In a cab tonight, after a junk food bender so humiliating it should be recorded on some eating disorder web ring for teenage girls, I had an out of body experience. I was retrieving messages from my cell phone - my mom, two wrong numbers, and Fudge Castle telling me my order is cooling - and suddenly I felt a very familiar vibration in my ass. It was the same vibration my phone gives off in my pocket, but how could it be! I am sort of embarrassed to admit that I did a "phone take" where I pulled my own phone away from my ear, wondering how it could be vibrating while in use, though knowing full there was no "how"; it just couldn't be.

Finally I realized the buzz was coming from another phone I'd sat on when I entered the cab. If it hadn't been in my ass I probably wouldn't have known it was there but, upon discovering it, it seemed a good idea to answer it. I wound up speaking with a nice girl named Helen, who was waiting somewhere for the phone's owner - a man with a bit of a problem being on time. Helen and I are to be married in the fall, and you're all invited, but that is not my story. Not now.

I did what I thought was most appropriate. I gave Helen my mobile number and instructed her to have her friend call me there so he could retrieve his phone. The succeeding turn of events is not worth report, except for two details:

When Phil (i think that was his name but couldn't be trusted with this information; names drop out of my memory just as soon as they enter it. i'm excellent with fingerprints, however.) dropped by to retrieve his phone, I greeted him at my building's stoop. He was a young guy - asian, slight - and he grabbed my hand and said, with alarming earnestness, "THANK GOD FOR NICE PEOPLE LIKE YOU." It was actually kind of moving. Thank god for nice people like me? As he held tight on my hand, I feared he'd experience the same super-powers Bruce Willis had in Unbreakable. Through his touch, I wondered if he would be able to feel all the horrible things I'd done with my life, especially since some of them had occurred earlier that day. Would his expression change from gratitude to spiritual pain, and finally slacken into grim disgust as he backed away from me? Still, the very idea that he would thank God for people like me made me want to do something nice, like destroy my eugenics laboratory.

Earlier, when I was trying to find Phil's information in his cell phone, I discovered that this model doubled as a digital camera. Curious, I selected a menu called "photo album". There were only two photos in there. The first was Phil making a crazy face into the camera. The second was Phil making a less crazy face into the camera. I've a feeling there won't be many more pictures than that during this phone's lifetime, which is probably not so uncommon. On television commercials advertising camera-phones, there is always some scenario in which the phone's owner sees the Grand Wizard of the KKK kissing a Mexican baby or something, and thank God for nice phones! In reality, 99% of the photos on those phones capture its owner making a crazy face. The other 1% are blurry shots of my penis head poking through the opening of my boxers. (sorry, phil. there's no god in the history of religion you'll want to thank for that.)