Back in a few days. Thanks for tuning in.

Steve

“How’s your food?” my date, a classy brunette, asks.

“Expensive,” I mumble through a piece of egg sodden brioche.

“It’s such a lovely day,” she says, stretching languidly while looking up at the flawless blue sky. “Don’t you think?” Even the weather here is ritzy.

As my date and I aimlessly chat about the weather a woman driving a battleship grey Audi TT pulls into a parking spot in front of the restaurant. I also notice that she’s taken up one and a half parking spots. Munching on my expensive Canadian bacon I see the woman start reading a book. And as she turns the pages she’s oblivious to the black Mercedes trying to squeeze in behind her. But since Audi Lady is hogging up so much space the task is beyond the capability of even the most skilled parallel parker.

After a few minutes of trying to make two pieces of matter occupy the same space at the same time, a visibly annoyed man jumps out of the Mercedes and tries directing his companion into the spot. After she tries and fails several times the man’s face flushes red with anger. “Look,” I say to my date. “This shit’s starting to get good.”

““Why can’t that Audi move up and let them in?”

“I think the driver’s on another planet.”

By this point the Mercedes is blocking traffic and cars are clogging the street. Not to be deterred, the man walks over to the Audi and taps on the window. Audi Lady looks at him sweetly and makes a “Sorry. I’m not leaving motion.” Apoplectic, the man throws his hands up in the air, storms back to his car and the couple drives away.

“Why go through all that frustration?” I say to my date. “There’s a perfectly good parking lot across the street with plenty of space.”

“Serendipity,” she says.

“Huh?”

“In this town everyone’s rich. So when everyone’s equal serendipity becomes a status symbol.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Have you ever found a parking space right in front of the place you want to go?”

“Yeah. That’s killer.”

“Well the guy in that Mercedes wanted that experience. He wanted to pull up with no muss or fuss and be on his way. But when he couldn’t get that experience he flipped out.”

“Why not park in the lot?”

“Probably beneath him or something. That’s why he spent five minutes all worked up trying to get that spot.”

I never though of serendipity being a status symbol. But when I think back to my waiter days my date’s insight makes sense. I can’t tell you how many times people came in off the street with no reservation and asked for the best table in the house. Sometimes I was able to give it to them, sometimes not. Most people were gracious, accepted the fact it wasn’t their lucky day and sat elsewhere. But some customers, just like that man in the Mercedes, flipped out. It was as if they thought the table belonged to them by divine right. Maybe telling them “no” trashed their delusion that life should just be one series of effortless moments after another.

“That guy in the Mercedes is in for a world of hurt,” I say.

“Why do you say that?”

“Serendipity’s a happy experience because it doesn’t happen all the time. Not getting it is what gives it meaning. If he doesn’t grasp that he’s fucked.”

As we finish up our meal I look at the woman in the Audi again. But she’s not reading anymore. She’s drinking Grey Goose straight from the bottle.

“Jesus,” I say, shaking my head. Would you look at that?”

“Oh my God,” my date says. She’s not on another planet. She’s hammered.”

Audi Lady takes one more immense guzzle from her bottle before stowing it under her seat. Then she gets out of the car, grabs what looks like a couple of rolled up paintings from the trunk and stumbles onto the sidewalk. She’s emaciated, pale and shaking. I worked with alcoholics for years. This lady’s drinking far more than she’s eating. I have no idea why’s she’s a drunk but it doesn’t matter. She may have a nice car and a great parking spot but if she doesn’t get help she’ll die within the year – beyond serendipity’s cool touch forever.

Suddenly this town doesn’t feel ritzy anymore.

Luckily I score a parking spot in front of a Starbuck’s inside a busy strip mall. Now it’s a hot day and I’m loath leaving Buster inside a car but I had the A/C blasting so the interior’s cool. Keeping the windows shut I lock the door and walk in to get my java fix. Besides, how long could it take?

Inside the cool shop I see there are two people ahead of me on line, a man buying a boat load of coffee beans and a large older woman wearing a dress that fits her like a potato sack. Feeling like a pastry I try walking up to the display case to peruse the goodies but the large woman’s blocking my way. “Excuse me ma’am,” I say politely.

The woman lets out a sibilant hiss of air and looks at me like I’ve crawled out from under a rock. Smiling at her disarmingly I note her flaming orange hair, granny spectacles, garish lipstick, over abundance of rouge and clumped orange mascara. If she was trying to look like The Joker she succeeded.

