Do you find yourself sending text messages when you aren't alone?
Do you send more than 10 text messages a day?
Do you assign text messages to a distinct ring tone?
Do you wake up in the morning and check your phone for text messages before hitting the snooze button?
Do you get angry when you miss a text message?
Does your text messaging interfere with relationships?
Do you ever have the urge to send a text message during sex?
Do you send text messages under the table while attending staff meetings at work?
Do you hold up the restroom line in restaurants to hide text message delivery from your dinner companion(s)?
Do you deliver and drive?
Do you use text messages to alleviate depression, anxiety, or any other instinctual reaction to the technologically advanced yet disconnected society we live in?
[roll hook]
If you answered "yes, but only when..." to any of the questions above, you may have an addiction to text messages.
If you answered by laughing in that self-deprecating way, you may be a step above the people in the first category, but your reaction is a telltale sign of using your awareness as a way to create a confidence that smacks of a false sense of security, which could only alienate the people in the first category, who would support your mission impossible if they knew your superiority was actually caused by their own fears of worthlessness.
If you appreciate both answers, then you probably recognize that the motivation behind the addiction is the real addiction and not the substance itself, and you probably know that knowledge itself isn't freedom, but that freedom is providing access to the wealth of knowledge for everyone rather than viewing people as categories, since you know that the "only" box for ethnicity on job applications is still a category. Although you may not have an addiction, you could benefit most from our program, since you have the talent, the awareness, and the freedom to create freedom for others.
Despite what category you fall under, here's your chance to recover the use of your fingers again by "digging down" to ground yourself in our 12 easy steps to recovery:
[roll sinker]
1. Criticize your partner for replying to text messages from friends during a serious conversation about your relationship, while conveniently forgetting all the times you checked your phone during sex to read the latest text message.
2. Deny that you have a problem when you are faced with an intervention but privately recognize that you will never be able to kick this habit.
3. Admit you have a problem when you finally receive your astronomically high cell phone bill, since you didn't sign up for a text plan because of your original criticisms about how nothing, not even the invention of call waiting, is as rude as this new technological distraction.
4. Declare that you are going to fight the urge to send a text for a whole month and send an email to your friends asking them to refrain from sending you texts, and take a deep breathe of freedom.
5.Respond to the text that arrives 30 seconds later.
6.Admit that your fatalistic background has screwed your ability to establish a genuine relationship with reality and your self-esteem, "Whoah there, missy, you're from Alabama, so scale it down a bit," and aim for a five minute chip.
7. Show up at an AA meeting and tell them that their twelve steps are stupid while brandishing a 15-minute collection of five-minute chips in one hand and reaching in your pocket to answer a text with the other hand.
8. Decide to stay for the AA meeting because everyone points at the sign on the door, "Absolutely NO cell phones. Please place your cell phone in the box before entering, and yes it must be turned off, Mr._____.) You may be subject to a strip search for smuggled cell phones, in accordance with Section BS, Article 'wakeupamericatakingbackyourrightsispatriotic, Particle 0dashniner um, did I really win again, damn dick you sure is smart to git all them people to alect me again, yes i met with my grammar coach today, he whooped me at horse, oh you mean that coach, I had him placed in a prison camp for calling me a bumbling moron,' of the United States Patriot Act (this means you, Ms._Watson____ ). Violators will not get coffee OR doughnuts, not even the maple ones that are always left on the tray when the meeting is over, and no, this isn't why they are always stale; we've told you, they come like that from the bakery.
9. Begin your own group with Mr.______, since obviously you both have a problem. Get rid of the "no dating other anonymous members," so that you can sleep with Mr._____.
10. Reinstate the "no sleeping with other members" rule when you and Mr. Hemmingway can't decide between your idea for the group's name, "Texaholics Onymous: The first step is not hiding behind your anonymity," and his, "Text Addicts: Feed all your other addictions so you won't need this one," and he begins drinking at noon and demands sex every time he's tempted to text someone.
11. Break the group into factions, like any great club that people attend religiously, and continue to fight over whether or not cell phone companies should offer text control and free clinics to people who can't control their urges and don't have enough money to pay their bills because the companies failed to properly educate their customers in order to feed their own addiction to capitalistic greed.
