Left At The Cock And Balls

You know that thing where they take down a house in your neighborhood and a day later you can't even remember what was there? It turns out if they do a good enough job of it, they can take away your ability to find your way home. They can knock out your entire navigation system.

One of the good things about living in the same place for forty-three years is you can find your way home in the dark. With your eyes shut. Three sheets to the wind with an off-key song in your heart and a flat tire. Anyway, that's what I've heard.

You don't have to creep down the avenue looking for the cross-street signs. You know where you live and you don't have to think about it, which is an advantage in any situation, and getting to be more important all the time. In my case, when I'm driving home, I don't have to think about it. I hang a left after the cock-and-balls and just before the jacking-off monkey.

I did not notice the cock-and-balls originally but once it was pointed out to me there was no other way to see it. It's a sign for a Mexican café, a proud, rigid column with a big round flower on the bottom. The tacos are just fine, no need to examine the sauce. The monkey from the coffeehouse has to answer for himself. He knows what he's done.

 

 

Anyway this is all something you tuck away in the periphery of your vision. But apparently the entire intersection is involved. Because when someone takes off all the siding on the building on one corner and then whisks away an entire large concrete building on the other and replaces it with a smooth coat of gravel, you can shoot right by your own street and miss it altogether, even after 43 years, dead sober. If you're a certain kind of person, you can then travel several blocks before it occurs to you to wonder where you're headed and why. You might even, if you're a certain kind of person, keep going hoping something will pop into view that will remind you why you're in the car. Maybe, for instance, you were going to the hardware store. If a hardware store shows up, then you can park and wonder what it was you wanted.

 

Certain kinds of people are afflicted with such a rich interior life that they are able to sail through their days on cruise control, oblivious to suffering, woe, other people, or one's own personal whereabouts or coordinates. There are quilt blocks to design, novel scenes to write, and music running in a loop. Such a person probably should not be driving. But definitely, if such a person is not to get lost or mislaid, buildings should not be whisked away, willy-nillly. 

 

I'll tell you what, it didn't take too long to bring that big concrete sucker down. It had been vacant for at least 43 years. It was just a place for dogs to pee and kids to express themselves with spray paint. In one day a massive backhoe knocked it down and scooped it up and then it was 1600 square feet of level gravel, without even a memory attached.

 

It's alarming to realize how much of our daily life doesn't require paying any attention at all. An entire nation can blunder along without having to notice what keeps us safe, what we stand for, the civic contract that doesn't exist except that we all agree to it, the frailty of the scaffolding of our civilization, until it's threatened or gone. With any luck and some time, we'll still find our way home.

This Is How We Verb

Don't know much about history. But I am always interested in the history of words: etymology (unless that's bugs). I want to know where a word has been for the last thousand years. And often, the derivation seems a little far-fetched. In fact, the word "derivation" itself either comes from the Latin for drawing out pus, or from the Vedic Sanskrit for tickling a water buffalo. Either way, you're left feeling kind of skeptical.

But maybe you shouldn't be. All bets are off in a language in which you can coin the word "pizzagate" and everyone knows it means "child molestation sex ring scandal involving Democrats operating in an imaginary Deep State." I mean, what the hell. From "pizza" meaning "pizza" and "gate" meaning "the third syllable of a Washington DC hotel that got burglarized by Republicans fifty years ago." A hundred years from now nobody looking up the derivation would believe it.

Derivations don't have to make sense. Take "homophobic." Some guy coined it in the '60s. We know what it's supposed to mean. I would quibble over "phobic" meaning "to be afraid of" since many so-called homophobes are not at all afraid of people they're pretty sure they can beat to a pulp. But also, "homo" comes from the Greek for "same." By rights, homophobic people should be people who insist on things not being too matchy-matchy, but that's not what it means. So we're left with someone who's afraid of homos. And I think that's kind of rude.

Or take "friendversary." Versus means "a turning." Anniversary is a year ("anno") turning (over). Friendversary should mean "the act of flipping your friend over" or "swapping out your shitty friends for whole new ones." But it doesn't. It comes from "friend" meaning someone you met through Facebook, and don't know, except that they have a cute cat. And "versary" means short for "anniversary." So a friendversary is a commemoration of the calendar date you moved into a virtual relationship with someone who has a cute cat.

