and also blah - but not today.

Today, the third day of my self imposed “vacation” from being online all the time, I have no problem with the TV. "Let's watch a real movie," I say.

"Cars??" he asks.

"No," I say, “Home Alone.”

I put it on and we start it up as the house fills with the warm smell of the turkey and sweet potato shepherd's pie Lauren's making in the kitchen.

About two minutes into the movie and Wilder’s seen enough. "I don't like this," he says.

"It's a classic," I say.

"Cat in the hat," he says - his new favorite show. Martin Short absolutely Martin Shorts all over his portrayal of Cat and frankly, its too much. Ruins the whole thing.

"Look here comes the hero!" I say, as a seven year old Maculie Culkin, the patron saint of my childhood, walks in. He's cheesing hard for the camera and we're eating it up cuz he's a cutie pie and we know it's about to get dark. Could such a movie even get made today? He was home alone for days. The trauma. We live in strange times. 

One of his other classics, Richie Rich, used to be my favorite movie. He's super rich, but he has no friends I'd think, watching a bootleg copy of the VHS in our tiny apartment. He's just like me. 

Wilder somehow says no and so I go back and scroll and scroll until we settle on some Mickey Mouse Christmas bullshit.

Now this would usually be a Prime Time For Scrolling The Internet - not enough time to 'do work' but in no way an invitation to relax because how could I when there is more work to be done. And so a compromise is made - I'll just look for a minute, I'd tell myself, checking my email and my feeds and then all of it again and again until I find something somewhere online that gives me a hit of that which I most fear: my own self-worthlessness, quantified and True. 

But not today. Instead, I grab a book, Finite and Infinite Games by philosopher James Carse, and I do some frikkin reading. Life, Carse argues, is made up of at least two types of games - finite games and infinite games – bam, there it is, the titular line, right away. You'd never see Fitzgerald start his book with "There he was - The Great Gatsby." 

The point of a finite game is to win. The point of an infinite game is to keep playing the game.

Carse wrote the book in 1978, long before the social web. I wonder which category the internet would fall into? A game you can't stop playing where no one can win. That's no game at all, and yet it feels like one? 

"Dinner time!" Lauren said.

I spring up and confirm - "Dinner time!"

"It's not ready," Wilder says.

"It’sready."

"It's noOot."

"No it is look."

"Fine," he says and climbs up his montessori ass high chair thing. "Puuuush" he demands, so I push him in close to the table.

He hold up a lil glob of turkey. "What's this?"

"Turkey" Lauren says.

He takes a bite, savors it, then says "It's good," with the surprised pomp of a Michelin star critic.

"Eat more of it ok?"

"IwannawatchTV" he says real fast, a deranged smile on his face.

"We gotta have some patience ok?" 

He responds by putting his hands together in a prayer.

"TV?"

"Not yet."

"I do patience!!"

We laugh because somehow he has learned that doing prayer hands is patience and it’s so cute and is, in a way, actually patience but also not really since he does it for about half a second before demanding whatever it is that he wanted.

"Ok we need a little more ok?"

"I eat chicken I dooo0o."

"Two bites," Lauren says.

He eats two tiny bites.

"Ten bites," I say.

He gets to seven bites and falls apart.  "I dooo0oooo want TV!" he says.

So far, so fine

Just because it's an obvious truth doesn't make it any less potent – defaulting offline has been…helping. I know I sound like one of those people who just started doing intermittent fasting and is PSYCHED TO SHARE HIS RESULTS WITH YOU IT’S NOT EVEN A BIG DEAL YOU JUST SHORTEN YOUR EATING WINDOW HONESTLY I'M NOT EVEN HUNGRY HONESTLY I AM SO GOOD MY WIFE LEFT ME BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO EAT AT ALL HOURS AND I SAID NO CAN I INTEREST YOU IN A BACON SANDWICH THE BREAD IS MADE OF LARD.

Most notably, time slows. Days last for eternities (he says, after three literal days) Nights are the hardest.  What do I…do? Just sit? My friend Nate, who inspired this project, said he'll sometimes just sit on a couch and think for a half hour or more. Thirty minutes? Of nothing?

I did not know we were allowed to do that.