The woman’s response to my polite request is to block the display case with her rotund frame. Its then I realize her large body is throwing off a negative gravitational field, a repulsive force that shouts, “Stay away from me!” Undeterred I slip past her and begin perusing the cookies, scones and doughnuts I shouldn’t be eating. Her sense of space violated, the old woman lets out a large “Harrumph!” and moves her considerable body mass five inches to the right. Ignoring the negative vibe from the woman I look at the pastries and decide to get myself a double chocolate brownie. Man, all that sugar and caffeine’s going to hit my system like crystal meth.

When the old woman finally gets to the head of the line she instantly starts peppering the barista with a million questions. What’s a frappuccino? What does it cost? Can you make it low fat? How many calories are in it? After the worker patiently explains everything the woman starts rambling about her day, how hot it is outside and what a nice young man the barista is. As I listen to her talk I can almost see the words tumbling out of her mouth and scattering on the floor. Rapid and pressured speech? Bi-polar makeup and hyper vigilance about her personal space? Yep. This woman’s nuts.

I try being patient. Judging from the frumpy condition of her clothes going to Starbucks might be this woman’s only weekly treat. But as she drones on and on I feel beads of sweat start clustering on my back. Not because I’m hot mind you, because I’m worried about Buster. Glancing at my watch I see five minutes have already elapsed. Looking at my car I can see Buster’s still wagging his tail happily but soon the it’ll get too hot for him.  And with my luck someone from PETA will come barging in demanding to know who left a dog outside in a car. Unconsciously I let out a loud sigh. Big mistake.

“Do you mind?” the woman says, looking at me over her granny glasses. “You have to wait like everybody else!” I just shake my head and shrug.

“Ugh,” the woman says, her hands fluttering as if she’s trying to fan away a foul stench. “I’m surrounded by freaky creepy people. Freaky creepy people!’ I guess she means me.

“What would you like to order ma’am?” the barista says, wearing a smile covering up his desire to scream.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“What would you like, sir?” another barista, a pretty girl with brown hair, asks me. Thank God.

“A medium coffee and a brownie please,” I say.

As the pretty barista fills my order the old woman decides on a frappuccino and a scone. But when it comes time for the woman to pay there’s a mixup and my coffee gets rung up instead of her frappuccino.

“I didn’t order that!” the woman says loudly. I look at the barista and our eyes lock in server solidarity.

“We’ll just give you the frappuccino at that price ma’am,” he says, knowing if he tries voiding anything the old lady will flip.

“That’s very nice of you,” she says curtly.

“Just wait at the bar, please. Your drink will be right up.”

As the old woman waddles away I notice she doesn’t leave a tip. No shocker there. I pull out my wallet and pay for my order. “Have a nice day brother,’ I say, popping a dollar in the tip jar.

“You too,” he says, smiling knowingly.

Walking past the old woman I rapidly put cream and sugar into my coffee, replace the top and start heading for the door. As I do so the woman looks at me angrily, her stenciled eyebrows twitching like Herbert Lom from the Pink Panther movies.

At forty-two I’ve discovered my patience for stupidity is wearing thin. Maybe my years in mental health and waiting tables burned it out of me. Or maybe I’m just sick and tired of all the bullshit. And just as the old woman’s about to say something to me I fire up my thousand-yard stare and dump a dose of “Shut the fuck up” energy into her crazed eyes. The woman flinches; steps back and I walk towards the door, not feeling one iota of guilt. But before I can get out outside I hear her screech, “This isn’t what I ordered. This isn’t what I ordered!” Looking over my shoulder I see her hectoring the poor barista and notice his pleasant face has replaced by a blank stare. Bitch should have left a tip.

I get into my car, crank up the A/C and drive off with Buster no worse for wear. “Freaky creepy people,” I say. “The world’s full of them.”

“Are you okay Miss?” I ask.

Since Buster’s on a leash he fell short of the woman by ten feet. As he wags his tail the woman gives me a look designed to reduce my body into subatomic particles. It doesn’t work.

I smile reassuringly. “It’s only a small dog Miss.”

“I don’t like dogs!” the woman says, stomping away angrily.

“”Take care Miss,” I say, watching as she plods down the street. I can tell she’s preoccupied with something but what that “something” is I have no idea. But if she doesn’t pay attention to her surroundings she’ll get run over by the very bus she’s waiting for. Maybe her emotional state prompted her outsized reaction. Or maybe she really just doesn’t like dogs.