While we're at it, that might have been the beginning of the wildly out-of-control new way to verb. Now you can "friend" someone and nobody bats an eye. I remember noticing it for the first time a few years back: "Let's festival!" the poster read, announcing the Gay Pride parade, featuring street-wide banners reading "THIS IS HOW WE PRIDE." And I thought: oh boy. This isn't going to be the last time we see this, especially in advertising. Sure enough, now you can also pizza, meaning eat a pizza. (It doesn't mean "molest a child like a Democrat" yet.) There's a pharmaceutical firm that likes to say "This is why we science." You can "brain better." I've also learned there is at least one way to "woman," and several wrong ways to "feminist."

There are definitely several wrong ways to feminist.

Sure, people have been "wintering" in Palm Springs for years, but things are getting out of hand. Is this vogue really something to celebrate? Should we cake?

It's all a little much, and irksome, as novelties can be. It is viewed by many as silly and contrived. And if you believe I am speaking less than forcefully, tough. That is simply how I passive voice construction.

My Apologies To The Albatross

There's a whole lot of packaging in the world.

I'd already ramped up my quest to avoid packaging, plastic in particular. I'm not moved by packaging that purports to be biodegradable. I suspect that it is biodegradable in certain conditions it is unlikely to encounter in real life. People are going to buy it greenily and it will still end up in a storm drain on its way to an albatross belly. I'd prefer to not have it in the first place.

First step was to ditch my Costco membership. Man, is stuff cheap there. But it's all wrapped up in plastic. Some of it is plastic stuff wrapped in plastic and shrink-wrapped to several of its closest friends. I can get all the same stuff at other stores for a little more money. Olive oil in glass bottles. Tonic water in glass bottles. I bring cloth bags for my vegetables and bulk foods, and if the only way they sell mushrooms is in Styrofoam with plastic wrap on top, I look for a different recipe.

All was going well. Many people do a much better job of avoiding waste than I do but my own personal midden shrank considerably. I could even go to small-can once-a-month garbage pickup, except that I know I would forget to put it out at least half the time.

And then some virus showed up and although some things did get better (less traffic, less noise), some things did not, as you may have heard. In my case, I decided to keep my elderly respiratory apparatus out of the grocery stores and get curbside pickup. Which works splendidly well, but it blew my packaging diet all to hell. Vegetables come in plastic baggies. Nothing comes in butcher paper. Feta cheese comes in a hard plastic shell. Okay, it always did.

They run out of stuff, though, and ask if they can make substitutions, and I say "sure." But then there are surprises. (Seltzer is not a substitute for tonic water, Petunia.) I ordered one (plastic) bottle of 600 Benadryl tablets to hold me for the next thirty years and instead I got a tower of little boxes with 600 individually-wrapped tabs in plastic bubble-packs. It took me five minutes to excavate just one. I'd rather have hives.

And of course so much is ordered online. Last month seemed like a package thunked onto the porch every day. I thought it was over and then a big box showed up. It didn't weigh more than a bag of chips. "What is it?" Dave asked, and I said "I think it's for the cat," except our cat doesn't sit in boxes, or, frankly, do any other normal thing. (Her own packaging, however, is first-rate.)

What the hell.

Inside the big box--which you could ship a Labrador Retriever in--were three more boxes. All empty. It was like God's Nesting Dolls Of Waste. I pulled everything out and found one small scrap of paper. Oh! My internet "provider" sent me the boxes so I could send back any old devices of theirs I wasn't using anymore. They'd just installed a new router. I sent back the old device and a couple random cables. They would have fit in a Kleenex box with room to rattle. But there was no preprinted label as promised. I contacted the company and they said they'd send me a new label.

Guess what fluttered out of a big box on the front porch a few days later?

Meanwhile Dave and I are fluttering around in a 2700-square-foot home in a town full of homeless people. A hundred and fifty years ago people routinely jammed all their kids, including the spares, in a small bed like a pile of puppies, in a one-room shack, and not without joy. But I can hardly bear to think of inviting more people to live here even though they'd still rattle. Best I can say for myself is I don't put a lot of heat in the place. I sweater up, and wait for the rest of my heart to thaw.

Inauguration Day

In the summer of '78 we had been in our house for a few months. We were a good team. One of us had a down payment and a steady job, and the other knew how to fix stuff. I was hopeful we would have a good garden someday, but at that point I was still waiting to see what was already in the ground. What would pop up. All kinds of stuff popped up.

