My SonicCare toothbrush doesn’t hold a charge anymore, but I don’t want to buy a new one. It was hard enough spending a hundred and forty dollars on one toothbrush, but two? That’s insane. That’s not happening. So brushing my teeth has become such a chore. I hit the button, it buzzes for like fifteen seconds, and then I have to plug it into the charger and wait something like four hours for another fifteen seconds. Right? That’s a lot of time just to brush my teeth. And those fifteen seconds are getting shorter every day, each time just a fraction of a second less charge.

What can I say? I’m frugal. I bought this messenger bag three years ago, and one of the straps doesn’t work at all. I say it doesn’t work, but you know, it’s just old. It’s an old bag. Still, when I bought it, I kept getting all of these unexpected compliments, like, “Hey Rob, that’s a really sharp messenger bag,” stuff like that, which wasn’t even my intention, I think I just bought it because it was the first one that I saw when I went looking for a messenger bag.

That strap I was talking about earlier actually fell off, but I replaced it with part of an old belt I had lying around. People kept telling me, “Rob, you’ve got to get rid of that old belt, it’s disgusting.” But look who’s laughing now? Me. Because I saved that belt, it was exactly the type of thin material I needed to help strap down that second side of my messenger bag.

But it didn’t really sew correctly. I mean, my sewing abilities are fine. It’s just that, I’ll never buy a real sewing kit. I’ve been to about six hotels over the course of my life, and you know what that means, right? Six travel-sized sewing kits. Why spend money on stuff when you don’t have to?

The only thing is, six mini-sewing kits, while it’s a lot of string, it’s not a lot of plain black string. They always give you a little bit of every color. The first things that I sewed, like holes in the armpits of my t-shirts, stuff like that, it was great to be able to use black thread. But by now, for that messenger bag, I think I only had a choice between turquoise or pink.

Do you know how hard it is to really sew an old piece of belt onto a canvas bag with hotel thread? It’s not easy. But nothing in life is easy. Like brushing your teeth. Sometimes if I don’t have four hours to wait for my battery to charge up, I’ll just use the SonicCare as a regular toothbrush, like actually manually brushing it back and forth across my teeth. Tell me about it, it’s humiliating. Especially considering the fact that I haven’t changed the toothbrush heads in over a year. Those things are such a scam. Shouldn’t it be around the cost of just another regular toothbrush? Like come on, I already spent one hundred and forty dollars on your device. Now I have to fork over twenty-five ninety-nine once every four months just to keep this thing new?

And explaining to everybody what’s going on with my messenger bag, like sometimes I’d just like to be able to leave the house without people handing me spare change, or saying, “Hey Rob, when are you going to get a new bag?” or, “Hey mister, you dropped a shoe out of your bag. You should really get that strap thing fixed.”

It’s not even a strap at this point. But I’m still laughing last, at everybody who called me crazy along the way, “Throw this away, waste more money on that,” it’s like, who’s the sucker spending sixty dollars a year on belts? Not me. And not anybody I know. And actually, I have no idea how much belts cost, because I haven’t bought one in forever. And also, I wouldn’t have anybody to ask, my breath has been so bad since my SonicCare stopped working, nobody lets me get a full sentence out without running away. And so, what, I’m out of touch? Or everybody else is out of touch. Either it’s me or it’s everybody else. One or the other.