You Can Tell Everybody This Is Your Song Tamara Shopsin FOR most of my 20s I played in the indie rock band Sleater-Kinney. We wrote songs, we recorded them, we toured. In my 30s, though, things changed. I started spending most of my time writing or working on the TV show "Portlandia." I haven't played many live shows in the past decade, but somehow I feel as if I'm still on tour - not just with my bandmates, but with everyone. So I thought I'd try writing a song again, so I'd have something to play. My song is prosaic. It tries to sound tossed-off, but it's not. It's overly considered. But soon I hit the sweet spot and - it's pithy. Whack. Thump. Head meets heart. My tune tells you where I am and what I'm doing. It's report and rapport. Truth meets the unreliability of feeling. Fact meets friction. I play it all day long. Here's how it goes. First verse: I texted to let you know that I woke up this morning. Otherwise I worried you might think, No word from her yet today - she must have died in her sleep. We're living on a million tiny stages. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces. We put our activities on display, our feelings, our families, our skies. We're not quite sure if there is a point in doing anything anymore if it can't be documented, if no one is there to observe it. We long for favorites and likes and reposts, compulsively monitor these new forms of applause. The marquees of our lives say, special guest: ME! We play an encore, and then another. The quotidian one-man show never quite ends. Second verse: same as the first. Except it's lunch. Please don't worry, I'm eating. Here's proof. #nofilter. All of these stages mean there is very little quiet. How can there be with so many exclamation points!!!? We shout as if everything from our breakfast scrambles to our dogs are tantamount to the "Rocky" moment at the top of the stairs, or being on the bow of the ship like whatshisname in the movie "Titanic." Never have we been so emphatic. If you want to elicit concern from a loved one, type a period at the end of a text message; it indicates a malaise, or worse, apathy. Apathy about that new sweater, apathy about 6 o'clock. In fact, I've never shown the hours of the day so much love as I have in the last few years. I've never meant YES!!! or NO!!! or O.K.!!! as much as I do now. And I've never asked questions as intensely. Third verse. I started a joke which started the whole Twitter-verse laughing. Oh, you're crying. I'm sorry. Delete. Let's be honest - if you're always on some ersatz stage, humming some endless song, then you can't merely mutter, "Hello, Cleveland," as if you're about to lecture to it, admonish it for not being some other city. Instead, you have to say, "HELLO, CLEVELAND!!!" Up onstage there is no place for the affectless "How are you doing tonight?" That sounds like you might follow up with some dour, disheartening news, like, "We have the results of your test" or "Let's end this relationship." Like. Relief. Fourth verse: Traditionally there might be a bridge here. Here's a picture of one I drove over today on my way downtown. A few years ago - mostly for the sake of talking about it - I quit Facebook. I went back only five times (O.K., maybe seven), but only to see how many people liked or commented on my status update saying that I was leaving. Note to friends reading this: Please let me know if you've recently died or had a birthday because I now have no way of knowing. Seeing how many friends cared about my quitting Facebook was like getting to observe my own funeral. I think Facebook should advertise itself as a memorial service for the living. It makes the present feel as if it is instantaneously collecting dust. We've become our own estate sales. But how can I put a price on my life if I'm not really living it? Fifth verse: Five verses and not a chorus in sight? I guess this is turning into a folk song or Don McLean's "American Pie." I need to take my non-Chevy German luxury car to get repaired. Any recos? DM me. When all of our information - images, art, news, modes of communication - is mediated through the same screen, the notion of value, of what is important and unimportant, even in a subjective, personal sense, becomes murky. Births, deaths, celebrity mug shots, piano-playing kittens, children we don't know engaging in wackiness, war, poverty, photos of salt shakers and table sets, tales of the mundane, puns: This is all funneled and flattened, much to our delight and convenience, of course. Everything is a headline, everything is front page. Sixth verse: I'm happy because you saw a squirrel and let everyone know. Also, my dad has cancer. I don't miss a more monolithic age, where we all watched or heard the same moments through one of a few outlets, when what we witnessed was not overly diffuse or fractured, when the commentary and discussion were not as loud and concurrent as the event itself. Sure, we rarely gather around a single moment anymore, at least not for long. But occasionally we join together to make a constellation that feels like a mass, something sturdy and important. Like maybe, right now. My song meets your song. Then piles upon piles of the mundane start to feel like days, like stories, like shapes, like songs, like lives. Chorus: All together now. I'll listen if you will.