There was big stuff too: a locust, a hawthorn, a couple dogwoods, a Norway maple, and on the alley side, a mature ornamental cherry with big floppy flowers. Also, there was one of those structures charitably referred to, in the neighborhood, as a "garage." It was thirty years past dilapidated. The kid across the alley liked to climb on it. I figured we were one growth spurt away from him going through the roof and straight into a lawsuit. It was a mess.

One weekend we took off for the coast and didn't get back home until well after dark. We fell into bed and the next morning Dave got up first, as usual. He tromped downstairs to the kitchen and gazed out the window, perplexed. Gazed some more. And then came back and sat on the bed.

"You know that garage you were worried about the kids climbing on?"

I did.

"You don't have to worry about it anymore. They burned it down."

It was the damnedest thing. The garage and the cherry tree and half of the hedge were so completely erased that they didn't even register as missing. In fact, my first thought, upon looking out the window, was only that there was a lot more sunlight out there. There wasn't even any debris. Just a flat, blackened moonscape.

First thing I did was go knock on some doors. I'd avoided meeting the neighbors. I don't remember what experience led me to that sorry attitude, but I lived in fear of having a close neighbor who drove me nuts but I couldn't get rid of, and I thought the best thing to do was just lay low. Now, it occurred to me that whatever happened in our yard was probably pretty exciting and maybe someone would want to tell us about it.

We met a bunch of neighbors including the fireman who lived across the street and later became a city commissioner. He was a real hero that day. Everyone agreed it was highly exciting. Boy howdy! Sucker went up like a bomb, it did.

It was a shame about the cherry tree. It's not coming back. Some things don't. But nobody was going to miss the garage. It would be hard to overstate how ugly it was, how dangerous. It was filled with old newspapers, a neighborhood shopper that some child was probably paid to distribute once a week, and dumped in there instead. It was pure fuel, ready to roar, just ready for a child with a cigarette. Even with it finally gone, we didn't have a clean slate: half the yard was charred. The maple dropped most of its leaves. Bits of debris, old nails and hardware, would keep turning up for years. But neighbors had turned into friends. We learned people need each other. There was so much more sunlight. So much possibility. We could almost see, now, the form a new garden could take. It would be a lot of work, but we were up for that.

And new green was already poking up from the ashes.

Eeek! Communists!

Poor Debbie Lesko! Some mean people wanted to keep the Republican congresswoman from Arizona from bringing her gun into the Capitol. She is outraged. We don't know what kind of scene she makes at the airport, but in the Capitol, where she and her colleagues are routinely kettled for the convenience of armed mobs, she's stamping her little feet. "We now live in Pelosi's Communist America!" she tweeted thunderously. Yes, you can tweet thunderously.

Ah, that old chestnut! It brings me back. When I was a kid that's what you called other kids on the playground if you wanted to rile 'em up. They were commies! Specifically, dirty commies. Just like Miss Debbie, we didn't know what we meant by it. It was another word for asshole. 

So Miss Debbie doesn't really mean "Communist" when she complains about being detained at a metal detector. What she's really hopped up about is governmental overreach. Authoritarians are the worst, unless they're Russians or North Koreans or some other repressive, crushing regime that we kind of admire, right, Miss Debbie? Authoritarianism is awesome if God's on your side.

"Communist" is just one of those big-basket words that scoops up many different people indiscriminately. It's a broad brush. It's like calling all Republicans "Nazis," when a lot of them are just self-dealing assholes.

I like to keep an ear open for the language being used to perpetuate the plutocracy. It evolves. For four years now "socialist" has been the slur of choice, but now we're hearing more about communists. Hardly anyone can define the terms, but that's irrelevant. Every now and then you will hear someone elucidate what is so awful about being a socialist, and it usually comes down to "they want to take all your hard-earned money and give it to the lazy people."

Sounds bad! But weirdly, they are fantasizing something entirely different from having all their hard-earned wages, pensions, and benefits taken and given to the indolent rich, which is what has actually happened over the last forty years. Someone should look into that.

In any case, I have a lot of commerce with the motley Left Wing and can report that very few of us consider ourselves socialists. There are a few socialists, and an anarchist/anti-capitalist contingent, but the vast bulk of us would align with Democratic Socialism, which aims to maintain a market system but strip it of its worst excesses and failures. A bit more like Eisenhower's America, in other words, without all the racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia and...well, we'd like to polish things up a bit, and try to save the planet in the bargain. It's not really scary at all. Make everyone's lives a little better, without making the billionaires' lives worse. Because above a certain income, you shouldn't be able to notice how rich you are. You can drown your soul in a bathtub of money just as easily as in an ocean of it, after all.

