do you suffer from techrettes?

tourette syndrome is no joke…

…although plenty of jokes are made about it.

surprisingly it rarely presents itself as cartoons and comedians make it out to be – with random shouts of profanity. if anything, i think that usually happens as a result of the victim expressing his or her frustration with having an uncontrollable tic whereby they jerk or make an odd noise…

…but “techrette syndrome” is the one i made up the other day.

it’s that random grab of your phone or tablet when your mind starts to wander without even thinking about it. we’ve all done it – the honk that jars you out of it from the car behind you because down time at the red light was used to randomly check facebook even though you just checked it moments before at the LAST red light. but you never know if your best friend, or girlfriend, or that random stranger who’s a friend of a friend of a friend but has really great tits posted some new pic or drunkenly checked in for “happy hour, part iii” at a bar on your way home…

…and you’re praying for the latter, but never mind that now.

it’s the sign of the modern family – the other day i was at the ufc’s, and she was on her phone surfing facebook, i was on the laptop writing a bit for here and her kid was on his nintendo ds – all while the tv was playing…something. i don’t know what – none of us were watching. and the sad thing is we were all in the same room, but not speaking, and we were all on battery operated devices so the power could have gone ass out and we probably wouldn’t have noticed at first…and this was not the first (or last) time this scenario occurred.

but the point is it’s an actual epidemic. sometimes it has good results. i was driving home from the shop a few weeks ago and going down interstate thirty-five with ZERO traffic. flying at seventy. but it was late, so i had nobody to talk to, so i pulled out the iPhone and started to surf facebook while doing so, and saw la tina had checked in at a bar on the east side for her birthday so i told myself if i could find parking in five minutes i’d go…and it only took three. but if my techrette’s hadn’t kicked in i would have missed her birthday, even if TECHNICALLY it had ended about a half hour before.

so sometimes bad things become good things…

now, of course, the cure is where the cash is. the guy in the government that invented AIDS didn’t retire early – but the motherfucker at pfizer that made the drugs to suppress it probably did. so i guess i need to figure out a marketable cure and retiring by fifty might not be out of reach…