News & Articles

I’m getting the shakes. I feel irritable and tense. I’m having trouble focusing. A piece of me is missing, and my body is having phantom pains. Every few minutes, I swear I feel my leg vibrating, as if I were receiving a text message on my phone. I’m not, though, because I accidentally left my cellphone at work.
It’s sitting right there on my desk, charging on my work computer. By the time I realized I left it behind, I was already halfway home on the bus. I didn’t think it was worth turning back for, but I was wrong. I’m a mess. I have a shell-shocked feeling - that nervous, fuzzy-all-over effect one gets when some horrible event happens. Every few minutes I have to stop and ask myself, “Did I dislocate my shoulder? No, my shoulder seems fine. Did my grandma die? No, that’s not it. Did I get caught watching porn on the computer at the library? No, I’m not in college anymore. I have my own computer these days.” It’s because my phone isn’t here, and my primitive monkey brain doesn’t know how to handle change.

I take the bus to work because I’m too poor to afford a car. The entire bus is just illegal immigrants, transexual prostitutes, drug addicts and me. We’re all very different, but we share the common bond of being losers who have trouble finding employment. Illegals because they don’t have work visas, trannies because people are frightened of them, drug addicts because they’re unreliable, and me because potential employers are weirded out by the Adventure Time tattoo on my penis.

I fell asleep in a Waffle House a number of years back, and I woke up in the restroom with the tattoo. I don’t really want to talk about it. The only reason I’m even going on this segue about the bus is because writing this extra text is the only thing that distracts me from instinctively reaching into my pocket and trying to check my non-existent phone every five seconds.

Perhaps the reason for this withdrawal is that cellphones are cancerous. Maybe I’ve been housing a big shiny cancer phone adjacent to my balls all these years and the sudden absence of radiation is causing this condition. Maybe it’s a good kind of cancer, like when that radioactive spider bit Spiderman, or when David Bowie pooped in a toxic waste dump and created Captain Planet.

I can’t live like this, all empty and phoneless. What if someone calls or texts me? What if there’s an outbreak of a flesh-eating virus and the mayor texts the address of his secret safehouse to all the handsomest people in town? I wouldn’t get that text! What if Michael Douglas finally responds to the letters I’ve sent him every day for the past 10 years requesting that he teach me how to talk like Michael Douglas? I might never learn how to do that. Think of all the hot bitches I’d be forfeiting!
Gasp! What if BURT REYNOLDS tries to call me? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for Burt Reynolds to ask me to hang out in the Trans-Am that he clearly doesn’t own or drive in real life? Burt Reynolds isn’t going to leave a message. He’s The Bandit, goddamn it!

Mind you, no one ever calls or texts me. Nearly every conversation I have is through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or one of the dozen other forms of modern communication that don’t require typing on a keyboard the size of a raccoon’s scrotum. I think the last legitimate, non-parental phone call I received was in 2007. That phone call was from Michael Douglas’ lawyer, demanding that I stop sending letters to Michael Douglas. I have not complied.

Tomorrow I will wake up, tweaking like a heroin addict at a methadone clinic, but my calm will be restored at work when my phone is safely back in my hands. I will check it and find that I didn’t miss anything, and then slip it back into my pocket like Bilbo Baggins did with The Ring. And like Bilbo, I’ll likely spend the entire rest of my goddamn life only using it once as some party trick to impress inbred relatives.

But it’s my phone, and my balls are chilly without it, dear reader. And apparently my leg vibrates repeatedly in some sort of convulsion if the phone goes missing for more than an hour. Also, I can use it as a wireless hotspot if my home internet goes out and I want to continue searching for photos of Studs Terkel for the Studs Terkel Breakfast Nook I’m constructing in my kitchen.

It’s 1am on a Monday, but I think I’m going to go get it now. *TWITCH*