Many moons ago in downtown Lewiston, I saw a man get into a fight with a trash bag.

He was hauling the overstuffed Hefty down Park Street, toward Chestnut, when the bag split and some greasy garbage spilled out. Enraged, the flustered fellow gave the bag a petulant yank which caused more trash to come squeezing out of the bag like foul-smelling newborn birds.

Frustrated by this development, he hollered at the trash bag with such force and passion that his voice cracked, which only annoyed him further.

He flung the bag to the curb and tried to kick it, but that only caused him to slip in some greasy trash juice and he nearly went down.

He hollered again and again — and his voice betrayed him. He tried to punt the torn trash bag once more, but his foot swung wide and he nearly fell butt-first into the street.

He swore and shook his fist. His hat went flying and landed in a small pile of fly-buzzed garbage. I don’t know exactly how long he stood there losing an ugly fight with brown orange peels, smashed milk cartons and a hundred empty ravioli cans, but I laughed so hard watching it, I ruptured three organs, two of which I was actively using at the time.

The sight of that random dude getting mad instead of Glad on Park Street caused me to wake up at 4 a.m. every morning for a week with uncontrollable giggles. Which totally explained the bed-wetting at the time.

I bring it up only because recently, I’ve been seeing the same type of hilarious rage on the streets, only this time, it appears to be focused on gadgets instead of fat bags of what the old-timers called “rubbish.”

On East Avenue in Lewiston one recent afternoon, a gangling, bespectacled man stood just off the middle of the street where he appeared to be screaming at the palm of his hand.

“Stupid son of a!” he screeched, and he jabbed at his palm so vigorously, I expected to see pieces of glass or of his finger go flying in all directions.

He swore at his phone, pleaded with it, threatened to hurl the thing onto the pavement before thinking better of it and beginning the whole swear/plead/threaten sequence all over again.

At one point, the now-red-faced fellow actually wound up as if to hurl the phone into a nearby parking lot, only to reconsider once more, causing him to commit what would be considered a balk in baseball.

He yelled some more, his words blurring into harsh grunts and squeals that remind me of the oddly sexual sounds some tennis players make when delivering hard serves.

Traffic slowed as flustered drivers eased around the screaming man in the street. Perplexity reigned for those three minutes on East Avenue, because unlike the trash battle all those years ago, the source of this man’s aggravation wasn’t so obvious. Unless you were right on top of him, you couldn’t see his misbehaving Samsung (I assume) at all.

“Mommy, why is that man so mad at his fingers?” a child might have asked.

“Don’t bother Mommy right now,” the child’s mother would answer. “Mommy needs to return this text message before she reaches the next stop light.”

People are so passionately obsessed with their little gadgets that it becomes more disturbing than hilarious. We’re talking about devices that can send messages, photos and videos across the world in near-real time. We’re talking about doohickeys capable of putting the world’s knowledge into the palms of our hands with just a few keystrokes.

Phones and tablets and snoogles and phuglets — whatever the hell they’re called these days — represent absolutely mind-bending technology and the guy on East Avenue was willing to die in traffic because his was temporarily misbehaving.

Was he missing the ongoing drama of a thrilling Reddit thread? Had an overheated battery caused him to miss an elusive Snorlax at the side of East Avenue? Snarkus interruptus in the YouTube comment section?

Who knows? The world is full of aggravations that can cause a man to go all MMA with an inanimate object. Who among us hasn’t wanted to punch a piece of stray gum stuck to the bottom of our shoe?

The trick is to do it privately. Me, I’ve got a fight date with a microwave oven that totally ruined my Hot Pocket. Son of a! I KILL you!

Crap, did my voice just crack?