12. Say fuck all to the group, despite their undying support for your cause, and run for the office of United States President, promoting a platform of more education and less taxes (banking on the fact that the history of suppressing knowledge will ensure that the American people are too dumb to realize that you can't have one without the other, and on the hopes that you will get both the vote from the working class--because they want their children to have a better life, despite the fact that a PhD won't give them more monetary wealth or the fortune of being an intelligent human being because they will exist in an ironically insular college town, hoarding the wealth of knowledge out of the fear of you and your cronies' ridiculous laws against free speech and the proper use of grammar and punctuation, and from the filthy rich class--because they want to hoard their money in a vain attempt to gain the American dream of happiness with more money, despite the fact that no matter how much money they own, they can never be happy until they realize that you and the cell phone companies, along with the Fox Network, have conspired to flash images of happy people wearing expensive clothes and driving expensive cars to create a false sense of happiness when really these commercial actors are just unhappy artists who take crap roles to gain a sense of accomplishment in a society that devalues art, and when their genius isn't appreciated, they join the tradition of the participatory roles in the status symbol smoke screen. Or, until the rich realize that they create their own net worth instead of the stock market. So you win and distract your citizens from the the real issues (such as the fact that earth's resources will not sustain the insane rate of consumption you promote) with silly notions of hating someone because of their sexual preference, or with declaring a senseless war for the good of the nation because it will protect what little oil supply is left, without revealing that you don't actually intend on sharing a drop, not even the oily-residue, of your wealth with the people whom you claim to represent, according to the initial purpose of the important office you hold, because of your hubris and your own fear of criticism. Then someone at a bar sends a text message while her friend is in the middle of telling a story of great value to her, and the woman sending the text only half listens while demonstrating her deft dexterity with T9 words. It finally hits the friend that this disconnection from people is the reason we are so unhappy and have elected such a terrible President. She decides that now is a better time than any to start a revolution, so she leaves her friend, staring at the flashing screen and nodding to an empty stool, and heads for the bathroom where she flushes her cell phone down the toilet, takes out a pen, and writes, "Want to know the key to eternal bliss? Call 1-800-the-prez." After changing her home number and disabling call-waiting, she answers caller after caller with the same phrase: "As your country's representative, I am vowing to never again imprison your potential by usurping the power you have to create your worth and your reality," and hangs up without further explanation. Then one day she has more calls than she can handle, callers from places she's never heard of, like Hanksville, begging to hear her words. And soon she finds herself managing dozens of volunteers, armed with sharpees, flooding the bathrooms of America with the Gospel of Saint Fearless, and eventually drones of people join her cause, which demands that the rich give to the poor by sharing our wealth of knowledge that we must disarm the unstable and dangerous system that is polluting our ability to maintain life and provide people with equal opportunity. You kindly step down from office without a fuss since you fear what you know to be true, much like a homophobic homo, and return to leading Texaholic Onymous meetings, where you can take out your emotional pain at the expense others on a smaller, more manageable scale.
13. You amend your original twelve steps and add the 13th Amendment Act, which grants you the right to take actions to protect the onymous rights of the twelve-step members, even though this requires that you deny their right to be publicly-known members of a club that really has no need for anonymity since we're all in the same club, whether we recognize it or not, but those pesky AA people told you to proselytize your beliefs in order to get people to change their habits, and so you decide that you must force your beliefs about anonymous behavior without regard to your own members and reveal their identities in order to help the poor, ignorant people living in squalor and sin experience freedom from the chains of addiction, which is really a decision based based on your fear of the mirror and not the narcissistic pomposity that many members claim as the cause of your insanity (sanity, as deemed by psychiatrists who have the same issue, despite their framed credentials hanging proudly on the walls of their expensive office that you only get to see for fifteen minutes a month, long enough for them to write a scrip while sending a text message under the desk). These members form a band of rebels, which you attempt to quietly suppress by using a spy with a beard and a protest sign, but your attempt to thwart their attempts with your predictable, trojan horse plot is thwarted by their cunning sense of awareness. They decide to start an underground newspaper criticizing you for your behavior as an ingenious counterattack, but instead of you take care of this by googling "bad words for people who are smarter than me," and the results include a hotel website and a blog criticizing the reliance on Microsoft Word, created by another greedy genius, for your grammar and spelling needs. This gives you the idea to call your advisers and ask for the teleprompt archives." Anything that makes me look good and them bad," you say. So they do some ten-second research in the annals of their brains and come up with the slyfox move of using the existing pejorative meaning of certain words along with a trusted, major Media artery to report that the "rebels" are attacking the president with "radical" ideas. To escalate the process of squelching the fanfare of these guerrillas and their irregular spelling of the your ancestors' names, you hire a major criminal syndicate to assassinate the leader of the movement and disguise the murder as a suicide by planting a forged note and an empty bottle of pills, but you had to dip into the 13-step budget because the first officer on the scene read your name on the bottle. This forces you to borrow money from AA's petty cash, not because its members agree with your philosophy on anonymity, but because they are known pacifists. Despite your attempts to maintain control of the onymous collective, which you and the goons and Fox tried to negate by re-naming it the "ominous prospective," a member who isn't afraid of criticism or rejection decides to run for office of group leader and wins the vote by a landslide. On her first day in office, she restores the original principles of the organization to each and every onymous patriot.
[roll non-satirical ending]
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The group remained a success until the stock market crashed and no one could get service on the farm anyway.
[roll credits]
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_____ bless america
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_____ bless america
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