Cool Again

In a stunning turn of events that defy the laws of probability, on par with me being named World’s Best Dressed Man or Most Likely To Survive A Month In A Barren Wilderness Devoid Of Pizza Delivery, I have managed to lay a whupping on Father Time, by which I mean I’ve officially become cool again, even at an age where the highlight of my day is if my knees either snap, crackle, or pop, but not all three, when I get out of bed in the morning.

Cool, huh? And all it took was me being incredibly careless and almost destroying an expensive piece of technology.

It all started a few months ago when I was getting out of my car. Now, this is a maneuver that I’ve successfully executed countless times in row, ever since mastering not getting caught up in the seat belt, but on this particular day, fate had something else in store for me. I honestly don’t know exactly how it happened, but as I was swinging my legs out of the car, I somehow sent my cell phone flying out the door along with them. The result was a horrible grating clunk as the phone crashed down to the garage floor.

Gasping in horror, I picked it up to survey the damage, ready to initiate mouth-to-camera resuscitation, if necessary. Luckily, it was still working. However, the screen had been cracked. The damage began in the bottom left-hand corner, where the brunt of the impact had been absorbed, creating a dense spider-web of fracturing. From there, several cracks crawled up the screen, as if in a race to get to the top, before petering out three-quarters of the way up.

My first instinct was to fix or replace the phone. Luckily, I’m both cheap and lazy, and so I did no such thing. Instead, I took the path of least resistance and learned to live with it. Within days, I was hardly even noticing the damage anymore! It was kind of like when you have a beloved car that’s continually falling apart, but you choose to ignore all of its flaws simply because over the years it’s become almost a part of your family – or you’re just too cheap and lazy to fix it. You instead grow to accept its faults, such as the engine falling out several times a week, as nothing more than lovable quirks, and the situations that these faults keep getting you into, such as having the engine fall out on your way to the hospital so your wife can give birth, as zany adventures that you’ll continually laugh about over the years, assuming she backs away from all of that divorce talk.

This all leads up about a week or two ago, when I discovered that cracked cell phone screens are now all the rage with the young crowd. (Google it if you want proof.) Apparently, a cracked screen gives you a sort of street cred, which is something that I haven’t possessed since – well – ever. This was quite a welcome revelation to me, and as a result, I’m now pretty sure that I’ve become cool! (Disregard the fact that I learned about this latest trend while listening to NPR.)

So far, the only problem I’m having is that people don’t realize that I’ve become cool. This is because nobody ever sees my phone, because– unlike the youth population of today – I don’t spend ninety-five percent of my waking time posting unreadable status updates to the internet with it. Instead, it sits cozily in my pocket until I need it to make my next move in a game of Words With Friends with my mom.

But I have a plan: I think I’m going to get a holster and start wearing my phone on my belt. Then I can show off my cracked screen and thereby gain the street cred that I so richly crave. Hot dog, it’s gonna be great! By golly, I just can’t wait! Gee willikers, I can’t see how this plan could ever fail! But first, I should probably listen to more NPR.