Mornings are also hard. Take this morning as an example. After an hour of solid work, I decided to look up one teensy weensy thing online. I plug the ethernet cable back into the desktop computer with the purpose of looking one little thing up. Or was it to check the slack message I saw I'd gotten last night and am now checking  and am now anxious and am now avoiding by looking for other slack messages which aren't there so I'm now looking for emails which are always there and now I'm balls deep in the All Mail folder of my email sinking into its quicksand until I see what looks like a rope, a lifeline, a substack essay someone wrote about this very topic and now I'm reading that piece and now I'm clicking on that little notification bell with the red "2" and now I'm in my dashboard and now I'm fucked. 

I spent the next hour and a half scrolling and clicking and taking notes and making plans as my moodscrolling becomes doomscrolling until I am saved by the yell of my son Wilder's cry from his crib – "mama dada where aarrr you??"

Where am I, indeed.

After Dinner

In a move that surprises no one, Wilder once again demands TV. Usually we'd cave and turn it on. I’d then seethe with a pathetic, typical rage:

DON’T YOU SEE WILDER THIS IS HOW IT STARTS FIRST A TV SCREEN THEN A PHONE AND THEN THEY’LL STICK IT RIGHT IN YOUR EYE WE HAVE ONE CHANCE TO SAVE YOU AND ITS NOW WILDER HERE TAKE THIS LITTLE KNAPSACK ON A STICK (KNAPSTICK?) AND RUN FOR THE HILLS JUST NO SCREENS UNLESS YOU GET LOST THEN USE THIS IPHONE 15 TO GET HOME WE LOVE YOU BYE OH WAIT BEFORE YOU GO HERE TAKE A LARD BACON SANDWICH

Not today, though. Today, Offline Alex does something unexpected. With no malice and even a twee bit of joy in my voice, I say, "Who wants to play a game?"

"I'm going to hide the cars and you have to go find them." I explain, referring to the 15 hot wheel cars Wilder now protects in his 'car bucket' as if they were his own children.

"Okay!!!" he says and runs into a corner and closes his eyes displaying an unfathomable and frankly disturbing level of cuteness throughout. 

I hide the cars while he keeps running toward us with his eyes wide open he doesn't yet understand the rules they do not matter to him they are not even real yet and violating them means nothing.

He searches for the cars and finds about half. We run it back and I hide them way out in the open to help him find them all and, next time, he still doesn't but it doesn't matter because he's reached quantum levels of cuteness, reacting to each car he does find with such an over-the-top earnestness that you'd hate coming from an adult who did theater in high school but here? Wilder? Magic.

Maybe this is what's changing? There's more room available for me to make decisions that aren't reacting to the stock exchange paced internet that I'm also living inside of at any given moment?

He's now found the Wonderboom speaker bluetooth thing and is asking for music. My phone is…nowhere to be found, so I ask Lauren for her phone and put on Queen radio on Spotify and now we're grooving.

"Watch this" he says, spinning around while bop bop bopping.

“Watch this” I say, spinning around on one leg.

“Watch this” Wilder says, spinning around just like last time but different but the same.

“Watch this” I say, kicking my legs out one at a time.

“Watch this” Wilder says, running to the kitchen making a tight turn back running past me to the front door another tight turn and back to me for a spin and fall.

“Watch this” I say, with an extra fast spin that makes me dizzy.

“Watch this” he says, running to the kitchen giggling now making a tight turn back running past me to the front door another tight turn and back to me charging right at me and falling into me laughing and giggling and we're in heaven.

I know things are great because even the barking of Robert, a dog who categorically does not allow anyone in the house to have fun, dance, or high five, isn't bothering me.

I plop onto the couch and feel the urge to film everything that's happening so I put Lauren's phone on camera mode swipe right for video and hit the big red button but the music stops. We cannot do both, the universe says, and so we simply don’t film this magic which perhaps makes it only more so? Or is it a loss? We could have had a record of this, but we don't. There could have been more, but there's less. Which is better, I no longer know.

Earlier

I think back, now, to Wilder and I's afternoon together. We went to the library but it was closed for Veteran's day and so we went to the mall instead.

I wonder how different that afternoon would have been had I been phone'd up, that is to say aware of my phone and how I could, at any moment of discomfort or boredom or anything, disappear into it.

It's almost like I've got my family - Lauren and Wilder - and my mistress - the internet. The online world inside my phone is full of possibility or, as the bizwhiz kids say, optionality. Is this what I've been running from? This…reality of my life? This consequence of my decisions up to this point? Online, I am all possibility with no reality, not really.

Except that unreality never satisfies. It's designed not to. If it did, it'd become real and hard and annoying and no longer call to you like the seductive siren song of an infinite game that cannot be won. So not a game at all, but its simulacra (nice philosophy word bro).