I don’t like people who don’t like dogs. Of course I’ve met people who have good reason to be afraid of dogs – they were mauled as a kid, saw a dog kill something or have serious allergies. On the flip side, however, I have a friend who was bit on the face by a large canine when she was five, had numerous plastic surgeries to repair the damage and still loves dogs. I also know people who are saddened by the fact they’re allergic to man’s best friend but still yearn to own one. Go figure.

But there are people out there who just don’t like dogs. I was perusing a dating website where one of the female respondents wrote, “I just don’t do dogs. It’s a deal breaker.” I feel sorry for any man who dates her. There’s also guy around the corner from my house who yells at me whenever Buster trots past his property. “Keep that dog off my lawn!” he usually yells out his second floor window. His lawn is a disgusting brown patch of dead stuff and his house looks like it hasn’t been painted in years. He’s one of these broken old men who have nothing better to do yell at dog owners and little kids. I don’t like him either.

“When you have a lawn worth protecting then we’ll talk!” I shouted back one day. I won’t be sharing my food with him if Armageddon strikes.

Dogs were the first domesticated animals. The theory goes that prehistoric wolves ate the scraps from garbage piles outside our ancestor’s caves and eventually became used to humans who eventually tamed them. In fact Buster’s great grandfather cubed to the nth degree was called the “Gobi Kitchen Midden Dog” and those 8th Millennium B.C. Chinese eventually breed those scavengers into breeds that would eventually become the Tibetan Spaniel, Pekingese and Japanese Chin. Another offshoot of the “Midden Dog” evolved into the Papillion, Pug, Long Haired Chihuahua and the Shih-Tzu. And those ancient dogs provided a valuable service in return for food – they were natural sentries. Whenever a rival tribesman or saber-toothed tiger was poking around dogs raised the alarm. Freed from always sleeping with one eye open, dogs probably allowed our ancestors to get some shuteye in a time when life was “nasty, brutish and short.” And as dogs became more and more prevalent they were seen as a sign of wealth. So if you had enough food to feed a dog you were probably sitting pretty in your cave condo. And if you were wealthy you’d score those fur-clad babes genetically driven to look for a sugar daddy to protect their offspring. I’m not being sexist or anything – that’s just the way things were back then. But maybe that explains why some girls get all gooey when they see a young guy playing Frisbee with a dog in Central Park.

Buster’s a Japanese Chin. His lineage is noble and ancient. Chins were the pets of Japanese royalty and were probably introduced to the West when Admiral Perry opened trade with Orient back in 1853 with the help of naval gunships and a little ship to shore bombardment. Not fond of being blasted to bits the Japanese gifted Perry with several Chins and they ended up in the hands of President Franklin Pierce and Queen Victoria. Of course the Japanese wised up after Perry’s little visit and began to build up a modern army and navy of their own. Well, we all know how that turned out. After WWII the Chin was almost extinct in Japan. So English and American breeders helped reintroduce the breed to our former enemies. And the Chin is still held in high regard in the Land of the Rising Sun. Whenever I run into Japanese tourists they go nuts when they see Buster and snap a million pictures. And you don’t see too many Chins either. They’re relatively rare.

True to his lineage Buster’s an excellent guard dog. At twelve pounds he can’t take down a burglar like a German Shepherd but you’ll know when one’s coming. If he hears anything out of the ordinary he sounds the alarm. One time he woke me up and I discovered that my apartment was filled with smoke. The house next door was on fire. Thanks Buster.

So why do some people hate dogs? I’ve never understood it. My knee-jerk reaction is that they’re selfish narcissists who can’t be bothered to care for another living thing. Dogs are a commitment and do put a crimp in a fancy free lifestyle so it’s no wonder so many couples get a dog before they embark upon having children. Now I’m not bashing people who don’t get dogs because they lead busy lives. They’re smart. Don’t get a dog if you can’t take care of it. But some people just have an unreasonable antipathy towards dogs and some dipshits abuse them. If it were up to me Michael Vick would be shoveling dogshit for all eternity. That would be some serious Karma. Once I saw an obviously disturbed youth throwing rocks at a dog tied up in a yard. You could have heard me yelling in Connecticut. And one of the biggest warning signs a kid’s an incipient serial killer is that they harm animals. Cops keep an eye on those children as they’re growing up.

Dogs help the blind, rescue people, sniff out drugs and explosives, are actual police officers, provide companionship, retrieve food and have been shown to help reduce depression. They bring joy to old people, teach children responsibility and help politicians get out of jams. (FDR and Nixon) And when the President gets a dog it’s a source of endless media coverage. 43,021,000 American households own 72,114,000 dogs and with pet food, vets, grooming and toys they’re a multibillion-dollar industry employing thousands of people. Dogs overwhelmingly provide more benefits to people than deficits.

