I'm on hold.

Right now, no lie, I have my headset in my ear and my phone right in front of me while I am trapped on hold. The great thing about living in the future, man, is that I can sit at a bar and type on a computer I carry with me at the same time I am on hold with a major corporation through the use of a phone that is smaller than my dick at the very same time I am drinking a nice cold beer.

They're playing bad "soft jazz" at me now. Soft jazz, I have determined, is what happens when pathetic white men want to try and do mournful jazz via hopes of getting laid for playing a goddamned clarinet. It's deeply evil, soul scarring music, and I feel that any radio station dedicating itself to the playing of this foul stench of a genre deserves to be hung by their toes. Worse yet are the companies that use it to soothe the nerves of the savage consumer.

The joke in all of this is that I am on hold with my computer manufacturer. Yeah, as you can see, it is a crippling problem I have here. I mean, I can use the fucking machine. Why should I need to call support for it?

If you could only see this screen. There' s a huge button in the middle of it. Shit, this sentence just went behind it, so I can't see what the hell I'm typing. But anyway, that isn't even my point. There's this box. It's large and staying right where it is. Worst of all, it has buttons.

Do you want to continue? Yes/No

Not that the buttons fucking work! “Yes” or “No,” the box itself will not go away. It hasn't hurt anything; it hasn't stopped me from working, per say, but it won't go away. I can reboot, but the box comes back. I can rip the battery right out with clenched, tight fingers shaped like the claws of my ancestors -- doesn't matter.

So yeah. Button. Box. Whatever. Stuck in my face. Stuck on hold.

The Kirk came by, on his way to Ireland, just the other week. He looked at my computer and savvied the issue quickly.

"That shit needs looking at, man," he intoned in his special way.

"It's fine! It's a beast of burden! It's healthy and strong and can bite the balls off of any comers! What the fuck do you mean 'looked at'?" I demanded loudly, swinging my arm in a wide arc that almost took out a window.

"Can't you see it, man? It needs help." The Kirk shrugged at me and told me how he had to go to Dustin's wedding. I was not, you might note, invited. Not after the last time, but that's a different story.

My mind rambles while I'm on hold. My friends are off getting drunk together and hitched, not together, and making with the merry, while I'm stuck here listening to Kenny motherfuckin' G wail away at some song that proclaims him not quite Michael Bolton.

***

I'm writing this a bit later. Tech support picked up. They told me to do all sorts of things, some of them sounded like fraternity hazing rituals, and eventually they helped me fix the problem with the fucking box. Box. Button. Whatever. It's gone.

Good thing, too. My mind was rambling pretty bad there. I was about to tell you all the story of my first erection. During a showing of Frankenstein.

Maybe next time.