I dug up a story I started writing last year, a story about the Apology Line. I have not thought about that project much, and I don’t talk about it much, but anyone who knew me from 1993 to 2001 almost certainly got an earful about my involvement with Apology. It is hard to believe that it held such influence over me for so long, hard to believe when I survey the ambivalence with which I regard it today. My dismay stems from discovering, years after the fact, that the project was not as bold or innovative as I thought. The project’s creator, intentionally or not, had me believing his was the first of its kind: the first answering machine set up for the public to call, the first telephone art project of its kind where anyone could call and leave a message and become involved in an interactive community of strangers or local communities.
Apology first went online in 1980, but as I later learned the call-in shows and communities had been around since the first answering machines became available. If this disillusionment seems petty then I think its weight comes from my further change in attitude toward the substance of Apology. morose and moribund beyond most tolerances I fell into the hole of liars and phonies who filled Apology with confessions of crimes never committed and deeds never done. The Line was full of lines, liars and lines and pithy whines.
Still, it’s interesting to look at it again, from a more detached perspective. Certainly the confessional element of the format appealed to the lapsed Catholic in me, to the gutteral guilt at my sparse and feeble attempts to attend church throughout my adult life. That darkness rises up in me on occasion, such as last Ash Wednesday, when the priest’s repetitively muttered “to dust you shall return” made me feel like my soul was made of dirt, and that i can never make peace with death.
