The Kickstand Conspiracy: What They're Not Telling You About Your Phone Standing Up

First of all, MacRumors. Look at that name. "MacRumors." Like it's still 1987 and somebody's whispering behind the counter at the Egghead Software that the new machine's gonna have a mouse with TWO buttons. You don't get to call yourself a rumors site when you're just typing up a press release Apple handed you on a little card. A rumor has stakes. A rumor means somebody could lose their job. This is just stenography with a logo, and I said so to my nephew and he looked at me like I'd grown a second head, which, fine, maybe I have, nobody's checked lately.

So. The iPhone Duo. Now it's got a case. A folio, they're calling it, which is a word they stole from people who actually kept papers in folios, real papers, the kind you'd get docked a dollar for losing at the county assessor's office, and inside this folio there is — sit down — a kickstand. A KICKSTAND. On a telephone. I want you to understand what has happened to us as a civilization. We have engineered a device that fits in your pocket and can, apparently, summon a car, diagnose a rash, and argue with your mother-in-law on your behalf, and the crowning achievement of the fall product cycle is that it can now also lean. Lean! My grandfather's ironing board could lean and nobody wrote an article about it. Nobody from a website with "rumors" in the name flew a photographer out for that.

And here's the thing nobody's asking — and I've looked, I've really looked — nobody is asking why NOW. Why this exact autumn does the phone need to stand up on its own. What is it planning to watch. What is it planning to watch that requires you to not hold it. I have theories. I'm not going to share all of them because some of them involve the water table, but I'll say this much: a device that wants to be looked at without being held is a device that has stopped asking your permission, and once a device stops asking your permission the next thing you know it's got a folio and a kickstand and a subscription plan and it's basically your landlord.

You know who never needed a kickstand? Burt Feenley. Big fella, ears on him like a car with both doors open, ran the newsstand two blocks off Cardinal Ave, and I want to say this was the summer they repaved the whole strip because the buses kept bottoming out on the manhole covers — no, wait, that was the spring, because I remember the smell of the tar was still hanging around when the Fourth of July stuff went up in his window, the little punks and the paper flags, three for a quarter — anyway Burt had this contraption, this rack, wire, spiral, held maybe forty magazines fanned out like a peacock, and he built it himself out of a busted shopping cart, and I only bring this up because — actually I don't know why I bring this up. He had a limp. I don't think the limp is relevant. There was a dog that lived under the newsstand, gray thing, belonged to nobody and everybody, and one October it just wasn't there anymore and nobody said a word about it, we just stopped looking under there, and that's the kind of quiet dignity this country doesn't have the stomach for anymore, we'd put the dog on a podcast now, we'd monetize the disappearance. Burt sold the stand in — must've been — no. Doesn't matter. Point is nobody engineered him a kickstand and he stood up on his own just fine, ears and all.

Where was I. The case. Right, the case, the folio, the whole — and another thing, and I want this on the record — a "folio" implies you can WRITE in it, doesn't it, implies pages, implies you could jot a note to yourself, "call the man about the gutters," and instead this thing is a rectangle of plastic wrapped around a rectangle of glass so that the rectangle of glass can prop itself up at a more convenient angle for watching a man in Ohio explain why your car insurance is wrong. That's not a folio. That's a shrine. That's an altar you fold shut and put in your pocket, and I don't say that lightly, I was raised believing altars stayed put, you didn't carry the altar to the bus stop, the altar was the one immovable thing in a life full of movable things, and now —

Now I'm thinking about the bus stop on Verner, which had the bench with the Randazzo Bail Bonds ad on it, faded so bad by August you could barely make out the phone number, and there was a fella there every single morning, tan jacket, and he did the crossword in pen, PEN, which I always took as a kind of dare to the universe, and one day — and I swear this is true, or I swear it's true the way I remember it, which by now might not be the same thing — one day he offered me half his newspaper, just tore it, clean, right down the fold, gave me the sports and kept the front page, and we never once spoke. Weeks of this. Silent as church. And then the bus routes changed, they rerouted the 14 up through the industrial side on account of the bridge work, and I never saw the man again, and I think about him maybe twice a year, usually for no reason, usually not this one, and I genuinely don't know what that has to do with a kickstand on a telephone except that a bench can hold a man up just fine without asking him to subscribe to anything.

And ANOTHER thing — the price. I haven't even seen the price and I'm already against it. That's not me being unreasonable, that's me being efficient, I'm saving everybody the trouble of the argument later. Whatever the number is, cut a haircut's worth off it in my head, because a haircut in '82 was a dollar seventy-five at Ruiz Barber, TALKING included, free of charge, opinions about the Cubs bullpen included whether you wanted them or not, and now they want forty for the cut alone and the case for your phone costs more than that and does less work than Mr. Ruiz's scissors ever did, and nobody's outraged, everybody's just standing there in line at the store with their arms crossed like it's normal, like a KICKSTAND is a feature and not a confession that the thing was never built to be held by a human hand in the first place, it was built to prop itself up and watch YOU.

I had a paper route. Did I mention that. Doesn't matter if I mentioned that, I'm mentioning it again. Route went up through the Halvorsen place, big colonial, dog on a chain that never once got closer than the length of the chain but sounded, every single morning, like it had finally worked out the math. Mrs. Halvorsen left the porch light on year-round, which struck me even then as wasteful, and I asked my mother about it and she said some people just aren't from around here, which didn't answer the question but ended the conversation, which I now understand was the whole design of the sentence. Thirty-one papers, six days, bike with a bent kickstand of its OWN, ironically, always down when you wanted it up, and I fixed it myself with a bent nail and a rubber band and that thing held for two winters, TWO winters, no folio, no firmware update, and I am not saying the bike was better than the iPhone Duo, I would never say something so foolish out loud in public, I am only saying the bike never once asked to be leaned against anything, it leaned because I told it to, and there's a difference there that I don't have the words for and I'm not going to pretend I do.

Anyway. The case comes in three colors, I think, or it came in three colors last I looked, which was ten minutes ago, and I already forget which three, and you know what, that tells you everything, doesn't it — a thing so unmemorable they had to give it a kickstand just so it would have SOMETHING to do besides sit there being forgettable. Burt's newsstand rack never had a color, it was rust-colored because it WAS rust, and you remembered every inch of it.

I haven't even gotten to the folio's hinge mechanism and I'm not going to, because I looked into it for four minutes and got angrier than the hinge deserves, and there's a version of this column where I explain exactly why, involving a garage door opener from roughly 1979 that malfunctioned in a way I still don't fully understand and that my father blamed, for reasons never explained, on the Petrosky boy three doors down, who I don't think ever touched a garage door opener in his life, God rest him, or God keep him, I actually don't know if he's alive, that's its own whole —

No. I'm not finishing that one either. Some things you start and you just leave lying there, same as this whole industry leaves its telephones leaning up against nothing, waiting for you to notice they don't need you to hold them anymore.

— Edgar, who still holds his own phone, thank you very much, and always will, and if that means his arm gets tired, so be it, an arm is supposed to get tired, that's what it's FOR—