There's a lot not to like about our current economic system, in which profit for some is sacred and the true costs of it are paid by the rest of us. Let's look at the results. Our planet may soon become uninhabitable. Extinctions are accelerating. Our resources have been stripped and turned into cash for the few. Legions of us are impoverished, homeless, sick. Entire populations all over the world are on the move for their very survival.

We would like to not be ruined by medical expenses. We would like to not be ruined by fossil fuel consumption. We would like clean water and a range of basic services. We would like to support small farmers. We would also like maybe some bullet trains, please.

"Communist America!" Poor Miss Debbie doesn't mean anything by it, not really. She's just using it as a phony label to instruct the masses who they're supposed to hate. You fling that word out enough and it fails to mean anything at all--it's just a stain in the brain that will hopefully remind you what Debbie wants you to do in the voting booth.

What she doesn't want you to do is think.

I Have Cash

 

This is all true.

My Uncle Bill was unusual in a number of ways. The ways that pertain to this story are: he was quite poor. His meager savings went chiefly to alcohol. And he was old.

So when he showed up in Montana to attend my father's funeral, there were a number of things about being in a small middle-class home he wasn't accustomed to. And when he asked my mom if he could make a long-distance call from her phone, she smiled him into the kitchen,  introduced him to the wall phone with the curly cord, and returned to the living room with the rest of us. None of us could make sense of the ensuing clinky noises coming from the kitchen and when we went in to investigate, there was Uncle Bill with a big pile of quarters trying to find someplace in the phone to stick them, and dropping them on the floor.

It's just an extreme version of that old common experience of waiting in a long grocery line behind an old woman who springs into action only after the clerk rings up the total, and then she begins to root through her purse for her checkbook, while eyes roll all the way back in the line. Old people!

And now that I are one, it's all just as embarrassing as my younger self might have guessed.

All righty then! Hand the clerk your credit card to run through the machine zzzip-clank. No? I run it myself? On that little box? How? Oh. The little slot along the side? I just slide it through there? Okay. Which way?

The side with the magnetic stripe goes this direction. No, the other direction. See, there's a picture of it right there. Right there. There. Here, let me help you.

 

I begin to squint at the machine every time to make out the picture of the card with the stripe so I'll be ready but for some reason it's never as clear as you'd think. And then the slot disappears altogether. I hover at the side of the little machine and frown.

 

No, here, you just stick the card in the bottom and it will read the smart chip. At the bottom. No, the other way. Just shove it in. A little farther. Here, let me help you.

 

Then I get accustomed to that but there's always a holdup. You have to push enter. The green button. Okay. Then sign. Sign? With what? You can use your finger. That doesn't look anything like my signature though! That's okay. It is? Okay. Thank you.

 

Then I get accustomed to that and I try to get in and out expeditiously but the machine isn't responding. You have to put in your phone number. I do? Okay. And then hit enter. The green button. Oh! Ha ha! Of course. Whoops! Okay thank you, see you next week! Ma'am? Ma'am? Don't forget your card. Whoops! Thanks! And also, it wants to know how you want your receipt. How do I want my receipt? Yes, paper or email? Or no receipt? Oh. No receipt, I guess. Bye!

 

As I make my exit the clerk laboriously twists around the machine and hits an appropriate button for me to end the transaction.

 

The next time nothing is working. Can't even find the slot. Just tap it, the clerk says. I tap the machine with my finger. No, the card. Tap it with the card. Where? Just...the clerk reaches around the machine for my card and taps it and hands it back. Or you could just use your phone.

 

Oh honey. I'm pretty sure I couldn't.

 

Did you know eye-rolling is audible if there are enough people in line? It sounds like the window shades rolling up in the old cartoons. Flap-flap-flap. Listen. I'm sorry. Nobody's sorrier than I am that I am now that dumb old person. But it will happen to you. I have no idea what form it will take, but it will happen to you.

 

Shamwowa? Could you come out here? My thing has arrived but the stupid drone won't drop it until I pay for it. How do I do that?

 

Oh, Grandma. We've been over this. You just think at it. You just think your full name really hard followed by your PUTZ number.

 

I did that.

 

This time don't think about an elephant. It's a security step. If you think about an elephant it won't release. You're doing it again. Here, let me.

 

Shamwowa glances into the sky and the package floats down. Grandma snatches it off the delivery port and huffs away, red-faced.

 

When the multiple duplicate charges generated by her flatulence show up on the invoice, she can always get Shamwowa to straighten it out. 

