Techno Date

Here I am sitting at another upscale chic bar with another date hoping that this one goes somewhere other than nowhere as all the rest have.  Unfortunately, the girl I am with is one of those obsessively materialistic persons that has the newest of the new whiz-bang cool phones that can do anything you ask it to and if it can't there is probably an app for it do so.

In a nutshell, she is sitting across from me eyes glued to that tiny screen, thumbs moving at a speed that can best described as a Jackrabbit on speed, completely ignoring me.  She is probably tweeting, texting or updating her Facebook telling the world how much of a sucky date this is.

I take a long draw off of the beer that sits before me and with a clinking, return the bottle back to the table.  I get a quick glance from her in a moment of complete stillness from those lightening thumbs for me to give her a half-cocked smile, only for her to just as quickly return back to the never ceasing thumb action.  I bet should could whip a middle schoolers ass in thumb wrestling.

"Put the phone down," I say to her with a slightly annoyed tone hoping to maybe salvage what sanity I have left from sitting here essentially by myself drinking alone.  She looks up at me again, though this time with a little less brevity than before.  An opening that I gather to use to further, perhaps even to, continue a conversation with another living, breathing, human being that isn't on the other end of some battery powered device.  "I would like to do more than sit here while you do whatever it is you are doing and perhaps get to know each other through talking."

"So talk, I'll listen." As she glances down back to the soul sucking device designed by Hell itself, gives it a quick little smile and engages the turbo thumbs once more.

"I'm not sure you are or will, you seem a bit distracted."  No reply comes from the zombie sitting across from me, just a glazed look staring down at the succubus held between her hands.  I swear I see a small trickle of drool forming at the corner of her mouth. "I hit a homeless man on my way here but I didn't want to be late, so I kept on driving.  I'll check on him on my way back home to see if he is still there or at least crawled off into the brush to die like some wounded deer after being hit by a tractor trailer loaded down with pig heads nailed to a flatbed."

"Heh."

Heh? Was that a laugh at what I just said or was it some primal guttural response to some inane thing she just read on that infernal device? I glance around the bar noticing all the other couples, talking, laughing with each other, not through some Hell Spawn but genuinely looking at each other, eye to eye, holding genuine conversations!  This is Hell or some sort of Bizarro World or the Twilight Zone.  I can hear the music now ringing in my ears.

I look back at little Dorothy of Droid, still thumping that phone with those hammers she must call thumbs.  I believe the world could come to a cataclysmic end and she would only learn about it through some update on Facebook to which her reply would be, "OMG!"

At this point I am done trying to pry little Miss Gollum's attention away from her Precious so I get up to go the restroom, say nothing to her upon leaving and receive nothing of any sort of acknowledgement that I left or a questioning of where I am going.  She is totally drawn in to the bright artificial glow of the tiny screen of doom.

Upon returning, I stop on my way back to survey the situation and see the same thing I have been seeing the entire evening.  I tell the waitress that I have to go, but my date has some friends on the way and that she offered to pay for my drinks even though I was uncomfortable with it, though she totally insisted.

Then I left to go home to have some meaningful conversation with some peeps playing Halo on the Xbox.

Numb II

I don't like hospitals.

Yet I am sitting outside once again with another passing of a family member. Seems we are dropping like flies.

This time it is my uncle that has left this plane for the next from a heart attack earlier today.  Seems drug use from the day before may have had something to do with it. This unverified but it wouldn't be a stretch if it was.

Let this be a lesson to you kids, drugs kill...eventually. May not be today or tomorrow but the effects from long time usage stays with you for your lifetime. They make you feel good for the short term but they are doing things to you that you do not feel or realize until years have passed, then it is too late.

I hope this death will be a lesson to some younger members of my family that have started to walk down the path of drug use. That they will realize that this family is cursed with a history of addiction. It is a fight that we fight throughout our lifetime from in utero till our passing breath. 

The true loss is that of his young son not being able to grow up without his dad. For his dad to teach him those lessons that only a father can pass to his son.

Another bastard growing up fatherless in this world.