“Don’t kid yourselves. Steve Jobs is in Lol Cat purgatory,” @Bitchwalla via Twitter

People, get a grip. Steve Jobs’ death was not like John Lennon’s or Princess Diana’s. It’s like comparing an apple to a couple of oranges. Steve had pancreatic cancer, and because he was a such a Big Mac Kahuna, he had the luxury of prolonging his life for a couple of more years thanks to a liver transplant. You and I would probably rot before we could get an organ donor, that’s a fact. Still death for him was imminent, pancreatic cancer is one of the tough ones. John and Diana, on the other hand, were minding their own businesses in the prime of their lives and on their way to do something, when suddenly they got the Big Crash. Way different stories, way more shock factor. And way different legacies lost.

Yes, Steve Jobs touched lives and was a great visionary. Again, let’s not get carried away. He was a weird cat with a sketchy past. I’m not going into the details, you can go on his Wiki page and check it out for yourselves. I will just make mention that he claimed to be a Buddhist. Apart from his austere uniform of a black turtleneck with Levi’s (which he copied from Andy Warhol), he didn’t really apply any of the principles to his own life. He was a man who re-invented the wheel. He stole from and quoted everyone else from Wayne Gretzky to Picasso, and in the process made stuff that everyone wants. I have some of his opiates (an iPhone and an iPod) and let me tell you something, I wish they had never been invented. No joke.

Do I enjoy music more now than I did when I was a kid with an 8 track tape player? I think not. Yes, it was annoying when the songs actually cut out when the tape changed. What half-wit invented that? It was the late 70s so probably somebody brain damaged from too much acid. But you know what? I listened to the whole tape, every song that was on the album. Same thing when cassettes and CD’s came out. It’s how I know every lyric on Hatful of Hollow. Now I have an iPod, I don’t even know what the albums are called and I get impatient and skip ahead to other songs, other artists, then I end up watching the first episode of Madmen for the millionth time. No question that it is convenient to have everything on one thing that is smaller than a deck of cards. More shelf room for your books! But even those are being read on the iPad. More shelf room for your liquor then.

My iPhone is a whole other horror. I’m addicted to it. When I’m not near it, I get anxious. I used to chew my nails. Now I swirl, sweep, tap, plunk, and probe my screen like it was my labia, in public no less. I had the first generation iPhone and it didn’t take long for it to get all glitchy. In fact, the speaker stopped working and I couldn’t hear out of it. It took me two months to take it to the Apple store because I had long forgotten it was a phone. I was using it as a toy basically. You have to be careful with it because water gets into it and then it becomes toast. Do not stuff it in your bra when you are working out, for example. I could do that with my Nokia and it lasted for years. So far, I have had 5 iPhones including an upgrade. I have clocked in countless of hours in the Apple store when things have gone wrong. The pomme- tekkies go through a zillion fancy motions trying to revive your iBaby when it is sick but in the end, they just open up a drawer behind the counter and hand you a brand new one. Part of the hype is that when the latest product comes out, people line up and the iThing in question sells out even before the store opens, they are that precious. The truth is, there is enough iCrap for every living being on the planet to drop in the toilet and replace 5 times over. All this from a Buddhist.

According to the media, Steve Jobs touched everyone’s lives. Not so much. My parents don’t even have a computer but they do talk on the thing that Alexander Graham Bell invented. Through the Facebook, I have childhood friends and school mates available to me on my phone which is never more than 6 inches away from one of my appendages, and yet when news happens, guess who gets it first? Not my newsfeed, that’s for sure. My mother! And why? Because people love to talk to her. She has never had a text message or email exchange that led to misinterpreted innuendo that inevitably turned into a falling out. Her tone is always friendly. When you talk to her, she is cute and funny and interested in what you have to say. People go out of their way to visit my parents and I can say that Steve Jobs and his vision had nothing to do with it.

Steve Jobs did, however, turn me to an insomniac, social media freak, LOL Cat fanatic, blogging monster, with an adult acne problem. You know have to clean the screen once in awhile. You don’t want to know where my fingers have been, or do you?

And I leave you with some of the best of LOL Cats: