Reach out and touch someone

Finally, somebody invented a disposable cell phone. Thank God. I mean, I knew there was some sort of giant void in my life-tearing at my soul, and like essence or something — but I just couldn’t place it. Now, I know what it was — I’ve been suffering, as all of us have, from a complete and utter lack of disposable cellular communication. Damn, it feels good to isolate the problem.

But as any good analyst will tell you, recognition is only half the solution. Action becomes necessary, meaning, quite simply, I must have one. I must get my hands on one of the jazzily colored, insta-hip enemies of earth and reason soon, before they become passe or ubiquitous or something equally horrible and common.

But Telespree Communications, the San Francisco wireless pimps that are promising this hot, quick, commitment-free cell whore lovin’, haven’t released their phones yet. What? How dare you excite me like this and then make me wait? I want to start disposing NOW!

But, alas, I’ll have to be patient. Telespree is likely putting the finishing touches on their disposable demons, giving them are-you-ready-to-hit-the-landfills?-type pep talks and stroking their disposable little antennae in giggly anticipation.

But I ask, for I must, is this Telespree hussy really a new thing? Aren’t cell phones already disposable? I mean, Christ, if you’ve got some sort of archaic phone without 17,000 orchestrated rings, Internet access, word-processing, voice recognition technology, mood enhancement, hypercolor, fortune telling and varying degrees of vibration, then what do you have? Crap. Throw it out. Because if you’re seen anywhere with that outdated, absence de accouterment hunk of probably-not-hip-silver metal, you might as well die. And, any major religion or philosopher will tell you, better than dying is simply buying the latest phone that’ll have everything you could ever need or desire, while still being small enough to get lost in your pant cuff.

So, since cell phones are clearly already disposable — and fundamentally so — the novelty in Telespree’s new phone is not its disposability. It’s the cost. Telespree is offering a phone to the wireless market’s sacrificial stone that nearly everyone can afford to throw away.

For a mere 20 some-odd dollars, the currently cell-lame population can purchase a Telespree handset in the iMac-esque color of their choosing (yeah, like, express yourself America), and then load up on battery phone-torsos that are programmed with pre-paid minutes. When the minutes expire, simply locate your nearest wastebasket, schoolyard, stream or animal’s mouth and jettison the tapped torsos. Yak, yak, yak-toss, toss, toss. Simple beauty.

With the phones so cheap, Telespree’s goal to get America fully strapped into wireless wisdom doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Reports today show that 60 percent of Americans still don’t own a wireless phone (in the words of Marlon Brando, “The horror!”), but I really think Telespree and the disposable cell phone era can fix that ugliness.

Picture this: homeless on the street, begging for pre-paid Telespree batteries. “Anything will help, even a single minute.” Ahh, the sweet smell of utopia.

Because when we’re all wireless, we’ll be happy, right? Nothing spells happiness like perpetual connection to absolutely everyone and everything all the time so help us God, right? So forget about the massive amount of waste (and not just any waste, yummy battery waste) that this talk ’n toss system will create.

My advice is to forget about it all and simply chat away — filling the landfills, roaming minute by roaming minute, as nothing is kept — only used before thrown into the festering pile of our own shortsightedness.

So thanks in advance, Telespree, for this monumental achievement. I’ll sleep better knowing that we all now have the option to participate in a fun, new-millennium style of pointless waste. And I’ll walk taller knowing that I can finally afford a cell phone — although regrettably not a phone that can play Cannon in D minor or do my taxes. Oh well! At least I can put my phone on a McDonalds tray and push it, along with half-eaten fries and happy meal toy packaging, into the Thank You trash slot and out of my life forever. That is, of course, until I buy my next short-lived phone friend tomorrow. Easy come, easy go. Talk is cheap.