Sometimes I repeat myself. And then I repeat myself. Unwittingly I told the same story too many times, making myself look and feel like kind of an asshole for it. Now I don’t remember if I posted it here. I don’t think I did. Accountant called yesterday. I said hello. He said “You have the sexiest voice I have ever heard!” And you know, his was the second such comment I received about this within 24 hours. Someone commented to me about the CBS segment and said I sounded like a pervy phone sex operator when I answered the phone. Makes me think I should really get organized re: podcast. This magical voice of mine is going to waste. Hah.

I remember people talking about it in college. I was the favorite person to read the “Purity Test” because I had such a pervy yet dorky way of asking the questions. I don’t remember ever getting specific comments about it from any of the radio station listeners, though. In that context I guess some kind of smooth voice is expected. Which is why I don’t know that I’m really wasting my gift by not doing radio. In that context I’d just be just another sexy voice.

…

I contacted the folks at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site today. Their response to my questions was sort of what I was hoping for, but then not really. The gentleman there said he had never heard the story of Taft getting trapped in a phone booth. I took some satisfaction in that. I mean it’s cool to find something that stumps even the experts. But then he added, as I already had started thinking, that countless apocryphal stories of Taft getting stuck in some confined space or another had circulated over the decades. The most famous one, in which he allegedly was trapped in a White House bathtub, did not even surface until 20 years after Taft had left office, and has been pretty uniformly discredited. The man at the Taft Historical Site flatly stated that the bath tub story is false, as I think any reasonable person with an interest in the matter would agree.

I left a voicemail for another person at the Taft site. I didn’t catch his title but he was said to be the final word on such questions as this but he was not in the office today.

I also got an e-mail back from the American Public Communications Council. That’s the group that used to publish the payphone trade journal, in which a few stories about or inspired by my site appeared over the years. They were always nice to me, unlike a lot of others in the payphone business who take me to be some kind of deathly phreaker anarchist, a notion I find hilarious but not worth the effort to dispel.

The APCC is “hanging in there”, according to today’s correspondent. They unplugged their web site to save money but continue to process dial-around compensation payments.

But my desire to write a story about the Taft phone booth thing hit the skids when I realized I had just re-written the story almost exactly as I had written it yesterday. I forgot, in the wake of the anger I experienced yesterday when the computer came grinding to a halt, that I had written several well-footnoted paragraphs about the matter. That was entirely irritating to me, so I got up and stomped over to the ghetto coffee shop, where I can type even more words that I will forget about so I can write them all over again at a later time.

Watching the pretty girls pass by — oh jeez one of them just smiled at me, what do I do???  Thinking I should call the building owner about this matter of seeing 4B. The new floor went in yesterday and I guess that was the last piece of the puzzle. If I have any lingering doubts about this little move it is that there is some legal minutiæ that would somehow intervene on all this, mandating that I pay market rate for the place. Does not seem possible but you never know. It’s a rough town, you know. Hah.

Funny I just saw a KATZ MOVING truck roll past. Their logo, with the way the dot over the I, makes it look like their web URL is KATZ.MOVING. Is .MOVING a TLD? Wouldn’t surprise me.

Followup conversation with the documentary film maker has me thinking her project is going to be in the works for a very long time.

Time to settle down and reach for some focus. Got it? Good.