You're What's Wrong With America Part II: Steve Jobs

Dear Steve Jobs,

I am really sorry about your liver. That said, fuck you. Because the other day, thanks in no small part to you and your I’m–so-clever-and-such-a-fucking-master-of-sleek-fucking-design, I damn near lost half of my right foot.

See, I was walking across the parking lot of Central Market with the goal of entering the store and purchasing a roasted chicken that had been pasture raised, hand-fed, killed-with-kindness, and then rubbed with herbs and spices delicately extracted—nay whisperingly coaxed—from the colon of a rare white Buffalo that lives in a Nepalese cave. While I myself do not eat poultry, I decided to make this purchase for my eldest dog, who recently had a stroke or else faked having a stroke so that I would buy her a roasted chicken.

As you may or may not know Mr. Jobs, it takes a good forty-five seconds to cross the Central Market parking lot. And as you surely do know, time is money! Not wanting to waste a second or a penny, I whipped out my iPhone so I could multi-task in style as I checked my gMail, which I hadn’t checked since at least two minutes before while I was driving. As I suspected, I had a new message, one that just couldn’t wait. It was a picture a client sent me. And yes, bonus points, it was a picture of ME! I was so excited looking at this picture of ME on the three-inch screen that you brought to the world that I failed to pay attention when it came time to open the door leading me into Central Market.

I continued admiring my picture of me on my iPhone as I yanked on the door, which turned out to be not nearly as heavy as my distracted brain calculated it to be. Have you ever been at a pub and they hand you a frosted beer mug and you grab it and, not realizing it’s plastic because it looks JUST LIKE A MUCH HEAVIER FROSTED GLASS MUG, you heave it too hard and too fast and the whole fucking beer goes flying over your shoulder? Okay, Steve? So the door situation was like that.

Also, the door was decidedly un-well hung, ending a good inch or so above the ground, the perfect catch space for my foot, since I was wearing my trendy Vibram five-finger monkey shoes, you know the shoes that just scream that I am the sort of person who enjoys dropping eighty-dollars on pretend shoes so that I can wear them to impress my fellow shoppers while I am procuring overpriced dietary staples featuring chefs’ autographs on the label as well as hand-plucked, 24-karat gold-plated chickens for my elderly, stroke victim dog. So I guess what I’m saying is that, if it makes you feel any better, I also blame, in part, the shoe makers, the grocery store owners, and whoever convinced us that we must coax our canines into breaking Guinness Book of World Records records with their life spans.

Me? I wasn’t feeling better at all, not as I yanked that door and pulled it with all my might across the top of my foot. The pain was instant, exquisite, eye-opening, breathtaking, and made childbirth seem like child’s play by comparison. The rainbow of blues, blacks and purples that have replaced my once nicely John-Boehner-tinged orange-tanned foot features hues never before seen by the human eye. In fact, hey, here’s an idea, Steve—maybe you’d like to incorporate this palette into your next groovy shade-changing iPhone screensaver!

So thanks a lot Steve. Thanks for being born and for inventing Macs and for luring me in. Thanks to you I married a lunatic I met online using my first Apple computer in 1995. I’ve taken endless internet writing gigs that have left me a bitter, disillusioned crankster—more on that in the second half— and, also thanks to your contributions to technology, I have completely lost the ability to read books, have face-to-face conversations with other people, or—as noted—cross a parking lot without trying to improve my Angry Birds score, text motherly advice to my adult son, or see what the temperature outside is rather than just, you know, figure out which way the wind blows on my own.

I’m not even going to start in on how also, thanks to you, I have committed myself to a Faustian, life-time-and-beyond contract with the evil fucks that run AT&T and how recently, once again, they turned upgrading a telephone into a fou- week, twenty customer service phone call, delivered-to-wrong-address, bullshit ring of hell that Dante himself could never have fathomed, not even with a state-of-the-art Inferno App.

Sincerely,

Spike