this wasn’t what i expected   somebody said in my voice; that might’ve meant that Anna Karenina 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.  […]

     It occurred to me that, in the future, I cast a shadow, Anna said; i couldn’t argue with that, but I also knew that representatives of congress come and go; so Anna Karenina, i think, might have hijacked Anna’s channel.  But then it occurred to me that Anna and or Anna Karenina were unhappy

    “I’m not there yet,” I said, although I heard it first, and it sounded like Anna’s voice.  If, by “there,” we meant prepared for each other’s company, then I had to agree:  That doesn’t mean it’s over.  But what was that?  What was not over—or over?  The presidency?  Should i even run   and I

     “Was that a red flag?” i asked.  You, me, and three’s company   “so where do we go from here?”  I was getting better at sounding my thoughts in my natural voice as opposed to the sound of my internal narrator—which I was certainly a function of, but which, at some point, was more like

     I did that, and I still gained a pound!  Oh well.  That’s my hat.  give it back to me.  I usually don’t wear hats unless I’m mowing the grass—guess I might if I lost all the hair on top of my head, but that hadn’t happened yet.      The voice sounded kind of like

     I went to an art show and ate all this food: I was coming down.  I had to try a little harder to get Anna Karenina’s voice right in my head when I was using my shield.  All too often, it sounded as if I was using my natural voice alone—which was my default

     This isn’t the right time.  That came in using the voice of my internal narrator, and it wasn’t mixed with Anna Karenina’s voice, so it wasn’t Anna that I was talking to.  I define just that internal narrator voice to be the voice of my future at some particular time—independent of my relationship with

     Am I composed ?  That’s what I heard: so I said, “I don’t know, are You?”  It sounded like the voice I had assigned to Anna—part Anna Karenina’s voice and part the voice of my internal narrator.  But I didn’t want to talk to Anna at this moment because I was afraid we’d argue. 

     The fuehrer was doing his thing: popping Pervitin like candy, and you had to wonder: how could the fuehrer, who was a health nut, not know that methamphetamines were bad for him?  He must not have wanted to know—or he did know and that was one of the reasons he was so angry.  (Because

     I didn’t know what to say at first when I was confronted by a thought—the conductor of a train, a young man, in Alaska, that told us about the history of the region over the microphone and then showed his face and posed the question:  “Does the voice match the face?”       So I