Look Up!: Finding Creative Inspiration in the Guilt of Looking Down

The idea of birds consciously and collectively pooping on everyone’s cell phones landed on us much like a pigeon’s dropping, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, but we should’ve seen it coming. When we were new mothers we would spend hours and days together with our new babies, feeding them, feeding us, and feeding our brains with series and doom scrolling.

(Turning a Bedtime Routine Into a Picture Book.)

In our defense, new motherhood was stressful, and we were two Louisiana women with two new babies in Atlanta. We had babies, rentals, and relationship woes. We found solidarity in our circumstances of both being on the verge of being single moms. (Side note: We genuinely dislike the expression “single mom.” We are just moms who happen to be doing a lot of work solo, and we shouldn’t be forced to identify our relationship status…) Being told, “it takes a village” only to face the harsh reality that that village, for many of us, only exists on Instagram. But, that online village kept us from fully connecting with our children, and the mom guilt was real.

It’s no wonder we spent a lot of time on our screens, and that’s where the story of Fontaine came to be. One afternoon we were talking about New Orleans. As children we would spend a lot of time in the city, and to us it was a magical place. We began talking about how it had changed. It seemed like the life of the city, the musicians, the artists, the balloon men, and the jugglers just weren’t really there anymore. The city we had seen as kids and the one we had seen most recently were shadows of one another. We didn’t see a lot of children out anymore playing, everyone was kind of distracted or just inside. It was right around then I said, “We should write a book set in New Orleans.” But what would it be about?

The answer came on a walk through a sunny, uniquely bird filled park near Amanda’s apartment. Amanda in a moment of self-guilt, crying out for comedic salvation, said, “Sometimes I wish a bird would just come and poop on my phone, and I would wake up.” I thought, “Holy shit, that’s brilliant. What if all the birds despise us and all of our digital distractedness, and they were secretly plotting to stage a revolution, to awaken mass consciousness, via bird poop?”

We laughed and walked back to her house. I pulled out my cell phone and opened the Notes app, and there on a screen, we wrote the first rendition of “Look Up! Fontaine the Pigeon Starts a Revolution.” This poem was born ironically using the very device it seeks to have readers put away.

It’s been roughly six years since that conversation that sparked the birth of our little lyrical urban legend. The best way I can describe our story is it’s a poop joke book that is actually a Trojan horse for a conversation about screen use.

I still struggle with my cell phone, probably now more than ever. On the eve of this long-held poem and dream coming to life, I find myself simultaneously on my screen now more than ever and more filled with a desire to live most of my moments IRL. I sometimes feel like a hypocrite because I still haven’t figured out how to find a balance between using technology and the technology abusing me.

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I wrote this poem to laugh about the absurdity of how humanity, myself included, has surrendered our attention spans to the screens.

With this technology, we can educate ourselves, collaborate on solutions for all of our collective problems, and organize for a more abundant and just world. I just fear that right now most of us are using these screens to distract ourselves. I know I am guilty of it.

I’ve heard the best way to handle the desire to change an undesirable habit is to acknowledge its existence with grace and humor. That is what I was doing for myself when I wrote this story—making a joke about one of my biggest struggles. I am the mom that hears the “bizarre scream” who is lost looking down at her phone.

While this Alfred Hitchcock parody is about overcoming our digital distractions, there are a couple of other messages embedded in this quick little poem.

Fontaine struggles, like many of us, with isolation and feelings of being alone, only to realize that it takes a village. In vocalizing what he sees (“The situation is poo!”), he’s able to find solidarity with like-minded beings who agree and are ready to act. They go through the work of coming together to strategize and devise a plan to take a stand and make a difference. And I’d like to believe they were successful in awakening people’s consciousnesses to the foolishness of always looking down.

This book is for parents who want to raise children who are not addicted to digital devices and who have the desire to play a part in healing this planet.

But mostly, it’s just a joke about birds popping on phones.

The story of Fontaine created an urban legend in our house, to the point that we can taunt each other with a warning: “If you don’t look up, a bird is going to come in and send you a message.”

I hope that by laughing over our shared struggles with looking down, we can remind ourselves and our loved ones to Look Up more. Otherwise, the birds may strike back. 

Check out Look Up!, by Britt Gondolfi and Amanda Romanick, here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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