 

Revolting

I really don't enjoy this.

What I want to do is publish the post I already had scheduled for today. Old fart meets credit-card reader, and hilarity ensues. I want to explain why spider bites are usually on your fanny because spiders object to being sat on. I'd like to tell you that my new shampoo smells like Pine-Sol and now I get out of the shower wondering if I've been scrubbing the toilet bowl with my head.

But I can't, because we can't go three days in this country without a lunacy grenade going off. We're all collateral damage, and the shrapnel is by now lodged in all of our hearts, and half of us are trying to pluck it out and half are happy to let it fester.

 

Nearly half cannot comprehend losing an election, because everyone they knew voted the same way they did. They cannot visualize their opposition, even though they've been mocking us for four years. Did they, too, believe we were fictional bots?

 

And some of them answered the call, when the call came. They were standing by, an army ready for their leader to deploy. Still, it was shocking. At first it almost looked like men were gaining the Capitol by scaling its walls, but surely that can't be--walls keep people out. Don't they?

 

But no, there they were, a faction of fat fascist fucks playing dress-up, and no, I'm not fat-shaming; I'm merely describing; they are shaming themselves. Just look at those fat white fucks. Where is Lorena Bobbitt? Get her on the phone.

These are described as "mostly white males," although that is a nod to their tattoos: this group is all about white power, and meanwhile, while we fantasize about where they can jam their rebel flags, Black power is alive and well a few states to the south, extracting the monkey wrench from the gears of the Senate with grace and peace. This is a day for the books.

But no sooner do we all bear witness than the Mostly-White-Males' operating system begins planting new seeds of deceit and broadcasting them into the soft spongy soil of the brainwashed: Antifa did this awful thing. That we totally approve of.

 

Sure. Those are definitely anti-fascists dolled up in raccoon underpants and traitor's flags. But it has come to this, that if I read a headline about vandals leaving a severed pig's head at Nancy Pelosi's house, I do not immediately know what group is responsible. Because the radicalized left and right occupy much of the same territory, where the politics of confrontation erases civility, and defense of freedom erodes freedom, and war is proclaimed the path to peace.

 

I do not equate the two. Neither by extent, or intent. I understand that the left musters in the cause of justice, and the right in the cause of a toddler's notion of liberty. But I have seen both sides attack an assault-weapon ban for the same reason: the need to fight our own government. I'm horrified to hear it from the right. It breaks my heart to hear it from the left.

 

After a while, the soldiers at the fringes start to look the same. Rage is its own fuel. Fury is all-consuming, and obliterates reason and dissent. Can it be quarantined? Set up a tournament, a jousting match. Duels: penises at ten paces. Make it ten inches, they still won't touch each other. Make it pay-per-view, and we can buy ourselves some nice health care, reparations, solar panels for all.

As for the shameless architect of our ruin, I do not want to see him harmed. I do not want to see him hanging upside-down in the town square. I wish to see him escorted into a court of law and delivered without ceremony to a secure location, wearing horizontal stripes and as long a necktie as he wants.

 

Adventures In Service Providination

 

We have crappy TV service. There's nothing on, although there is a whole lot of it, and even the remote control is tragic. If you accidentally hit the wrong button there's hell to pay to get the TV screen back in the proper corral, and it's easy to hit the wrong button because you have to hold the remote over your head to make anything go. Also? We can't turn the TV off without getting off our asses and walking over to it, and what century is this, anyway? What are we, acrobats?

But we don't want to change it, because we do not like change.

CenturyLink made us change anyway. They said they're no longer offering our crappy TV service and we should look over their many fine alternatives. Really, there's nothing I like better than calling a Service Provider on the phone, because I so rarely have anything to do for any given four-hour period. 

The fine choices boiled down to having a dish bolted onto our house, which we reject on aesthetic grounds, and ATT. ATT wanted twenty bucks up front to get the ball rolling and that took a couple hours because something went wrong with the nice lady's computer and it kept ralphing up my credit card. The nice lady was distraught and whimpery, because, I believe, she is accustomed to being screamed at, and I kept reassuring her that I was fine. I was so happy that she spoke English that I wanted to luxuriate in the experience. I don't want to be that person who complains about people with accents, but I admit to a strong preference for it in my Service Providers. Anyway I told her I could happily listen to her all day long, and then I did.

