Benjamin Titus

In the autumn of 2000, I was a senior in high school, driving a 1986 Mazda B2000 pickup truck with something like 200,000 miles on the odometer. My parents had graciously replaced the radio with a CD playing model and bought me the biggest speakers that would fit behind the bench seat (they weren’t big, but they were mine). The small space between the passenger and driver would have held a zip-up CD organizer and whatever book I was carrying around at the time.

I drove all over northeastern Connecticut, visiting my new girlfriend, spending time listening to acoustic guitar and folk singers at the open mic nights at The Vanilla Bean Cafe, in Pomfret, and going to Woodstock Academy (now, pretentiously and constantly, “The” Woodstock Academy). I am not naive. I was prone to depression and laziness, with no idea that my racing and fixating mind had a diagnosis no one ever brought up. I was uncomfortable in my soft body, oversold on my own intelligence, and I have to suspect I was a bit of a boor, in the way of 17 year old boys who are not actual monsters but whose behavior is nonetheless embarrassing.

I long for those days. Not the people or the content of my life, but the way of living. Being out all day with no way for anyone to reach me unless I called them at the same time they were in the location of the landline phone I dialed, using my parents’ AT&T long distance calling card to check in with them from payphones, letting them know when I’d be home. Carrying a book everywhere and cracking it open at the first sign of boredom. Burning mix CDs for friends and playing the ones they made for me.

I miss the semi-analog, half-digital, technologically liminal moment of my late teens. There’s no going back, of course. But there are small ways I am working to restore the best of that life. A place to write online. eReaders with no other distractions to disrupt the reading. A standalone camera. I am a Gen Alpha Luddite in an Elder Millennial Edgar suit. But little by little, these changes bring me sparks of joy. And the muscles of prolonged concentration have start to twitch and strengthen after nearly two decades of decreasing use.