The Prayer

I hate your iPad. I hate your iPad more than I hate your iPhone. Hell, I hate it almost as much as I hate my own iPhone, and I’m a self-professed (and loud about it) early adopting, Mac product nympho. I’m typing this on a laptop emblazoned with a chewed up apple below a mysteriously levitating leaf that I marvel at without question, while listening to music recorded by someone else yet arrogantly personalized with an “i”, through little white headphones, also personalized with that same “i”, like all the other drones who managed to peel their bodies from peaceful slumber to congregate at a Starbucks at 8am and gorge on over-roasted caffeine for hours while wondering why we’re all so damn tired all the time.  I say this to you with nothing but the best of intentions and a vitriolic kindness in my heart. Your beloved status symbol says no more about your social standing than the 140 characters you just typed into it to update your eager gaggle of lemmings on your last bowel movement. The overgrown smart phone before you, with its personalized flip case, complete with hydraulic reading stand and surround LED laser show does not make your penis or your brain any bigger, and it doesn’t dial out. It merely informs everyone around you that you had an extra 500 bucks plus tax you didn’t know what to do with and that you’re a sucker for cheap marketing. Just like me.

The pad, like that other pad before it, is a technological marvel. I’d be a foul-mouthed, opinionated nimrod with my taste in my own mouth to suggest otherwise, and lord knows I’m just foul-mouthed and opinionated. Yes, the design is nearly flawless, and will be until somebody reads this in ten or five or three years on some yet to be conceived and currently inconceivable device and chuckles at my simple minded techno-naiveté.

There are some, nay many, who, in the midst of worldwide economic calamity, can actually afford the most beautiful mobile reading device I’ve ever seen, and unlike the rest of us, they don’t use it to watch porn. These kind, intelligent, sophisticated souls will take their hard-won tablet to the corner mom and pop café on a crisp fall morning and read something insightful or mindless or trashier than an issue of OK Magazine while sipping a warm, soul-soothing cocoa hand made with a doting grandmother’s love. Maybe you’ll see one on a long flight while you’re cramped in coach and mutter a silent blessing when the guy next to you passes the time watching episodes of “Law and Order” on his sleek, battery saving iPad, rather than a bulky laptop like the one tucked under your seat and currently dying of design envy.     

But i reserve my ire not for these, the Apple users that god and Steve Jobs intended. My iWrath is aimed at the guy on table 50, who was born anti-social, will die anti-social, and is hell bent on making sure that everyone on the planet knows it in the time he has between the two events, the first unholy, and the latter not mercifully soon enough. Most people choose as screen savers photos of their dogs or their kids or the person they used to bang regularly when they were in love and had the time and energy to do it without having to schedule it on the calendar application that came with their iWhatever. But not this guy.

This guy, this iDickhead, wants you for your free WiFi. He craves your high-speed connection and demands it on pain of Yelp. He marshalls his business associates, because he has no friends, to a place where he can obsess about his professional peaks and valleys for hours while nursing twelve Coca Colas and never once getting up to pee, all the while insisting that the aforementioned business associates will be arriving any minute to discuss a very important investment deal that will render everything, including the very building you’re in and Christmas, irrelevant.

And there iDickhead will sit, scrolling through page after web page on his time and space sucking gizmo in self-imposed geek-xile, hitting the home button in case he missed that all important Push notification that will make him sexy and glancing lovingly at the gigantic production company logo screen saver that he may or may not actually be associated with but will make sure that you see, at least in passing.

Two hours later, iDickhead will be joined, despite the staggering cosmic improbability, by not one, but two actual human beings more introverted and socially awkward than himself. And one of them will have a camera.

You’d think that for $500 and the price of a Coke, iDickhead’s iPad would come fully equipped with all the audio-visual and recording needs a man who doesn’t interact well with others might need. But no. iDickhead requires a separate sentient being with big hair, a camera, and an accent to prove his importance on the international stage. And the camera will require its own Coke.

I do have to hand it to the good people at Apple, the battery life on the iPad is indeed endless. Three hours into web browsing, email composition, and intellectual masturbation, iDickhead was still going strong, and I concluded that he was either peeing into some unseen urine port they failed to mention on those clever “I’m a Mac” commercials, or had a bladder as mighty as the Euphrates. Big hair was still snapping photos, though she always kept the telephoto lens pointed down and examined the digital display featuring her handiwork in a way reminiscent of Russian spies safeguarding a precious microfiche. It was as if, like unicorns and good Michael Bay movies, the images on the camera would instantly vanish if anyone actually saw them.

Somewhere along the way, iDickhead and companions actually order something, because even the terminally semi-conscious have to feed. For a brief moment, there is hope. Perhaps iDickhead was just so hungry and preoccupied with a family illness, and all he needed to soften was a good meal and the kindness of a stranger in an apron. Maybe this fellow traveler did indeed have the cure to world hunger and the answer to global climate change on the device I so callously chided in an extended 1200 word moment of cynicism. iDickhead, like me, had a mother that loved him, hopes, dreams, and an affinity for the aesthetically pleasing. We were the same, he and I, and for a precious moment in time we shared the same air and the familiar warmth made possible, if by nothing else, at least a merciless forced physical proximity. So what if I was his server and he’d already cost me a quarter of a night’s earnings and the rent was past due? What’s a little cold hard cash for the loving comfort and hospitality offered an appreciative soul in need?

Had I known that iDickhead would tip the way he did, I might have accidentally poured a pitcher of glistening Coca Cola all over him, his big haired companion, her camera (because state secrets must be kept safe at all costs), her nebbish I’m presuming lover who I hope is secretly married to three women and a donkey in Utah, and the fucking iPad that has no business in a packed restaurant at the height of the dinner rush in the first place.

It is my sincere hope that one day, far from the mundane, mortal concerns of food, shelter, civility, and job security, I might share a quiet moment with iDickhead and, soul-to-soul like something out of a Deepak Chopra self help book, I can tell him how his absent-minded behavior affected me in a negative way and burdened my already weary mind and body. And then, I’d pour a pitcher of glistening Coca Cola on him and his iPad, on purpose.

 

Comments

[Danny]

Brilliance.