Lileks: It's a Bundtiful day in the neighborhood

The neighborhood coffee shop has a bulletin board. Once upon a time it had offerings from neighborhood kids to mow your lawn or walk your dog or mow your dog or other tasks. Notes from people who had things to sell:

Card Table; has most of its legs.

Lost dog. Answers to "Xhoghli." If found, subdue and call number below.

But now there's eBay and Craigslist. So the last few years it has been festooned with a thick coat of business cards, looking like shingles applied by a drunk. Yoga coaches. Wellness consultants. Realtors — which is great if you suddenly need to sell your house, but you're miles from a bus bench.

Into this breach comes Nextdoor, a smartphone app recommended to me as a fine way to connect with neighbors on a molecular level. It verifies that you live in a certain neighborhood, then drops you into a ceaseless river of chat. Lots of crime talk. Roving miscreants breaking into garages and taking bikes; alley lurkers; a rusty white van gleaning trash and recyclables; reports of a program to insert microchips into feral cats, perhaps so the NSA can use them as remote surveillance devices; stories of dogs lost and reunited, and something about Bundt cake pans.

It was this last one that got me thinking about whether I wanted to use the app. The person either wanted a Bundt cake pan, or had a Bundt cake pan to give away. If it was the former, you can see how the app is handy, because if you stand in the street and shout I NEED A STANDARD SIZED COOKIE SHEET you will get nothing but a reputation, and if it's the latter, well, therein hangs a fascinating tale, no?

What brought this person to get rid of a Bundt cake pan? A sudden conviction that it's just cake wearing a fancy hat? A resolution to get rid of all household items with a silent "d"? You want to post a note and say, "Tell me more about this pan. I'm intrigued." And then you learn that she got a new one as a gift but can't throw the old one away, because it is perfectly good.

You could "follow" the Bundt cake situation if you choose, but that means notifications, and that means your phone gets agitated and sends you alerts. I am willing to accept alerts about national security and severe weather but I draw the line at updates about castoff dessert molds.

I disabled notifications right away, because after I signed up I got alerts: Such-and-such neighbor has welcomed you! comes on the lockscreen of your phone, and you have to respond. It's like someone who knocks on a new arrival's house with homecoming gifts, and the curtains part slightly and a voice from inside the house says, "Leave it on the stoop." That's who you are if you don't say thanks.

But you're at a stoplight. You'll do it later. They pile up. Now there are 27 of them. Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! You reply "Thanks!" to the first one, and then realize it's around midnight, and you just made some fellow's phone buzz, and he grabbed it from the nightstand thinking WHO DIED? and it's me, saying "thanks!" two weeks after the fact. You don't even know who he is. Next week someone gives you a hard look at the grocery store and shouts I WAS SOUND ASLEEP and you have no idea what he's talking about.

The welcomes pile up like Christmas cards from people you haven't seen in years, and now you feel completely anti-social. Then you get a brilliant idea: while walking the dog, just stop in at the neighbor's house and deliver the thanks in person.

Knock knock. Door opens. "Yes?"

"Hi, I'm James, from 14 blocks over? You welcomed me to the neighborhood on that app, and I just wanted to say thanks!"

Door closes slightly. "Hey, great, uh — I'd ask you in, but, uh, I think the iron's on upstairs."

"Oh, I'll be off. See you on your smartphone, swapping recommendations about plaster repair!"

And then to make it really creepy: take a picture of the house, and shout, "Just adding it to your profile so I can match your name with your place on the block!"

See, that would be wrong. And weird. The brilliance of the app is the assumption that we want to connect, we need to connect, but would prefer to do so from a distance, on our own terms, when we want.

Neighborhoods as they appear on the map are a fictional idea, lines on a map. They have their own general character and reference point — the grocery store, the school, the well-reviewed cafe that sells six atoms of guac for five dollars. If another neighborhood declared war on yours and started lobbing rockets, you'd feel sudden solidarity with everyone in YOUR neighborhood, but at the meeting to discuss terms of surrender you'd look around and think "I don't know any of these people."

How do you define your neighborhood? Your half of the block and the houses across the street? The person you nod to when you take out the garbage? All that, and more. There's the familiar dog walkers, the connective tissue that ties the different blocks together. There's your kids' friends, ambassadors of their own blocks. There's the street you cross that makes you feel as if you're leaving your neighborhood and entering another, an arbitrary line you draw over the years. However you define it, the app will add something to the way you view your neighborhood.

Microchipped feral cats and rusty white vans prowling the alleys, for example. If I see one I'll ask if they're looking for a Bundt cake pan. Yeah — how'd you know? Shrug and smile. You live around these parts long enough, you learn things.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858