6/10/01: They Woke Me Up
First, a random poem for you:
The phone rang,
and continued to ring.
I swam out of sleep
as from the ocean’s floor
to silence it.
After, I found
I could not drop so deep
as I had descended before.
Now. While you're here, I'll tell you this. The poem above refers to an incident at about 8 pm the other day, when I was asleep early because I'm a dork, rather, more specifically: an overworked, tired dork. The phone rang, and you know what the person said? It was some guy who asked for Carlos, and said good evening, and at least part of it was in Spanish. I forget which part. I said, in English, you have the wrong number. He seemed surprised-- not that Carlos doesn't live with me, but that "you don't speak Spanish?" I said, "hablo espanol, pero no quiero hablar contigo porque estaba durmiendo quando usted me llamo!" which granted was mixing the tu and usted form, but I was half asleep after all; I'm just proud I remembered my imperfect past tense, blah blah blah. So then he apologized for waking me up, and I said "no me llames jamas, entiendes?" and he promised never to call me again. I swear, I get more goddam bloody wrong numbers and they're all morons.
Case in point. The other night the phone rang at 3 a.m., no kidding, and this sad tired voice said, "Hello? Hello? Hello?" and wouldn't say anything else. I hung up and it called back. I said, "What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to scare me? Because I'm not scared. Frankly, I'm just curious. Why don't you say something other than 'Hello? Hello? Hello?' like a friggin moron, because then at least you wouldn't just be wasting both of our times, you raging flailing idiot." And the voice said, "Hello? Hello?" So I hung up again, and it didn't call back this time.
Okay, this story, such as it is, has come to a conclusion, thankfully.