Tiger Phone Card
The most ubiquitous thing littering the by-ways of my neighborhood are phone cards. More so even than smashed Corona bottles, though there are plenty of those as well. This is an observation of street things born of a close watch of the jagged detritus below my bike wheels, that I keep for my tires sake.
I supposed this surprised me. I accumulated a small collection of these cards in their two and five dollar increments as I found out what they were.
The condition of the cards is oddly uniform. They are never in good shape. They are bent rolled spindled, but never mutilated, rarely folded. These are the terms of the card canon. In this a mute testimony to the emotions attached to a technology of communication. After I had a few of these, and was trying to come to some conclusion about them, but before I had much of a thought of writing about them, I heard a song on the radio. A duet by structure, a male and a female singer: "I'm in my hotel room. I'm sitting on the hallway floor. I know we're both so so so, so tired, my phone card just expired." "You only call me when you're drunk I can tell it by your voice, it's the only time you open up to me and tell me that you love me." This is Dengue Fever and their song Tiger phone card, a love song dedicated to the phone card.
My neighborhood is a working class neighborhood. Of immigrants dominated by complexes of garden apartments with many single males mostly working in general construction. Even the couples always have the remainder of their families somewhere behind, somewhere abroad. I like the card in the phote that refers to African Heroes, but am reminded there of the line from F. Scott Fitzgerald "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy" There is a great yearning associated with these many many cards: on the sidewalks, in the playgrounds, down by the creek. All the places these calls are made from. Windblown markers of love and loneliness. And of the cryptic global economy that places purposeful livelihoods far from home. Making for a great struggle to gain extraction from poverty and peasantry. These little slips of color printed cardboard speak of the needs that made it necessary, the dreams that make it endurable.
11:36:16 PM  ;;
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