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BottlenekkidJanuary 13, 2006 Phone calls are my chronic bottleneck. I hate making them. I can put them off indefinitely and then a little longer. Two times in my life phone calls have been easy: as a bookstore's book and magazine buyer during the first half of the 1980s and then during my two stints at the Martha's Vineyard Times, ca. 1987 to 1993 and 1996-1999. From time to time I poke and prod: why are phone calls so hard? Boils down to this: I'm afraid people are going to cackle at me and then hang up. It's hardly ever happened, but who said it had to make sense? E-mail was made for me: I'm never afraid anyone's going to cackle at me online, and there's no way to hang up; if they delete me unread, I'll never know it. So this morning I was between jobs. Shipped one out yesterday afternoon; the next one hadn't arrived (it came around noon today). The local astrology columnist talks about the moon being "void-of-course," i.e., between signs. That's me between jobs. No planet's in charge; I'm drifty, I don't know what to do next. I can piss away a lot of valuable time during these "void-of-work" periods. Not this morning, though. This morning I did good. I made up cyber-folders for the three writing projects I want to pursue this winter and early spring. I started making notes for two of them. Credit card in hand, I ordered tea from Peet's (I like coffee but tea has always been my morning drink), a pound of Yunnan Fancy and a pound of Assam Golden Tip. Uhura Mazda is overdue for an oil change, the brakes need work, and a peculiar albeit sporadic rasping noise has been making me nervous the last week or so. Uhura gets inspected in March, which imposes a deadline of sorts; deadlines calm my nerves and make me bold. I called Courtesy Motors; Larry gave me an appointment for Monday. Finally I called the guy whose press release I saw in yesterday's paper. He's offering a free 10-week course in folk guitar. I'm no musician but I need to be making music in my life. Last month, when I decided time had come to exit the Island Community Chorus, I hoped some new doors would open. With uncharacteristic clarity, I asked the muses for two doors in particular: singing informally with other women, stuff like Libana performs in concert and teaches in their workshops; and learning to play the guitar. On my own I've made some progress with the latter, but after I've learned five or six chords and how to make pretty good changes from one to the other, I go looking for a song to play, and whatever I pick turns out to have some bar chord or other monstrosity that my stubby fingers can't stretch around. In my heart I knew I needed either a book or a teacher. So I look in yesterday's paper and there's this guy offering a free course in exactly what I want to learn, all because he thinks there's not enough music in the world. I think he's right, even though I'm wallowing in my latest order from Ladyslipper; there's definitely not enough music on Martha's Vineyard. I called the number, got the answering machine, and said, "Sign me up." Through the bottleneck and into the future. Feels like there's some real momentum coming on.
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