I could have walked a twenty over to their office faster. It was my idea, ultimately, to plug in my landline and try to get the transaction through that way, and it took me a while to find the cord. It has been unplugged for four years although we still pay for it because evidently taking the landline out of the Internet-TV-Phone Bundle doesn't make it cheaper. Basically, our landline is serving as packaging twine for our Bundle. I plugged the old workhorse in, the very same lady called me back on it, and we were in business.

Then all I had to do was wait for a new device to thud onto my front porch and plug it in, plus they were going to send over a Service Technician. I wasn't clear what the Service Technician was going to do, but I said okay. "Okay," the nice lady said, brightly, clearly relieved that ATT had my credit card number now, "how does Tuesday work for you?"

Quite well, thank you.

"And what time of day is good for you?"

This, as it turns out, is a little Service Provider joke. They are howling in the break room.

"Anytime after nine would be fine."

"All right, we'll set you up for Tuesday, with a Service Window between 9am and 5pm."

"That's some window," I said.

"But no later than 7:15," she continued.

At this point I am laughing myself snotty. I'm not sure the nice lady is used to that, but I think she wanted to keep the conversation going so she didn't have to talk to someone mean.

The service window between nine and five but no later than 7:15 reminds me of our newspaper service. When The Oregonian went digital, they offered a sort of hybrid deal: they would deliver papers some days, and the other days would be digital only. They trumpeted this change as "Newspapers Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, with a bonus paper on Saturday!" Awesome! It's not like we went from seven papers down to four; we get a bonus! Whoever in Marketing came up with that probably still gets a bonus just thinking about it.

Anyway, the "no later than 7:15" Service Window proved to be a bust. Tuesday came and went with no Service Technician. Two days later I got another call explaining that the technician never made it to my house but they'd be happy to send one out Monday if I wanted. Sure! When?

She had a window between nine and five. But no later than 7:15. I can't wait. Actually, I can.

I Need An App

A number of states that don't include mine are offering a free phone app to help you know how terrified you should be that you've been exposed to COVID-19. And if you have been, you can choose to take proper precautions such as isolating yourself or hiding in the closet sucking your thumb or beginning to take the precautions you hadn't bothered with before, or something. I'm not sure what I'd do with the information. I'd prefer something more immediate like a live warning system that you're about to get too close to an infected person. Something along the lines of that exploding dye packet that they put in the ransom money.

I mean, they used to do that in the olden days. They used to put big pustules or black boils on people, and if they could do that in medieval times, why can't they do it now? Now they have germy teenagers that look totally normal and although it's always a good idea to avoid those people anyway, it can't always be managed, especially if you want a pizza delivered.

I'm not terribly worried on a daily basis because I do take precautions. I assume that anyone I meet is riddled with disease. My favorites are the sneezy people who wave their hands in a friendly manner and holler that it's just a cold. Pardon me? If you have a cold, you have swapped snot with somebody in some way. You have. If you've been doing this pandemic right, you shouldn't have Sniffle One.

Because I can be exceptionally dense, I had to read several paragraphs about the app before I figured out how it works. As everyone who is not me knows, it works because it is assumed your phone is adhered to your body at all times. Apparently, that is a reasonable assumption. I'm the only person who says things like "Call me in the afternoon, I should be home by two," and I don't get how weird that sounds until I get the puzzled look.

As far as the Big Eye In The Sky is concerned, I have been sitting on my kitchen counter for days.

I also fail to remember that most people use their phones for way more than communicating with people. That's just about all I can do on mine. They say it's "smart," but that's just so as not to damage its self-esteem. Every time I try to download an app it tells me it's way too small to have such a big app shoved into it, and I should consider unloading something first, even though there's nothing in it. It's just a bulimic little piece of shit, is what it is. As a consequence I have learned to live without most of the life-simplifiers that litter our brainscape. I'll still walk a few miles to a store and find out it doesn't carry what I want and say Thanks Anyway and walk home again, and feel no sense of betrayal. Other people wave their phones in the air and get the nearest pizza paid for and dropped by drone through the sunroof while they're still driving. They check their blood pressure and then they check their portfolio and then probably their blood pressure again, and meanwhile I don't even check to see if anyone called once I get home, which is where my phone is, probably.

Nevertheless, the same people who are afraid Bill Gates wants to microchip them with a vaccine have a phone pocket sewn into their pajamas and don't think a thing of it. Everyone from the FBI to Walmart knows where they are. And I'm definitely not letting my phone go out and get sneezed on by all those other phones. I don't know where they've been.

But somebody does.