So I’m doing the dating game now and my “deal breaker” is a woman who doesn’t like dogs. Yeah, it’s a bit absolutist but trust me, I learned that lesson the hard way. If you don’t “do” dogs I don’t care is you’re a supermodel – you’re gone. And while some people look askance at my joint custody arrangement, fuck ‘em. They’ll never understand and they’re not worth knowing. Having a dog and taking good care of it is a character reference. And between my ex and me Buster’s one of the best cared for dogs in the Tri-State area.

As the dog-hating woman boards her bus I shake my head. Something bad might be happening in her life and that’s sad.

But then again something is wrong with her anyway.

I was sitting down watching television (Flash Forward) when I felt my cell phone vibrate in my left back pocket. But when I reached to it, much to my surprise, it wasn’t there. I shrugged it off. Maybe a passing truck and sent some tremors up though my couch. But ten minutes later my left butt cheek vibrated again. And again. And again. “I must’ve pulled something at the gym,” I told myself, and left it at that.

But the phantom phone just kept ringing. Sometimes a real phone was in my back pocket, sometimes it wasn’t- but every time I felt the sensation my phone wasn’t ringing.

One night the vibrations were so constant that I began to worry. So I did the worst thing anyone can ever do when they’re experiencing strange symptoms – I logged onto the Internet. After half and hour of Googling I was convinced I was having mini-strokes, diabetic neuropathy and Multiple Sclerosis all rolled into one. But after some deep breathing exercises I told myself I was making something out of nothing and decided not go all Code Red. And a few days later the buzzing stopped as mysteriously as it started.

Two weeks later I’m in my doctor’s office for my yearly physical. After the weigh-in, EKG, BP check and annual anal violation my doctor states I’d live another year. “Just lose weight and reduce the stress in your life,” he says. And as my sphincter resets itself from the gloved finger I tell the doc about the other weird sensations in my butt.

“Oh that’s nothing,” he says. “I call it “Absent Cell Phone Syndrome.”

“Are you serious?”

“Where do you keep your cell phone?”

“In my left back pocket.”

“And is that where you have the feelings?”

“Always.”

The doctor laughs. “I’ve been carrying a beeper for over thirty years. And every once in a while I feel it buzzing on my belt when it’s not there. You get so used to the feeling that the body replicates it.”

“Absent cell phone syndrome,” I said. “I like that. You think that one up all by yourself?”

“I should patent the phrase,” my doc said. “Write it up on your blog. See if anyone else has been experiencing the same thing.”

When I leave the doctor’s office I think how different the world is than the one I grew up in. When I was a kid we had TVs with antennas, got the news from three networks, picked up the phone when it rang, played records, sent letters through the mail and had to go to the library to research term papers. Now I can’t imagine a world without email, 24-hour news, blogs, Wikipedia, text messaging, cell phones, voice mail, Amazon.com, iPods, plasma televisions and, especially, laptops. If I had to write two books using a typewriter and carbon paper like they did “back in the day” I’d have become a drunk. All this stuff has become woven into the fabric of our everyday lives and there’s no turning back.

When a person loses a limb it’s not uncommon for them to still feel pain and sensations where their appendage used to be. It’s called Phantom Limb Syndrome. And since electronic toys have become such a part of us, a digital limb so to speak, they’re now a virtual part of our bodies. So it should come as no surprise that I’m feeling mysterious vibrations in my ass – it’s used to my cell phone. And let’s not talk about when the Internet is down. When the power went in my neighborhood a few weeks ago I thought my roommate was going to slit his wrists. No internet! No email! No instant messaging! Our brains seem to crave the endless mental stimulation the worldwide web offers. Me? I read a book by candlelight. But to be honest after three days I was getting itchy too.

Later that night my roommate comes home from work and plops an iPad into my lap. His job lent him one to figure out how to make their business operations more efficient. When Apple rolled out this little gadget a few months ago I thought, “What a stupid device, my laptop can do everything this thing can.” But after a few hours playing with it I found myself sucked into a world of e-books, watching videos and surfing the web on something no bigger than a magazine. It’s just another digital limb – but a really cool one. And when my roommate took it back to work with him the next morning I felt deprived. Uh oh. Absent iPad syndrome!

I have an iPhone, iPod and a Mac already. But as my fingers ached for the iPad’s touch screen my ass started buzzing again.

I’m so screwed.