Is That the Old iPhone?

By Dan Brooks

I couldn’t help but notice that we both have the same phone. Not the exact same phone, of course—I couldn’t help but notice that we both have iPhones, and you have the iPhone 3G. Man, I remember how excited I was when that came out. Remember how you could get the discount if you had the first iPhone, but you had to sign a new two-year contract to get it? I guess that contract has just about run out now, huh?

I bet you’ve got some sweet music on there—the second Wolf Parade album, “Lollipop,” maybe that Will.i.am song about Obama. I’m just messing with you, bro. Obviously you’ve synced your phone since 2008, probably for the software update they did when my phone came out. It’s cool that they do that for everybody, even if the old processors have a hard time with some of the features.

Hey, what direction are we facing right now? Oh, sorry—I assumed you had the compass feature,  but then I remembered that was the iPhone 3GS. Gotta have that GPS for the compass feature to work. I suppose if somebody needed to find you in an emergency they could triangulate your location based on cellular towers. Or just check the premiere of the first Iron Man movie, right? I’m sorry, dog, but you walked right into that one.

I love you so much. Not you, dude—sorry, I was video chatting with my girlfriend. Wanna see her? She’s Asian. We were going to go to the LCD Soundsystem show tonight, but the new album is kind of meh. It’s like if you took Yeasayer and slowed it down and then mixed it with the beats from Big K.R.I.T. Those are bands, by the way. “Meh” is an expression from the internet used to convey ambivalence.

Anyway, we’re probably going to skip the show and go to the bar underneath Union Pool. Dude, you didn’t know there was a bar underneath Union Pool? It’s pretty tight. You go to Union Pool like usual, except when you show your ID to the bouncer you also give him a fifty with “ski pass” written on it. That’ll tell him you want to buy coke, and he’ll send you to Gary in the back. But then you tell Gary the password, which is “eightball,” and he lets you into the bar downstairs. If you want to buy an eightball, just say “secret bar” like usual.

The bar under Union Pool is kind of lame, but there’s a party in the VIP area tonight that should be cool. I’d invite you, but there’s a list. They had to buy all the parrot glands in advance so, you know, guests only.

You don’t know about parrot glands? Dude, it’s a totally amazing high. It’s like that feeling you have right after you get something you really wanted, where you feel a pang of nostalgia for the time when you wanted it so much, and then there’s the sense of euphoria you get from that feeling going away. You know what I mean? Probably not—it’s a completely new human experience that you can only get from smoking parrot glands.

Anyway, I gotta bounce. My phone’s ringing, although not at a frequency you can hear. Give me a call sometime—assuming the backwards compatibility worked, you’ll find my number in your contacts list. Hit me up if you ever need a hologram; I’m a hologram designer for Xxklckzys, the company that actually runs AT&T. Totally sweet to meet you, bro.

That’s a great handshake, by the way. Really ironic.

Dan Brooks writes about politics, consumer culture and lying at Combat!