Um, huh, yeah. I leave the worst phone messages. I really fear phones. Kinda related to my fear of job interviews.

But outside of strangers, offices, & internally claustrophobic spaces, I actually like to talk: it is a way of playing among friends, where I can joyously rap my voicebox unto the possibilities of the self & community. I like to talk for hours about people & places & poetry. I like to talk in exaggeratedly European accents. I like to talk like witches or barnacled sea-whipped curmudgeons. I like to talk tough. I like to talk without rehearsal. Perhaps that's why I like to hang out with Jimmy among his gruff, rough-talkin' friends. For the impolite immediacy, the serrulated humor. The unprofessional exhilerating theatricality of humane speech.

Alone in the house, talking into a receiver to someone who is absent, I sense futility, faint, ever-present, & the future bemusement of the receiver.

& beware those cell phone options! If you call someone & get their answering service, damp the temptation to listen to your recorded message. If you do, don't feel ashamed & re-record. Once in the days of my cell-phone ownership, a friend left what he believed one perfectly recorded message when he had, to my great perplexity, left three very similar messages due to some (horrifying had he known) service glitch. Oy.

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