I am changing my cell number.

Why?

Because everybody in this goddamn town has it, as well as half the population of China.

How did they get it?

I have no idea. I think it’s plastered on a billboard somewhere or written on the wall of a gay bar restroom … but what’s done is done.

That being the case, my ringer is almost always off and I tend to miss calls and my voicemail is “full” more often than it is not.

If I left my phone on, I would never get any sleep (not that I get much anyway).

On any given day, ten people I know are in town, and at any given time, eleven of them are drunk.

“Wow, I can’t believe we have been playing blackjack for 10 hours straight while drinking Crown and Coke. What time is it? 3:30 in the morning? Let’s wake Rex up and call him an asshole! No wait, let’s pay that hooker over there to call Rex and tell him that she’s pregnant with his kid!”

Well, my friends … screw me once, it’s your fault, screw me eight hundred times, it’s my fault.

Add to that the people who want to get a quote or an interview (I generally don’t do interviews), or who just want to piss in my ear because they think I am too hard on Henderson, and it is no mystery why I avoid the phone like the plague.

Frankly, the chances of a phone call getting through to me are slim to none.

I think the last time I actually returned a call was sometime in 1985.

Anybody will tell you that I am patently unreachable by phone, and that is not by accident.

I also don’t listen to my voicemail because it requires an hour of “Press 1 to listen to your message, Press 7 to delete, etc, etc.”

What usually happens is that I just mash “7″ repeatedly until the bitch shuts up, at which point I assume my mailbox is empty. Several days later, I do the same thing.

All of that being said, I think I have found a solution. There is a call routing system that sends specific calls to specific places, and organizes all of my voicemails on the web.

Therefore, when my hoes call in at the end of the night with their daily take, it gets routed to my cellphone so I can keep my pimp hand strong. The rest of the calls go to voicemail … except this particular system is extremely usable and computer-friendly. I don’t have to hold a phone up to my ear and follow a bunch of prompts, rather I can just click and listen.

This is something I will probably actually do at the end of the day.

It saves the voicemails in audio formats that are readily playable on the computer, which means that I can actually start “taking calls for the site”.

This is something people were requesting over a year ago (along with a podcast), but I had absolutely no desire to hold a microphone up to my phone and record the voicemails … so it never happened.

People are frequently hanging out in town, and they are not lugging a computer around. Finding a cybercafe to email me from, or to log into the forums (most people are scared of the forums anyway) is not a high priority, but everyone carries a cellphone with them.

So for 99% of the people, it really is easier to just give me an update on their cellphone from the bathroom while they are pissing out their 20 alcoholic beverages. Few people remember what in the hell they were doing the day after … or won’t admit to it.

Technology marches on, and I am finally running to catch up.

Therefore, you can now “call in” to the site.

You can also stop calling my cellphone, because pretty soon you are going to get one of those keen “This number is out of service go straight to hell” messages.

Of course, it probably goes without saying that the whole point of the thing is to provide information or amusement to other people … so the audio may very well be made available on the site either as an inline audio clip, superimposed over a video of a guy fornicating with a sheep, or through any other method we can possibly dream up.

Of course, we’ll use some slight discretion to protect you from yourself. If you shout your social security number or home address into the phone we’ll bleep it out, but pretty much anything else goes.

Keeping with the theme of the site, we probably won’t censor much, so you are responsible for your own rants, and your views are your own. If someone calls in while banging two midget hookers in a jacuzzi filled with jello, don’t blame me. People can participate however they want. It’s not my place to judge.

Anyway, this is a new concept for us, so we’ll see how it works out.

If you wish for your voice to be heard (literally), then feel free to engage in some PhoneRex at:

(866) 300-8686

It’s even toll-free for you cheap bastards that didn’t spring for National Long Distance.

I swear I didn’t make up the term “PhoneRex”, but a couple of people really want us to use it. They think it’s clever.

“Rex” does rhyme with coitus (well, not “coitus” but the less formal derivative) … so what the hell.

Anyway, the good news is that I might finally get your voice messages.

The bad news is that everyone else might get them too.

P.S.  We just put a new feature on the thing.  If you call three times without leaving a message, the system automatically blocks future calls from that number.  It helps prevent wading through the endless stream of hangups, which frankly makes no sense.