Emergency Gaylert System

I keep tapping my old phone to watch the blank lock screen light up. Its contents have been transferred to a sleeker, younger model, wrung out like a sopping wet towel. For now, the phone’s battery is slowly dying, and I am sitting with it like it’s a dog being put to sleep. This is my vigil. The data has left. It bided its time, waiting for an upgrade, and then jumped; a parasite. This is its goal: to find a more powerful host when the old one begins to churn and falter to a pulp. It resurrects inside a new body before the old one dies. But even then, the data never dies. It’s merely dormant and patient. The discarded phone stays on, but is completely empty until it powers down. It has nothing to it. It is the only thing in this world that is alive without a soul. It is alive when it shouldn’t be. It is an abomination.

There is going to be an emergency alert sent to every phone in America tomorrow, October 4th. FEMA and the FCC are running a test that they’ve done since 2011. I don’t remember the others. Maybe they were never reported on before. Tomorrow, at 2:20 EDT, every single cell phone, TV, and radio will blare that wretched electric grind—the sound of a garbage disposal—simulating what our warning would be before some impending catastrophe: nuclear, weather, other. I’m not sure what good it would do if it was real. By then, whatever annihilation befalling us would already be in the process. In media res. There is no escape, but here—listen to this horrible noise. Cell phone towers across the country will be broadcasting this test for 30 minutes, and there is a makeup date in case severe weather postpones it. An emergency alert test being ruined by an actual emergency.

Sometimes I think about if the kind of event these tests simulate were to take place; some phones would survive and still be connected to the cloud. The phones wouldn’t be blaring the signal in continuum until they also powered off; there would just be silence punctuated by notifications. Google alerts, calendar reminders, alarms. Imagining a gay’s phone, lost or left behind in a mass evacuation, dinging “TAKE PREP.”

My friends and family like to say I’m a doom monger, and excited by chaos. I can’t argue with them. I alienated almost every person in my life in the months before COVID shut down the country, when it was still a mystery pneumonia. I saw myself as the town crier, ringing the bell, warning, texting articles, daily death tolls. My chicken little ass. It’s not that I enjoy calamity. It’s the opposite, actually. I hate it. It’s just that someone has to worry about it, and ruminate on it, and obsess over it. And that someone is me. I took up that mantle when I was a kid, when I understood there was too much to be afraid of in this world to not be fixated. I am codependent with doom. I am in Doom Al-Anon. I tend to it like a lighthouse keeper, clutching a wet lantern and climbing the spiral stairwell into oblivion. I am on Lexapro and Wellbutrin.

***

A lot has happened in the last week. It became October. Taylor Swift was contacted by the government to start dating Travis Kelce and going to NFL games, for the good of our crumbling Republic. Kelce plays for the Kansas City Chiefs. Do I sound convincing when I rattle off that fact? I’ll have you know, I was was already following him on Instagram. Months ago, a straight girl friend tipped me off to his hetero hotness and hetero charmingness. And he is hot. And seemingly charming, in that way the popular boys in your class who flirted with female teacher and never suffered were charming. He’s 6’5” and looks like a contestant on the Bachelorette who gets to the end but doesn’t win. He looks like a steak with a mouth. He has bright blue eyes; “OK, we get it” blue eyes. He talks about mental health and has a good relationship with his mother. He asked TayTay to come to one of his games, like one of those incel-adjacent teen boys in the mid-2010s who publicly asked famous women like Mila Kunis to come to their high school proms. This was after he made a friendship bracelet for her.

There was radio silence after he asked. No emergency alerts. Taylor is very busy, you know, making a literal billion dollars and being a CIA asset. She doesn’t have a lot of time for anyone, especially men. The last time she dated a guy, she went off script and dated a human pillow case with an oil ring on it in. No one wanted that, especially the United States Government. And to make matters worse, he wasn’t even American. No more British beaus for Taylor! They probably come down on her about her Matty Healy era, maybe cutting the power in her Manhattan penthouse, just to let her know: We’re not happy. So, I wouldn’t blame Tay if she had just ignored this Travis man and carried on making money. But soon duty called, and Citizen Taylor was seen in the VIP section of an NFL game, cheering Travis Kelce on, alongside his sweet mother. It was time for her to clock in and clap for this man while he ran around on a field of fake grass.

Last night she was seen at a Chiefs/Jets game in New Jersey, again in the VIP, alongside another Government Psyop: Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Antoni Poworski from Queer Eye was there, too, for some reason.

He looked like he was disassociating, like any fag at a football game would. It is the only time I’ve ever related to him.

***

The Writer’s Strike ended last week, too. I was out to dinner and left my phone in the glove compartment of the car because I was stressed and promised myself I wouldn’t look for updates. At some point, I asked my husband to check if there were any updates in the negotiation. He pulled his phone out and Googled, and after a few moments, in his calm, beautifully flat voice, said, “Tentative deal.” Tentative deal! I loved the way the words looked together. Exacting. Restrained. Cunty. Two days later, the strike ended at 12:01 am. An emergency alert sent out to every writer in Los Angeles: it’s time to get back to not having a job or health insurance. That’s not true, though. Some writers do have jobs.