Will Hicok Low:
Checking His Love Trance, a Cup He Took Full Brimm’d (1885)

"I still feel compelled to check in from time to time
and seem to possess no reliable defence against Checking Out before I exit."

It seems to be the nature of social media that the mere act of checking in insidiously transforms into a form of checking out. All intentions aside, once inside, things naturally guide the eye to other, often unrelated, entries, before a trance completely overtakes the proceedings. I might consequently feel lucky to make it back out of there alive, though I sometimes feel as though I exclusively exit as some form of undead. Not quite dead yet, I wash up like an exasperated, if better-informed fish. I will have inevitably gained some remarkably arcane knowledge, often the kind with no obvious practical application, though somehow nonetheless supremely satisfying, as if I’d gorged on popcorn or salad dressing. My palate will feel temporarily satisfied without growing much more sophisticated.

My CheckingIn/CheckingOut boundary becomes my primary dichotomy. I seem unable to maintain a stable relationship between seeking important information and settling for the barest, most useless trash. I seem to have become unnaturally attracted to every bright/shiny, regardless of its quality. The sleezy seems roughly equivalent to the consequent, so I lose my usual ability to distinguish between the two classes. My once-discriminating taste ignores textures and might even temporarily prefer a few sweet things over anything more substantial. I consume empty calories, which even seem to temporarily satisfy me, though I start feeling hungry again almost immediately.

The volume of seemingly useless trivia I’ve retained astounds even me, but since everybody seems to be absorbing the self-same stuff at ever-increasing rates, I gain no real advantage in trivia games. Everybody already knows the real names of each of the Three Stooges and is also well aware of the technological advantages US troops enjoyed in WWII’s South Pacific campaign. No detail seems too trivial to become the subject of somebody’s TikTok video. Likewise, no trivia qualifies as too arcane to break the endless chain of oddly related links. Judy Garland’s half sister’s hairdresser even seems to be an utterly reasonable topic for a little forty-minute biopic. My mind juggles virtual bubbles filled with something much more vacuous than nothing.

“Accidentally” leaving my phone behind seems a reasonable defence against my ever-eroding CheckingIn/CheckingOut boundaries. Same with road trips, which were once the ultimate distraction from everyday existence but have now become as close to full-emersion experiences as I seem to get. The Muse and I actually converse without one or both of our noses maintaining connection to whatever the algorythm’s serving. She asks how I’m doing because it occurs to her that she doesn’t know. We hadn’t thought to actually check in with each other, separated as we were by half a living room and different algorithms. I find her question to be bordering on the unanswerable because I’d been Checking In or Out so often that I’d forgotten to ask myself the same question.

Intimacy seems an increasingly rare commodity as we spend our days immersed in the strangest sort of privacy. My security protocols ensure that nobody peeks over my shoulder when I’m scrolling, but something else prevents me from fully connecting to whatever I’m doing when I’m feeling so secure in there. I am not very often creating lasting memories. I was joking that time stands still after entering there, but that’s certainly a lie I tell myself to pretend I engage in activities of little to no consequence, when there’s quite literally no such experience. Whatever I do that I feel might be of no consequence might just be the most consequential. It might actually matter whether I’m CheckingIn or CheckingOut, or not feeling quite capable of determining which I’m engaging in at any particular moment. I still feel compelled to check in from time to time and seem to possess no reliable defence against Checking Out before I exit.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz