Okay, so there we are late on Friday evening, me and Ruth, down on the piers in Astoria, laughing at the sea lions — they've learned that there's this one warehouse-type structure that amplifies their horrible yells and throws a badass reverb effect on top, and basically they run a fucking nonstop rave under there, it's hilarious.

We recorded some audio on our phones and were about to wander off when they started making some even louder and more horrible sounds! We both pulled our phones back out. Mine slipped out of my fingers.

There was some kind of, like, curved indent in the wood of the pier, and I think it was also kind of spongey and bouncy compared to the wood around it. My phone hit the curve at the exact right point to get deflected out at almost a perfect right-angle, flying parallel to the ground. It launched out under the bottom of the railing without hitting anything else or skidding on the pier — nothing but net, maximum air, zero opportunity to stop it. Landed in the sea, took actually kind of a surprisingly long time to sink, for a piece of metal and glass — I had plenty of time to watch it spin around in there and catch the light before it disappeared beyond mortal ken. And both me and Ruth were like "...did that actually just happen?"

Anyway, RIP Linear Robin the iPhone. 🌊

BTW, I am extremely proud of not flipping the fuck out!* I wasn't mad, just flabbergasted. Partly thanks to a stronger-than-usual dose of my ADHD meds,** but I think mostly that was just a legitimately absurd event — the Hand of the Great RNG just reaching down to be like "guess what, dumbass."

Also, there have been a bunch of times when I've deserved that and somehow evaded it, so philosophically speaking the only valid response is "WELP."

Of course, I can only be philosophical about it because I have enough money that it's not a hardship to buy a used replacement on short notice. Haven't always had that kind of stability; grateful to have it now. Also grateful that cloud backups mean money is all I really lost.

* It isn't usually on public display, but pointlessly flipping out at myself when I accidentally destroy something is one of my noisier flaws. Usually spilling food, or, damn, you should have seen me that time I spilled a gallon of paint, just wow.

** I was expecting some anxiety for other reasons. Turned out to be justified, which is a whole OTHER story. All I'll say about that is that Zipcar's backend is some monumentally low-quality software, as evinced by the fact that I know anything at all about their backend.