Early this year, I started to feel like I was losing my relationships. Not due to any active conflict, just the isolating nature of the times. Friends felt unreachable: A text might as well have been a battered scroll smuggled under the floorboards of a warship or stuffed into a saddlebag on the Pony Express. I couldn’t read from intermittent messages how they were feeling, if they were burned out by their jobs, paralyzed by news coming from the Trump administration, or just being avoidant. (Maybe all of the above.) Little clarity came from social media, now overrun with spon-con, bot spam, and propaganda. AI grew inescapable. So did the threat of state surveillance. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I missed talking to people. So a month ago, I got a landline phone.

It’s a cherry-red

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