Clouds In The Head

So I don’t take my smartphone to bed and noodle around the net or texts or edit a video or sort my photos or do my email before sleep.

My mother might call. She’s dead but she’s always ringing, isn’t she, if you take your phone to bed. It was lovely getting a call from Mum except always inconvenient. I’ll ring you back. I’m just a little busy at the mo. I’ve got five, no four minutes. I’d have to ring back and that was what was lovely because she so often disapproved of what I was up to in my life and I miss her tsk tsk of disapprobation. So I don’t take my phone to bed because my mother not only might call, she will.

I don’t take my smartphone to bed and disrupt my sleeping patterns. I leave the phone “off the hook”. Yes it’s outside the bedroom – not charging of course, because there’s no solar at night. And if it does ring I’ll leap up as it’ll be some emergency. But it can’t fully ring. It can’t really ring.

And it’s off the hook in another way. It’s been snagged on my line all day, tugging my float under, taken the bait, and suddenly it’s free. It’s not going to gaol, it’s not going to be arraigned or arrested or frisked, no bail need be posted. It’s off the hook. The handheld device cum phone vaudeville of the day is over, the act has been the usual combination of awful and wondrous adding up to meh, the big hook came out but as the act was still at that moment (and especially the next) keeping us enthralled, the hook went back, stage left. The fishy phone swam away. No one can really ring. So it stays off the hook. It can have a breather, wind down, kick back, put its feet up, off the hook for the rest of the night, and me as well.

My number’s been disconnected, you see. It’s sleepy bobo time. It’s the Land of Nod, not the Land of Nodding Along to some Facebook thread. (En fait, I usually face some book before I go to sleep – right now it’s Jazz by Toni Morrison.) Not the zing of virtual electric wires shocking me awake. It’s oh so quiet. No one to knock and ring and tap. No “Hallo”, a word wrenched into common parlance by the phone. Because answering the phone required a greeting. Phones always require something. Moshi moshi, digame.

I don’t take my smartphone to bed because of all my hang-ups. About insomnia, and always being “on”, and de-skilling myself of book-reading, and eyesight, and the way it attenuates the day into nothing, and that one last chunk of lost time, and spoiling my dreams with some last-minute digital bullshit, and working till my literal last waking breath that day, and my partner won’t let me, and guilt, and I’ll miss my beauty sleep, and my mother might call, and old-school fomo, and my core human need to be disconnected.

And the memory of the landline life we led before, and the sweet metaphors it spruiked into the night. Moshi moshi, you can hang up now. Just let it ring out. Laters.

Written at 6.15am on a waking dream. PS I highly recommend Jazz by Toni Morrison, especially when you get to the sublime pp 93-97 (ah, Toni) and The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech by Avital Ronell (ah, postmodernism).