All This Life

Since the morning of the mass suicide, since Paul and his son saw the band members jump, since Jake posted the clip online, since he saw his boy tearing up his room with a baseball bat, Paul hasn’t had a bowel movement. It’s like everything is dammed up behind a wall of worry. Fear, concern for his son. For his whole generation, really. Their crass way of publicizing everything. Paul didn’t even know how to play fantasy football, so he doesn’t know the first thing about Twitter or Instagram and the like, these technologies that make it seem like a good idea to share shrapnel from your life, meaningless slivers of each day: Here is the frittata I had for breakfast and check out this cloud pattern in the sky and here is a pic of me laughing with old friends having the greatest time ever and isn’t this a clever way to decorate cappuccino foam?

None of it made any sense. The whole thing has been easy for Paul to dismiss. They’re kids. And kids are stupid. If these inane devices were around when Paul had a full head of hair, he’d probably have pecked his days away, too, mark his every thought with photos or emoticons. Which, if he’s being honest, is his least favorite thing about texting with his son. He’s accepted that he has to do it. A phone call is like a unicorn. So he texts like all parents clumsily do, but it would make it so much more digestible if his boy didn’t include an infantry of emoticons with every communication.

And what’s the deal with all the exclamation points? Why is that the preferred way to punctuate each prosaic phrase? From downstairs, he’s texted his son if he’d like a bagel for breakfast, and from upstairs, the boy texts back, “Sesame!”

It all makes Paul feel so old. So irrelevant. He’s sexually irrelevant and emotionally irrelevant and socially irrelevant, and if he keeps pretending that certain advancements in the workplace don’t exist he’ll soon be occupationally irrelevant, and in a few years Jake will go off to college and his wife’s already gone, so Paul will be left familially irrelevant, and that will be the end result of his life.

It’s not just kids, though. That really bugs him. Paul has to basically police his coworkers, or they’ll fiddle around on Facebook all day. He might not have his own account, but he gets the gist of how it works. What’s so satisfying about liking something? How could that ever fulfill you? Why scroll through posts and pictures and links? Why comment on other human beings’ updates when you’ve walked by twenty people on the street and didn’t take the time to talk to any of them?

If he tried to pinpoint his disdain, that would be the bull’s-eye — the isolation. He wants to tell his son, Don’t rush to spend time by yourself. Don’t hurry to alienation. It’s an inevitable destination. Time will eventually shroud you like velvet curtains, blacking out everything.

You’d think Paul would be a perfect candidate for social media, someone jettisoned from his family, his real-world community, somebody without any outlet, no way to express his feelings except one sour thought at a time, but this loneliness has the opposite effect. It’s made him irate at smartphones and computers, and he’s convinced that Jake wouldn’t be in this current mess if it weren’t for the Internet. If it weren’t so easy to share things online. Paul protests its existence by staying as offline as much as he can without getting fired. He pickets each technological advancement by pretending it doesn’t exist.

What does exist, and what is currently being digested by Paul, is a laxative. He and Jake stopped by the pharmacy on their way to Jake’s therapy. The boy waited in the car, and Paul ran in and asked for “the strongest laxative alive.”

The young lady working the register made a food-poisoning face, shook her head, then said, “Try aisle eight.”

He bought the one with the best copy on the box, and he tore into it in the parking lot.

With the laxative in his system, Paul climbed into the driver’s seat with renewed faith that things were about to get better — if not better, at least he’d drop this extra freight — and this assured feeling lasted until he realized that Jake was in the back seat now. He had been up front during the drive over. Paul had squawked about breaking that habit of sitting back there, get up front, act like an adult, etc., and Jake had caved and sat sullenly next to him, listening to music on his iPhone while they drove to the pharmacy.

“This is my reward,” Paul said aloud as they made their way.

Jake didn’t hear him, of course, kept bobbing his head to the beat of the song only he could hear, and Paul could only wish that laxative luck — things were bottled up and backing up further with each infuriating second.