Today I was putting a cigarette butt out with my foot and a giant brown rat fell out of a wall and almost landed on my shoe. But I’m not even mad anymore about the rat. I was on a pedestrian littered street, about a foot into the alley next to Wendy’s when this happened, and I almost screamed like a girl. Like a stupid girl who just broke a nail. But I’m not even mad anymore about almost channeling the spirit of the weaker gender of the species. What I’m mad about is my goddamn cell phone battery.
When I got home from work tonight, there it was, wrapped in an envelope addressed to me. I could finally charge up and use my cell phone again. It has been over a week since I’ve been able to use it…and you know what I’ve learned in that time?…Those who say they can’t live without their cell phone or mobiles are either full of shit or pathetic. This past week was the best I’ve felt in a really long while.
My very old, outdated cell phone serves four functions:
1. alarm clock- it wakes me up in the morning
2. clock- it tells me what time it is so I don’t have to wear a watch
3. text message- allows me to communicate with people I don’t necessarily want to talk to
4. laughs- I pretend to be on the phone with my mother at inappropriate times and people love it
These are the four basic uses for my cell phone, and without them I thought I’d be lost and discombobulated (how can that be a real word?), but I wasn’t. Without an alarm clock to wake me I ended up getting up earlier, recognizing that no damn machine was going to tell me when I had to be up. I considered getting “Discipline” tattooed on one of my shoulders. Without the time I was forced to ask a stranger if he had the time, but after that I used the sun, and then I watched “An Inconvenient Truth.” I actually haven’t seen it but I urge everyone to be environmentally conscious, you never know when a rat may pop out at you. But the loss of time was actually beneficial for my psyche, since I swear that I once entered the Green Line tunnel and had traveled an hour ahead into the future by the time I got out. Some sort of wormhole thing, I can’t explain it. But I don’t need time messing with my brain, so I can leave it. Without text messaging and calls, along with the absence of a land-line in my apartment, I didn’t have to talk to anyone, which meant no obligations whatsoever. And lastly I couldn’t make a joke about talking to my mom while peeing in the corner of the bar, but that joke is getting old anyway.
All of this hit me last night when I was in the movie theatre seeing Ocean’s Thirteen. Before the feature begins they present this huge production, this one with Forest Whitaker, that ends with the message, “Please silence your phones.” I laughed to myself (maybe because I was alone because I couldn’t call anyone to invite them to the movie) and thought to myself, “You’re all slaves. Slaves, I tell ya,” as I watched the people take their phones out and shut them off or silence them as prompted. Then the “I Am Legend” trailer came on and at the end someone stated loudly, “Going.” I could spend hours on this piece of the story, but I have to restrain myself and continue. I walked into the theatre excited and left content enough. I was free.
But this all came to an end when I got home tonight. I stared at the package for a while and then opened it. Then I connected the new battery to the old phone. Then I charged it for a bit and turned it on. I had a bunch of messages, mostly from my mother and father, but one got my attention. It was from an old college buddy, a past roommate, a personal drug dealer, drinking companion, etc. A good friend. In the message he described the “advanced state of intoxication” he was in with some other folk I knew from college. He ended the message perceptively saying that if I had a break in anti-social behavior to give him or the others a call. I laughed out loud at the message and for a brief moment I was happy that my cell phone was back. Oh, how he knew me well and oh, how I would’ve liked to have been there with the lads.
Then I pressed and held the power button until the orangutan, who I like to call Jesus, on my display panel disappeared and the screen went black. “That was nice,” I said to no one in particular.