Who needs VR glasses when we're already living inside the virtual reality experience now, here, on fuckin Facebook. 'Virtual reality,' itself a paradox like imitation crab, cannot be won or lost because it is not real. That's the point.

But today, briefly, I have been without it. Not that I've stopped thinking about it, of course, but I can feel the flames dying out and in their place a boring, beautiful realness coming into view. Has this always been here, waiting for me to see it?

How can one ever feel like enough when the entire connected world sits waiting, one swipe away. How can even this bliss of an afternoon with me and my son compare to the unknown magic of literally everything else? It can't, and yet it's better than all of it combined for no other reason than it's what is actually happening right now.

Here, in one afternoon, I remember so much. Like Wilder asking for a snack and rejecting the pouch demanding FOOD in his BUCKET and so I put cheerios in his little container with handles that he can stick his little fingers into, and he ‘eats’ them all by which I mean he eats about 40% and spills the rest onto the floor before asking for a refill.

Would I have remembered that if I'd been on my phone? And if I had, would I have taken the time to write it down?

How about the early twenties couple in front of us in line for the mall’s train that takes you from one end of the mall to the other who were making out so violently it looked like both of their tongues were the alien in the movie aliens trying to destroy the other.

I'd probably not have remembered Wilder and I debating whether the mall would be open if the library was closed and me explaining that the mall is always open because money talks.

Or us goofing around in the barnes and nobles and then me saying we had to find the potty and him saying "YOU?" and me saying yea and the barnes and nobles bathroom being closed, a weird veteran's day move but okay, and us instead going to the AMC theater and cramming into a little stall where I pooped and Wilder narrated to the entire and honestly pretty full bathroom in vivid detail everything that was happening in our stall including, "Oooh I see a poopoo now dada" until I asked him to stop and he instead opened the stall door which I panic-closed and told him to keep narrating. 

Maybe. Honestly, maybe. But I sort of doubt it.

Lauren joins in

Night time and we’re still dancing. Lauren joins in and says "Watch this." She does that criss cross arms on knees thing that I think is supposed to create the illusion that your legs are flowing through one another? Unclear and made more so by Lauren's rendition. Wilder hits her back with a spin and she responds with another jello leg cross. Wilder then begins running and Lauren begs him to try her move - "please," she says, "watch this" and I notice and I start laughing hard and so does she and Wilder's cheesing and here we are in the infinite game of it all.

There is no way to win this game. We don't even know the rules. The point is to keep playing. The rules change accordingly and with zero effort. Without any sense that someone even could win at this game, we let go of competition and begin to truly play. 

You can't win because we've already won. This is it. The infinite.

The dancing continues until bath time. Wilder brings the wonderboom speaker into the bath and the game continues.

I plop on the couch and grab my computer and start to write all of this down, reflecting on how fundamentally different this all might have been if I'd been tethered into the internet.

FOHI™

Maybe it isn’t FOMO we’re afraid of but it’s opposite - fear of hanging in (fohi™) - the seemingly unbearable weight of sitting in the mundane truth of the present moment, full of so much nothing that we can’t help but experience the truths of a life: our knees hurt, someone we love is gone, and everyone in the AMC Americana bathroom is being updated in real time on the status of our bowels.

The urge to escape a feeling is one I know well. I’ve spent a life doing it, and I gotta say - not a huge fan. I mean, in the moment of escape, sure, it’s nice or at least it’s…nothing, since I am not there to experience it, but in the long term? 

Say at the end of my life, I was shown two super fast forward movies of my life. In one, I’m scrolling through the internet on my computer and phone for 60% of it, and in the other, I’m…not doing that, spending that time instead with Lauren and Wilder and my friends and the painful realities of a life well lived - and you asked me which one I’d preferred to have lived, it’d be a no brainer. 

And yet in the moment, today, it feels impossible to choose that path. Because we’re stuck, here in the maze of the web, digging ourselves deeper into a debt that can never be repaid. If only we could find our way out and unlock the door and free ourselves from this.

This is the promise of a game that cannot be won. There is no door to unlock because no one is keeping us here. The door is wide open. All we gotta do is take a breath, say “Watch this” and walk on through.

Paid subscribers also get a daily record of what my life has been like offline. That link is available here.

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🧡 Comments

1. describe your infinite game?

3. what’s keeping you from getting offline more?

5. Fav McCulie Culkin movie? how the hell do you spell his name if only there were a way to find out

6. do you want me to write more about this infinite game book? I could write a whole big essay if ppl want but like idk