Hey Hugh, it's Jim.

Hey Hugh, its Jim. Give me a call back when you can, will you? Haven’t heard from you in a while and you know, just want to touch base. How you been doing? Yea, just looking for people to talk to, it’s lonely here, I can’t drive, I can’t get out. Maybe go for a drive, I could pay for the gas or something like that, you know. Take it easy, bye.

 Two weeks later, Jim was dead. And I didn’t go to visit him. I didn’t even hear the message until about 4 days after he left it, maybe a week. Why, because I’m so broke I was only listening to work messages and talking to family and friends on the phone. I couldn’t even find the time to listen to his message. I saw it there and wasn’t even able to process enough to have the emotional time to listen to that message. I didn’t even fully form the thought “I can’t listen to this message because he is going to want me to do something, like drive him somewhere, and I don’t have time to drive my old friend JIm somewhere..” Because A) I would have driven him somewhere if I had had the time to do it, no question, why not? I’m not trying to monopolize my own time as opposed to the interests of my old friends in even the slightest and B) I didn’t know his cancer was terminal. The last time I had seen him he’d been in the hospital with some tubes going into him and we’d joked about the cardboard tasting protein jello that I tried, in order to have something to do and indeed, I’d come to visit him instead of going home to eat dinner so I was hungry after a long day at work as a 58 year old doing carpentry, running my own business, lifting all of my own 4x8 sheets of 3/4” ply, this is the ‘worker’ end of communism, that understands how the worker is oppressed and can not manage the emotional life in order to make good decisions and throw off oppression. So yea, I did not know he was terminal or I would have listened to that message, -that incidently I still have on my phone, if you want to stop by and have a listen. Its agonizing. But I’m hoping that Jim would understand, he was ‘a worker’ too, as they say on the Anarchist News website, people sign their names on their posts “ a worker.” 
Anyways, reading Jim's words is like crying and driving.