“Send transmission from the one-armed scissor.”

Today, I made a man with only one working hand dig through the garbage for me while I watched. He was in the middle of eating lunch too. So what have you done for the lulz today?

I got a new phone finally today. As to whether this was a worthwhile expenditure, I’m still debating. On the one hand money is tight by design these days, and I’m still fabricating the bootstraps with which I will pull myself up. Looming close on the horizon is a mandatory housing change, meaning I should be putting away pretty much everything I earn and buying next to nothing. The necessary unknown of living somewhere else in a month and a half is both a stressor and an excitement, and the only thing I feel I can do right now to reassure myself is have lots of money waiting.

On the other hand, one must play to one’s strengths, and looking back on the last few months it’s easy to see how important my phone has been as an anchor of sanity in my life. A little TweetStats combing last night revealed that there has only been one day so far this year that I haven’t tweeted. Feels good m… no, actually, I don’t even know that that feels good. But holding a phone with a touchscreen and a camera,  with no chipping paint or cracked screen or layers of dead skin cell grime peeking out from the cracks, and knowing that it is mine and that I earned it has dribbled a significant amount of joy into my day. So I don’t regret it.

I also believe in omens, and I felt that the past few texts on my old phone were a good way to put it to bed. You see, my phone would only hold about 150 incoming texts, and since the summer of 2008 I’ve been saving all the best ones, the ones that I just couldn’t hit delete on. It’s been a difficult battle, scrolling through old messages, evaluating the importance of arbitrary points in my life versus the ability to receive new data. I’ve had a fluctuating range of 7-3 spots open for new texts on my phone since I left for Cali. And keeping that up has been tough. This has been my partial motivation behind tweeting some of the best texts I get, because I can then delete them from my phone.

Plus the new phone was like twenty bucks after rebate. So lay off me, me. Though the guy who sold it to me duped me into buying a 30 buck car charger. He was the owner of the bum hand, and even though it maybe makes me an insensitive bigot, I couldn’t stop from being intrigued at his dexterity in popping off battery cases and switching out sim cards. After the purchase, I ate at a Togo’s occupying what was obviously a halfheartedly-repurposed sports bar and which smelled faintly of urine. There, I tried to activate my phone, only to find that I needed an activation code for a second time, which I’d left on a post-it at the cell phone store. So back I went, and into the trashcan our hero fished with the same hand he then used to eat his oatmeal cookie.

And so I’ll leave you with some choice texts from my old phone, now serving only as an electronic memory bank:

I’m in a car in mexico, MO with a CONVICT. REGRET
02 Jul 2010 11:15pm
sender: withheld

Woke up to gay sex. WHERE ARE MY SHOES
06 Jun 2010 9:57am
sender: withheld

[name omitted] is currently explaining bukkake to his mom
15 Apr 2010 8:23pm
sender: jth005

I threw up so much Spider-Man mac and cheese last night. Luckily the girl in my bed was just a friend.
28 Mar 2010 12:44pm
sender: withheld

New hypothesis: i passed out on the chair and vomited all over myself and the chair, took the shirt off and went to bed. That shirt was full of vomit. Trashed.
23 Nov 2009 6:44pm
sender: withheld

Midnight tall boys in honor of WTC?
9 Sep 2009 8:36pm
sender: morningcrafter

Would you like to hear about the world map again? Yes/no
21 Jun 2009 10:43pm
sender: zoomz6

Getting out of jail at 1130a, sleeping til 7p, is this win?
13 Jun 2009 7:13pm
sender: nerfdude3k

Join
16 Dec 2008 1:21am
sender: Flirt

In memoriam:
Phone: 2006-2010