"I was going to call my old, first phone number in the Bronx, and talk to whoever answered.... I would interview this person long enough to reveal our common humanity..."

"... and I would then tell his or her story with compassion; whatever differences we might have — cultural, political, whatever — would disappear with greater familiarity and understanding. Above all, we would, together, two ordinary people, prove that for all this country’s troubles, modernity does not have to be soulless. So I called. And got this recording: 'The next available service specialist will be with you momentarily. They will be happy to assist you with any inquiry.' Then I was put on hold, where I remained for 22 minutes, until I hung up." 

Story idea goes bad for Gene Weingarten, but he got a column out of it anyway: "Maybe the past is only a phone call away" (WaPo). They say you can never go home again, and, it seems, you can never phone home again. 

 

We were just talking about E.T. yesterday. Remember? "Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., [Biden] seems to instinctually believe in the healing power of physical connection—even if that intimacy can sometimes feel a bit too close."

Everybody's trying to make a connection... but maybe nobody's there anymore. Weingarten's column made me think of Bob Dylan's "Talking World War III Blues":

I was feelin’ kinda lonesome and blue 

I needed somebody to talk to 

So I called up the operator of time 

Just to hear a voice of some kind 

“When you hear the beep it will be three o’clock” 

She said that for over an hour 

And I hung up

I love this old clip... and notice the variation on the lyrics just before the one-minute mark: 

 

In the official lyrics (at the link above), we see hear that Bob talking about his "crazy dream":

I said, “Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain” 

He said, “Nurse, get your pad, this boy’s insane” 

He grabbed my arm, I said, “Ouch!” 

As I landed on the psychiatric couch 

He said, “Tell me about it”

In the clip, that last line becomes "He said, 'Tell me about it, dreamwise.'" Dreamwise! That's an example of the figure of speech we were talking about yesterday in the post about "That's the way the cookie crumbles." Remember? In the 1960 movie "The Apartment," Jack Lemmon says, “That’s the way it crumbles cookiewise.” I quoted a professor who bemoaned  "the horrible '-wise' jargon" of the 1960s. Nice to hear Bob Dylan bemoaning the same usage, whenever that was — around 1963. 

Some nice coincidences this morning. Seems hopeful.