Friends, are you frustrated looking at this image? Feel as if you are not getting the full picture–it’s blurry, and you can make some of it out, but there is a lot that you can’t decipher? That was done on purpose. It is a non-traumatic way to simulate what having a stroke might be like.

Two days ago I was walking home, looking at my smartphone. Decided to put it away and concentrate on walking. It snagged on my hoodie’s pouchpocket and fell on some gravel. The screen was splintered near the upper left corner, and the display was radically altered, with ghost-images, dimming, and a test-pattern-esque block where the impact had been.

I find it a bit ironic that I’d had a sculpture of Iron Man as the screen wallpaper. Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, often had circuitry problems of his own.

And in the case of my phone, not only was the display screwy, but the touchscreen navigation went from nearly-impossible-to-use to totally useless. I did manage to use it to call my friend Martin Klass to give me a location of a Metro PCS shop, and I was able to communicate via text with a good friend with whom I play Words With Friends, but after that it became worse than useless–for instance, the alarm went off promptly at 5:30 AM, and I couldn’t turn it off; it would eventually stop chiming; then every five minutes it would go off again. Three times for that; three times at 7 AM, which is my Snooze/Reminder alarm in case I am lazy,

I thought of my phone as a stroke victim, getting and giving inappropriate signals, doing things it/I didn’t want to do. And when I got a replacement phone, and the SIM card, essentially the Soul of my phone, was transferred to it, like a stroke victim it had to be taught how to do ordinary things all over again. It still doesn’t know that I don’t like AutoCorrect. I have lost my text-message history. And, alas, and alack, my superb Wordle record seems to have been expunged. C’est La Vie, mes amis!!

To ease possible frustration, here is a transliteration of image and text. A guy (probably a self-portrait, but think of him as Anyguy) implores his phone “SPEAK to me!!!” The phone replies “=ZZZT!=” Beneath the phone’s word balloon it says “HISTORICAL NOTE: On January 31st, 2022, I dropped my smartphone, cracking the screen. It is useless.”

Broken Stroke

Brain bloodbaths may wreak HAVOK on us oldsters
Reducing even sleuth Hercule Poirot*
Obliterating skills bpth mind & motor
Kaputting future plans of to & fro
Entanglementing unto un-OK
Now rendering a staid routine flambée

* SPOILER ALERT for Hercule Poirot fans: Agatha Christie, legendary mystery writer, wrote Curtain, which was to be her final Poirot novel, at the age of 39, when she was at the height of her creative powers. She then locked it up and wrote many more mysteries, but saved Curtain for last. In the novel, Poirot, an enfeebled stroke victim, is mostly confined to a wheelchair. –Friends, that’s how I remember it, at least. I am 67 years old and my cognitive decline is well started. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be lucid enough to reach out to the world via these blog posts!!