I want to write about the illusion of control. That is one of my mind’s focuses. We’re trained by loud voices to respond. I’ve got a loud authoritative voice that gets results.
I can make words seem true the way I say them - they even sound true to me. My deep voice is like a big set of bellows powering an instrument vast and glorious and God- the devil that He is -- hath given me a tone-deaf ear and inclination towards laziness which prevents and prevented and will prevent me from bothering to examine and master the intricacies of this amazing instrument. I use it as infrequently as possible and it closes up on me in irked reprisal. When I, for example, finally speak during a day off from work, to the cashier at the drug store, my voice comes out as a surprise to us both. Where most voices come and go, like little chirps, my deep voice drops onto the floor with a flat slapping sound, staying there. All words tend to lose their meaning when I speak them. My voice is a needle that scratches each record it plays, morphing the singer’s voice into mine, riddling the once-clean margins with my random notations, my boredom, my longing, my sloth. I spit out the crumpled remains of tapes I’ve played, mixes for long drives back and forth to college upstate, blazing too much lazy herb, lots of b’s: burbbly, bubbly babble until I can’t understand my own voice when I hear it on someone else’s answering machine.