yes please(63)

I thought of this when I got back to my boys, the elephants and the greeting ceremonies. I told them about how one day we might ride an elephant and they climbed on each other to act it out, switching parts halfway through. I gave them a bath and put lotion on their skin. I realized how lucky my life is. And theirs. I lay in bed and thought about time and pain, and how many different people live under the same big, beautiful moon.





the robots will kill us all:


a conclusion


IN 1997, I PROUDLY DECLARED I WOULD NEVER OWN A CELL PHONE. I was on a New York City street corner and I was young, poor, and knee-deep in free time. A bunch of us were standing around smoking. A cigarette was my cell phone back then, a tiny social unit that helped me fill the day. Suddenly, we noticed Lou Reed walking our way. He strutted toward us like a grouchy mayor in a leather jacket. A Lou Reed sighting was like the first robin in spring; seeing him meant your life was opening up and you finally lived in New York City. He passed by us and we all exhaled. One of my friends took out his cell phone and pretended to call the National Enquirer. It was one of those “flip phones,” a tiny pocket-sized clamshell that looked like a lady razor or a makeup compact. I held it and felt its weight.

“Nope,” I said. “I just don’t need it. Cell phones aren’t for me. What am I going to do? Carry this thing around all day?”

When I was growing up, the Poehlers were the lower-middle-class family that had high-end gadgets. We had an amazing answering machine. It was as big as a toaster oven and used full-sized cassette tapes. I would come home and see the light blinking, excited that someone had tried to call us even when we weren’t around. I would rewind the tape with a giant button and listen to a strange voice asking me to renew my subscription to Seventeen magazine. That answering machine was a big deal. We fought over who would leave the outgoing message, each one of us believing that we could find the right mixture of humor and gravitas beneath our excruciating Boston accents. The answering machine was my personal secretary. I would run home after school and change the outgoing message as needed. “Keri, I am going to the mall. Meet me at Brigham’s and if you get there first order me a chocolate chip on a sugar cone with jimmies.” Sometimes you went somewhere and people didn’t show up. There was no way to instantly reach them unless you went to their house or called them on their home telephone number.

MTV arrived not long after. I would spend hours watching this incredibly cool and new station while thinking, “Finally, someone GETS ME.” I was ten years old and receiving a crash course in adult life. MTV introduced me to punk music and gay people. I met Michael Jackson and his talent split me in half. I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind.

HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had no business subscribing to HBO, with the little money we had, but Bill Poehler did not scrimp when it came to TV. I was a TV kid. There was no limit to how much I could watch. I even ate in front of the TV. (My parents will wince at this, but more than once we ate in the living room with TV trays or at the kitchen table with the kitchen TV on.) If we had the money we probably would have put a TV in every corner of our house. My parents didn’t pay much attention to what I was watching because they were too busy working and remortgaging their house. I watched things on HBO that were much too scary and adult for my still-forming sponge brain. Seventies and eighties movies were obsessed with devil kids (The Omen, The Exorcist) and rapey revenge (The Last House on the Left, Death Wish). There were moments in those films that were just scary and sexy enough to burn into my brain and haunt my subconscious for years. But mostly, HBO was about ADULT CONTENT, and that meant movies about Divorce and Intrigue and Betrayal. I learned how adults communicated from watching movies on HBO. I also learned what made me laugh. I watched every comedy I could find: Annie Hall, Caddyshack, Fletch, and Airplane! I sat next to the TV and transcribed The Jerk in blue composition notebooks. I thought about comedy. I thought about being a writer. Technology was creeping into my life in slow and manageable ways. The Future was Almost Now!

I spent my entire college career without a cell phone or e-mail. I typed my papers on a Brother word processor, which had a window that showed five sentences at a time and had a tendency to go on the fritz and make you lose all your work. I typed papers in my dorm and printed them out in my hallway, because I didn’t want to bother my roommate with the loud mechanical noise of the Brother spooling out “Tiny Fists: The Use of Hands in the Early Poems of e. e. cummings.” When I moved to Chicago, I used a paper map that folded in your lap to navigate the city. There was no Internet, no e-mail, no texting, no FaceTiming, no GPS-ing, no tweeting, no Facebooking, and no Instagramming. A few people in the late eighties had giant cell phones that lived in tiny suitcases, and I saw some in movies. I became aware of the existence of e-mail and considered checking out this company called America Online, but the film WarGames had taught me that the computers could start a nuclear war so I decided to wait and see. In the meantime, I wrote letters and maintained a healthy dose of eye contact. I still carried an address book.