(Photo illustration by Maureen Scance, The Denver Post / istockphoto)

Vampires moved into our house years ago, and we didn't mind.

They seemed friendly enough.

But quietly these insatiable, seductive monstrosities multiplied, they metastasized, and now my wife, Annie, and I look back and wonder: Is it too late? Have the creatures won?

Not yet. This year we made our second stab at driving wooden stakes through their frozen hearts.

We unplugged, sending the undead — the infestation of screens crowding our lives — back to their tombs.

Annie and I call it Amish Weekend.

The idea: What if, like the Amish, we at least simplify our lives, if only for two days? No undead meant no television, no computers and no phones for anything other than talking, and then only in case of emergency.

With the house free from undead hauntings, we thought, maybe something novel would blossom.

The kids didn't exactly unleash hoots of joy when we first unveiled Amish Weekend, last January. The older in particular, then 12, had just started texting months before, and this undead spell had captivated the girl. She texted when she did homework. She texted when she walked. She texted in the car. She texted when we talked to her, which often led to her looking up at some point and saying, "Huh?"

Interestingly, the idea did catch on within one of the undead's most elaborate lairs: Facebook. We mentioned Amish Weekend, and like fellow prisoners in a Siberian gulag, our friends cheered our liberation, wished us well.

You are so lucky!

And that we were. The girls didn't migrate to different screens when we were busy cooking (we spent a lot of time in the kitchen); they played cards, or helped us with the chopping and sautéeing. We heard them laughing together, and despite the weekend of forced proximity, they barely argued.

In the evenings, we sat around a table with a board game between us, moving colored pieces to different squares and rolling dice. We read a lot, and listened to music: The girls tolerated ours for a spell, and I saw them move to the beats a few times, and we put up with Justin Bieber and contemporary "dance" music where the singers all sound like robots.

We didn't dance so much.

But we did hike nearby trails during the weekend, and took our dog, Bruno, on a lot of walks. And talked more than I remembered.

Time seemed to unfold, rather than arrive in bursts. Undead time, I came to understand, sucks us into a vortex of electronic stimulation, a blizzard of distractions, that bewilders. We emerge and don't remember what happened, how much real time had passed.

Compared with that, real time almost has a glow. That's how I remember that weekend, at least: 48 hours of sunset striking brass.

Monday rolled around and the undead emerged from their caskets, leering, but I felt strong. The weekend had been one of the best in quite a while.

We held back the undead.

Soon, though, the vampires and zombies resumed their hold on the family, and I feel compelled here to stipulate that we aren't exactly a media-frenzied family to begin with. We let the girls watch only a few shows a week, and we view with them. We put strict limits on computer time. Annie and I toil to restrict the amount of time we spend staring at screens the size of business cards, punching keys smaller than oatmeal flakes.

A year later, the house contained even more of the ghouls. New games invaded our smartphones, fresh services, novel arrangements of information that seemed important and called us with great urgency.

Play "Words With Friends" with your mom, ingrate!

Resistance seemed futile. The house-crashers — really, life invaders — insinuated themselves into our world with such ease. We had embraced them, displayed our necks for them, and by the time they started calling the shots, it seemed reasonable.

I'd rather just read a book to my 9-year-old daughter tonight, laptop, but you make a good point about the things I want to Google, like the sun's weight and whether orcas have ever eaten people, and the need for photographic updates about the beach vacations of friends I don't know.

The undead in our house are a motley lot. There's the big one hanging above the fireplace in the basement family room, cords flapping from its sides like spilled intestines (we think that one might be a zombie); the smaller ones that sit on different surfaces, whispering to my younger daughter: Come play! The so-called real world is SO BORING, compared with me. Guess what I have today? Little animated hamsters that dance around in a fluorescent sushi restaurant. They talk to you! They have cute Japanese accents!

The ones sometimes attached to our bodies, parasitic little rectangles of plastic and light, seem to possess telepathic powers. Look at me! they command. Feed me! You are missing SO MUCH!

The parasites are especially cunning. Back in the old days, in 2008, waiting in line suggested a dull time, yes, but I used to eavesdrop on conversations and wonder about people's accents (is that Minnesota or Michigan?), look around the store, and just, you know, experience the strange, bright, hyper-commercial world of the supermarket. For me, at least, just noticing stuff defeated boredom.

But for the past few years, the parasites screamed whenever I stopped walking, even if only for 15 or 30 seconds.

I'm here! Look at me!

I usually obeyed. The weird confection of the supermarket interior, the tabloid covers, the accents — it vanished. Instead, I learned the next day would be sunny and 56, and I read a message from somebody in Kenya who wants me, a stranger, to invest in his amazing new wrinkle cream.


In January of this year, fed-up with a long holiday season trapped with the undead, we once again went Amish for most of a weekend.

So long, soul-sucking ghouls.

Hello games. Books. Nature. By Monday morning I felt like I'd just returned from a vacation from somewhere serene and quiet: a remote cabin in the San Juans, say, or a palapa on a quiet Yucatan Peninsula beach.

But all we had done was remove the screens, these crypts of commercial fantasy, from our lives.

The Amish experiment will return several times in 2012. One thing the pursuit taught me: The tactile world is much more interesting than the conjured.

What is staring at a small screen in a Costco checkout line? Examining a larger one at the kitchen table? Losing oneself to the gargantuan television bolted to the family-room wall?

Well, sometimes it is useful. Sometimes it is interesting. Sometimes it is even edifying.

But when it takes over, I think all of that is the new boredom.