this wasn’t what i expected somebody said in my voice; that might’ve meant that AOC was projecting her neutral shield—her natural voice, and, in so doing, she was planting thoughts in my head, thoughts that might help me move in a positive direction. but it could’ve been somebody else doing the same thing. oust the fire starter!
but who could that be? was there some remnant of Hitler living inside me—and i needed to oust that? But I don’t think good and evil work like that. Evil can’t communicate with the future—it can only speak to the past.
“if that’s what you want,” AOC said. I said yes, that is what I want, but i didn’t slow it down to Navajo speak, which would’ve been like sending something out that bounced off the atmosphere and arrived at a difficult location like am radio; you could do that, any time, especially if you were trying to send a private email that you didn’t need to read all at once—but when you shared a similar frequency, which AOC and I did when we spoke, you could speak normally or even faster than you’d think language can allow, and, in doing that, the sound was a little better, and you could talk to each other without trying to encode everything. I did this a lot when I was using my shield.
I wasn’t so lonesome when I had AOC to talk to—especially because, as I knew now, she was a woman. the idea of a woman fit her perfectly, and, because of that, i liked to imagine her as my soulmate; but what about my feelings for McCord? I was losing McCord—or gaining AOC and or Alex; i don’t think that meant i was a lesbian in general; i wasn’t attracted to women in general: i had specific feelings for these two women that lived in my imagination.
Check your email AOC said.
“Icouldn’t say for sure what was bothering me,” that was AOC—i guess it was part of her email. “But I had a hang-up.” I sipped, patiently, on a Dr. Pepper, which was when I liked to project AOC’s voice the most—Alex’s too. But right now I wasn’t talking to Alex. I was reading AOC’s email. “Perhaps we share a Dr. Pepper across time, if, that is, Dr. Pepper doesn’t have a life span.”
“We have each other.” I forwarded that to Alex in Navajo speak. She could read it later.
“Zoom in, or zoom out,” AOC said.
That reminded me of a Bob Dylan book in which he stated that, when he was getting started, he liked to sing and play in such a way that those that didn’t like him would be pushed away, and those that did would be drawn in. I wondered, then, if this woman I used to date that wouldn’t get out of the car with me was actually me refusing to get out of the car with Bob Dylan. He was on too many drugs, and I didn’t especially like him. The feeling might’ve been mutual, however, because, when I was learning the guitar and singing my poetry, Bob Dylan certainly didn’t get out of the car with me! He must’ve known that I was dumping my back often enough (with scotch) when I played the guitar.
“That was me,” AOC said. Apparently the latter paragraph was part of AOC’s email to me—she was telling me that, back then, she didn’t want to get out of the car with me, probably for similar reasons—I was getting drunk and using our conversations to write poetry and play the guitar—which is something that I probably shouldn’t have been doing, if, that is, I hadn’t been singing Shakespeare, often enough, when I played, and trying to connect with him. I’m confident, by the way, that I did connect with him. But maybe I made him angry because I was dumping my back—I know that Shakespeare did a little ranting in his plays as he got older.
“I’d named him Craig”—after an uncle, who’s voice might have changed over time, in my memory, but, none the less, had an address in my head.
I did a little tuning to get back in sync with AOC’s email—sounding out Alex’s voice, which was now Alex’s natural voice—the voice I had previously been using to talk to AOC, who was now addressed by the combination of my voice and Alex’s natural voice.
I’m a mess AOC confessed and i want to get rid of President Jack Daniels
I wondered, then, if she too had a President that was pushing evil more and more as they approached the end of their life. To achieve this volume, with me, she must have been under pressure from somewhere. But I also considered the fact that I inadvertently passed some presidential garbage her way when I got a little excited and didn’t want to come down (from a sugar high, for example; note: my Dr. Pepper did not have sugar in it).
This vector maps to this vector something I’d always suspected but which she’d now confirmed. I considered the possibility, then, that AOC might’ve taken the amplitude that identified me in the continuum and replaced it with the corresponding frequency such that no, her president did not necessarily have to be evil for her to achieve this volume and talk to me; furthermore, I could do the same thing: I didn’t necessarily have to change frequency and or turn up the sound much one way or the other as long as our wave functions aligned. So maybe AOC was telling me that we didn’t have as much in common as I might’ve thought, or maybe she was just saying: “you don’t need to turn up the sound with a Dr. Pepper to talk to me—i can talk to you whenever you like.”
i like my Dr. Pepper
“You like talking to me.”