Damnatio Memoriae

This isn't a journal, and it never has been. There is plenty of overlap with my actual personal life, sure, but this record is also shot through intentionally with lies, misdirects, exaggerations, omissions and hyperbole. If it were just my experience, my god, you can't imagine how dull it would be. These days so much is done for clout or to build an audience or just straight-up for money, I'm sure you can forgive a little bit of zhuzh-ing of the truth so I don't threaten to drive off any portion of the mid-single-digits readership by being my regular boring self.

I trust most of you who read this are sophisticated, well-read adults who don't need the reassurance and aren't put off by the SHOCK REVELATION that some of this is lies. If you built a parasocial relationship based on the content here, I'm not going to try to discourage or dissuade you directly, I'm just going to say: you could just do so much better.

I'm prefacing this because I'm about to tell you REAL THINGS that have happened to me in the last 4-5 days. I know I just said I do a bunch of lying and exaggerating but this all REALLY HAPPENED!

1) I managed to lock myself entirely out of my iPhone.

Now look, this is the First World Problem of First World Problems, I get that. But it if you've bought into the the-known-universe-in-my-pocket lifestyle, you find out fast that being cut off from your little world-tether umbilical is pretty disruptive. You sort of die, socially and economically. Not biologically of course (if you have that app on your phone that does kill you if you lost contact, my god, delete it. Why would you download that in the first place, what is wrong with you? What's the upside, I don't see it), but you do get the sense, in the dim, cold quiet of separation, that the world is moving along just fine without you being able to affect it in any way.

The short version of the story is I switched carriers and learned about "SIM card carrier lock" on a cellphone, which I had to clear by doing a factory reset on my iPhone 12. I have iCloud backup, but it turns out you can't get to the backup if you don't have the password. And it really doesn't help you, once you've already started to delete the phone contents, to only then remember that you'd changed your password semi-recently and didn't bother memorizing it because it was written down on an app in the phone. The phone whose contents you were watching it, irrevocably, delete. Woo!

Can you recover your Apple ID using other means? Sure! Like if you have another Apple device that's logged in to it, like for example the MacBook Pro museum piece I use to type this very blog on week after week. But when it's so old it hasn't been able to update the operating system since pre-covid, you will get the very helpful "an error occurred" when you try to initiate the recovery process.

I thought I was stuck with a non-working phone. I had dropped my previous cellphone provider but couldn't initiate the new one, I thought, without access to all the phone's functions. I don't want to say which provider I went with, but this one seems to have spent all its money on a second-tier British soccer team and none on in-person stores for emergency service. The process is DIY and pretty straightforward, but only if you skip the crucial step of Being A Giant Doofus, which I opted in for.

I thought I had to sit through the long process of having Apple review my case and give me an opportunity to re-set my Apple password, which takes minimum 72 hours, but the 72 hours passed and... nothing. So I had the genius idea to call Apple support. They walked me through the reset in maybe 15 minutes? Felt great to get back to the life-giving oxygen of online existence again, to reclaim my digital citizenship (and be able to drive without terror since I haven't had a physical card for my proof of auto insurance since maybe 2018). This is all being presented with the tacit agreement, after this, to never again talk about the circumstances by which any of this came to pass. I'm OK leaving a mystery in place. Man, that was crazy, what was it again? Probably a lightning bolt or an angry Jesus. Maybe both, I'm not sure if Jesus does lightning bolts or if that's too pagan.

2) All this occurred right as the government was shutting down. This is the government, the American federal one, that employs me and issues the checks that allow me to fund my gasoline-free Southern California lifestyle of glamour and hedonism. It's super fun and not at all embarrassing to tell your boss they have to call your Google Voice VoIP number you just made up because you all-thumbs-ed your way into monk-like asceticism, right at the worst possible time.

The phone now works, but this all meant that in the interim, I had a ton of unexpected free time and literally nothing to do. It was quite the crisis for a brain that has been trained for constant input.

I paced some. I talked to the cat, but her muted reactions (up to and including changing rooms or remaining disdainfully asleep) left something to be desired. I filled the void with caffeine and sugar, like any responsible American should, but things got desperate there, I'm not going to lie. I even read a few pages of a book.

I came to my senses though. By the time the book-related vertigo wore off, it was only a few hours until I had my phone up and running again. I only had to scroll through 3-to-7 hours of Bluesky and reddit posts to remember who I was and how I belong in this world.

I can thumbs-up or heart react to Instagram posts again. Bright red oxygen-rich blood flows from my core to my fingertips and back again, once more. I'm whole. I'm me. I can do this shutdown standing on my head.*

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*provided I figure out how to lock the screen so it doesn't keep "fixing" itself right-side up for me.