Up Next on Intervention: Ken Wheaton

I blame my stepsister for this. She’s the one who started it. She’s the one who said, “Go ahead. Try it. It’s free.”

I’d resisted earlier attempts from others to try it. Besides, they were simply a bunch of addicted chuckleheads themselves, the sort of people who spend hours on Twitter talking about social media talking about marketing and engaging–obviously the sorts who had no personal lives worth mentioning, whose interior landscapes were empty voids waiting to be occupied by anything.

But my stepsister got me.

There I was at my dad’s house, hungover (from proper alcohol mind you) after the night of my 20-year high school reunion. (More on that in a later post). So I was a little weak when she waltzed into the kitchen with an iPad.

“So you went ahead and did it?” I sneered.

“Yeah,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“What do you actually use it for?” I asked.

“Mostly playing ‘Angry Birds,'” she said.

I should have turned and walked away. I should have at least changed the subject. I’d heard. The bird was the word.

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Want to try?”

Two hours later, I stopped playing. It was the only visit to my dad’s for that particular trip and I hadn’t looked up from the screen, hadn’t said anything other than to mumble “son of a bitch” under my breath so as not to corrupt the kids I was ignoring as well.

Besides, my stepsister, deprived of the bird for two hours, was starting to twitch–and there are too many guns and knives lying around that house to take that kind of risk.

While she was getting her fix, I shook my head clear, figuring I was safe. No way was I buying an iPad. And I didn’t have an iPhone. I decided to check out the app store on my Palm Pre.

Yup. There it was. It wouldn’t be the same, but it would be good enough. I started downloading. My stepsister, having gotten her fix, passed it off to my sister-in-law. She and my brother were up till 4 the next morning, playing the bird.

Me? After two weeks of draining my phone batteries and sneaking off to “the bathroom” and staying up till 2 in the morning perfectly sober, I finished the base levels of “Angry Bird” last night. Of course, many of those were one-star affairs and I only unlocked three golden eggs and there’s a new Halloween version out and my high scores could be better and, well, look, I have it under control. Seriously. Besides, I could be out drinking all hours of the night, waking up my mind ravaged from a hangover. I’m just a little tired is all. This eye twitch will go away in no time and … look … uh … I gotta go. Something’s come up. Need the bathroom. Yeah, that’s it.

P.S. Sprint and Palm, you need to put the Halloween version in the app store. Come on, damn it. I need this. I mean I don’t NEED it, but, well, you know.