By Francis Phelan
Special to YNOT

NEW YORK – It may seem strange for a homeless guy to say, but one of the things I miss most about having a place to live is the simple pleasure of being connected to the world of real-time information.

Sure, I occasionally read the newspaper before wadding it up and shoving it down my pant leg to serve as insulation against the bitter cold of a winter night in Manhattan, but in this modern age of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, by the time I’ve got my hands on the front page of the Post, the news on it isn’t any fresher than the fish scales and coffee grounds that imbue it with its unmistakably New York scent.

This is why I was so excited when the Big Apple started installing free public Wi-Fi kiosks around the city, enabling domicile-challenged people like myself to stay connected to the world despite our homelessness.

Using these kiosks, the events of the day are never more than a tap away using their mounted tablet interface. Here I can read with true New York pride all of the smart, tough, un-PC things fellow New Yorker Donald Trump has to say about Mexicans, peruse nasty comments on social media about Stephan Curry’s shoes, or scare the living shit out of myself watching Fox News videos about ISIS.

Most importantly, of course, using these vitally important kiosks, I can finally surf porn somewhere other than a public library.

Now, I’m sure some of you don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing for guys like me to stand in the street fondling our genitals, but consider this: Aside from the tablet screens at which we can stare while fiddling with our dicks, homeless guys jacking off in the street is nothing particularly new.

Why, all of a sudden, is it so hard for people to just ignore me as I publicly spank my monkey? For almost 12 years, I’ve been masturbating at least twice a day in the streets of this great city and nobody said a thing, but now it’s a “problem.”

I’ll tell you what it is: The privileged few just don’t like the idea of us homeless people having access to any of the comforts of home, whether it’s a warm place to sleep, a decent meal or a high-speed public internet kiosk that makes surfing tube sites a snap.

All you homed people just don’t get it — and why would you, really? You have a bedroom, a bathroom, a utility closet, maybe even a company car and a garage to park it in, all kinds of options for private places in which to stroke it to porn. As such, you think of masturbating in public as some kind of disgusting kink or evidence of mental disturbance rather than the physical necessity it is.

“I used to come here in the ’70s, and I remember thinking Times Square was as skeezy as you could get, but I was wrong,” some random ex-New Yorker allegedly told the Post. “This is as skeezy as Times Square could get. I mean, in the old days there was plenty of porn, but you could only see it behind closed doors. So at least there was that level of modesty.”

Motherfucker, you live in Dallas now. Accordingly, you’ve lost your privilege to criticize the Vagrant Americans of New York. Go back home, cry yourself a river about porn conventions happening in a building owned by your new home town and kindly STFU.

While they may have lost their ability to ignore me and my vagabond ilk when we’re masturbating in the thoroughfare, New Yorkers don’t seem to have similarly misplaced their capacity to ignore misbehavior on the part of their own kids — who, believe me, have certainly mastered using these kiosks to surf porn, despite having all kinds of other options at their disposal.

Predictably, all the faux outrage over guys like me doing what comes naturally when presented with a public Wi-Fi kiosk has led to a travesty of social justice: The city has installed content filters on the kiosks, thereby depriving the underprivileged their God-given right to access materials to aid in the natural, normal, healthy bodily process of achieving a self-stimulated orgasm.

While I’m sure this news will be met with cheers and applause from all the self-righteous busybodies who have been loudly grousing about our self-groping, among my homeless compatriots, there is outrage, there is pain and there is about as serious a case of collective blue balls as I have seen since the immediate aftermath of Mayor Rudolph “Porn Is Bad But Dressing Up Like Carmen Miranda Is Just Good Fun” Giuliani’s decision to shut down the many porn theaters and smut shops of Times Square back in the mid-’90s.

Mark my words, New York: You can take away a man’s free-public-Wi-Fi-delivered porn, but you can’t take his penis, even with a court order. And so long as we have penises, hands and nowhere to go, we can and will jerk it in the streets.

As a practical matter, you can’t jail us all for public indecency. We’d quickly overwhelm the prison system’s budget — and for many of us, a jail cell would be the nicest digs we’ve had in years.

So, New York, unless you want to see the streets running white with rivers of homeless-man-gravy, you need to do the right thing: Turn off the filters and give us back our internet — our whole internet, not this censored, filtered bullshit you’re serving up right now.

The ball is in your court, Big Apple. Unless you want the reproductive output of the ball in your court as well, you’d best heed this warning call.

Now, with that settled… Anybody got any spare change, or maybe an old copy of Hustler you’re not using anymore?

Francis Phelan is a homeless man who primarily lives in New York, occasionally visits Philadelphia and Baltimore, but wouldn’t take a shit in Dallas if you paid him to.

Image: Maurizio Pesce