January 24, 2007
You’re not the only one I love…
Will you fight to hang onto me?
FYI, SAN FRANCISCO, YOU BITCH,
you have a rival. Though I’m the first kind of person Gavin ought to court with wine and roses to keep around, I can see you won’t make it easy for me to stay here as a writer with no income. (I reject the word “unemployed” because it implies that employment is the standard to which all worthy folk strive to adhere, and ergo that unemployment is a deviant, lesser state of being, looked down upon by those “gainfully employed.” I’m plenty employed, thank you.)
I’M THINKING THAT
perhaps if it comes down to selling my flat, instead of moving to an apartment, I should just plain move. To Brooklyn, New York. (Cruella, calm down; it’s much too soon to get your hopes up!) My mother is now 82 and my sister and uncles are still in Philly, and it would be nice to be—not close—but closer to them. I love Brooklyn and Manhattan and would relish the opportunity to explore them thoroughly like I barely did while living back there, but I don’t know if I have the stamina for east coast life anymore. Tons of people, crowding and claustrophobia on both streets and subways. General environment of grime. “Manhattan smells,” said Tom Robbins, “like the litter box for the Kitty of the World.” (I apologize to Tom for calling him “too clever for his own good.” I should be so clever.)
The weather, summer and winter, sucks big time, even with global warming delivering the first snowless December since the 1880’s. The weather in SF is never a factor and it’s easy to take that for granted, given that one big reason I left Philadelphia is that I am constitutionally unsuited to humidity. It enervates me, renders me nonfunctional.
I’LL MAKE A BRAND NEW START OF IT
But hey—New York. Needs no justification. Whatever it is, you just put up with it. I’ve been on the west coast for 25 years, but I never abandoned my persona as an easterner. I was born to talk trash. Is it time to return to my eastern (European) roots?
First off Jon and I hit the Met for an awesome Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit. (Did he never stop creating? Not only a glass artist but ceramicist, painter, furniture designer, architect and more.) Looking up from the street at the massive façade of the museum, I have a flash of it in ruins, being discovered by some post-nuclear archaeologist, millennia hence when the earth has started to live once more. Later we do the Rockefeller Center Christmas thing and walk down 5th Ave. eating roasted chestnuts out of a bag. Mel Torme got it wrong, Jon Crow got it right: New York at Christmas is “chestnuts roasting and the smell of piss…”
JAY-SUS KEE-RIST!
On Times Square we discover the new three-story, 25,000 square foot M&M’s World New York store, devoted entirely to M&M merchandising. Their tagline: “So Much More than Candy!” M&M action figures, M&M apparel, M&M chutes of 22 mix-and-match colors, M&M plush toys, M&M golf club covers, M&M yo-yos, M&M whatever you can think of, you can get it here. For $500 you can own a set of sterling silver “M” earrings, bracelet and pendant. Wow, that is so much more than candy! On the lower end of the shopping scale there are soft stuffed M&M footballs for $3, or $8 plastic slider bracelets.
The store is packed top to bottom with people, even after Christmas. It takes me a while to find a plain old bag of M&M’s. But I don’t buy it. I cannot and will not feed this depressing monstrosity, a store born of people’s temptation to buy something Because It Is There, creating an artificial craving for M&M crap. It’s the A-m&m-erican Drea-m&m.
BACK TO PLANET EARTH
I decide for the duration of my visit to pretend I live in Brooklyn. Jon is at work and I exit his paid-off co-op in Park Slope and walk down Union Street like I own it. I do some casual shopping on 5th Avenue and buy an “Eat Drink & Be Merry” sign at a collectibles shop, then a key-to-my-heart key chain, which I will later lose.
I work on this column at Ozzie’s Coffee Shop. But Ozzie’s loses points because they serve their coffee in to-go cups whether you’re going or staying. A coffee shop without coffee cups won’t see much of me. The Tea Lounge is more my style and will no doubt become my hang.
IT’S JUST WHAT I DO
Later on I wait for Jon at the Brooklyn Art Museum, “checking out the goods” on a Rodin statue as he walks towards me through the lobby. There’s an amazing exhibit by Ron Meuch, who creates fiberglass or silicone sculptures of people that look as real as real people—veins under flesh, beard growth, mottled pink skin, body hair, the works. I’m amazed at his prowess but also wonder, why has this guy invested so much time and effort in learning to be expert at this? Well, it’s just what he does. “Michael Jordan plays ball, Charles Manson kills people,” Aaron Eckhart says in “Thank You for Smoking,” and this guy sculpts hyper-realistic people. I ask the same of myself. Why am I doing this, sitting around tapping out words? It doesn’t matter, it’s just what I do. People can respond to it or ignore it. I can’t not write.
The Annie Liebowitz Photographer’s Life show is also here—I am always inspired by the phenomenal output of people who do, do, do their thing. The other amazing show is the large-scale watercolors of Walton Ford, a master of his medium, in the style of Audubon but with satiric twists.
There’s a quote by Audubon in the exhibit documentation, which I must borrow a pen from a guard to write down: “When an individual [passenger pigeon] is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches again; the bird is gone.” How like train travel that is—a living, moving travelogue of sightings that pass like thoughts that come and go.
We walk through Grand Army Plaza admiring the Christmas decorations. I think how great it would be to take my time with New York, to give it its due. And you’ve got to live here for that. It appeals to me more than going back to my house in Portland did. Jon walks me down to the canal and talks about him, his parents, and me buying a building together. I like it as an idea but I am sick of owning things right now.
On my last night in Brooklyn, Jon whips up a splendid catfish dinner for me and Oscarito at his place while I pack. I would love to have regular evenings like this, taking turns making dinner, drinking wine, shooting the bull. I have thoroughly enjoyed living in Brooklyn for 3 days.
“LEAD ME NOT INTO PENN STATION,”
as Saul Bellow put it, yet here I am awaiting The Cardinal to Chicago. It’s nearly 60° here at 6:30 a.m., and as unseasonably mild in Chicago. Are we as a planet completely fucked? Everybody everywhere’s talking about the weather. God willing it’s not too late to start doing something about it.
THE CARDINAL, TRAIN NO. 51
Departing New York, Friday, January 5 , 2007, 7:05 a.m.
Arriving Chicago, Saturday, January 6, 3007, 10:20 a.m.
There it is: my favorite sign in all the world, on a bridge crossing the Delaware River in New Jersey: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. All my life I wondered what on earth Trenton is making that the world is taking, until one day I was tearing the bathroom floor out in my house in Portland and discovered: my toilet was made in Trenton. Only fitting.
At Bristol Cemetery the headstones are colorfully adorned with red-ribboned wreaths, flowers, even a Christmas stocking. Elsewhere a house has painted in large white letters on its brick wall the information: THIS HOUSE HAS A BURGLAR ALARM!!!
I have the bizarre experience of being the only passenger having breakfast in the diner which seats 16, like I am a traveling dignitary with my own wait staff. Looking out at the platform full of commuters at Metropark station, I nonchalantly enjoy my French toast and ham as they wait for their trains.
JUST PASSIN’ THROUGH
Approaching Philadelphia there’s a mural reading “Passing Through,” and indeed this is the only time I have ever passed through Philadelphia on my way to somewhere else. The Philly thing gets ever more painful as my mother ages. This time she goes so far as to say, “This might be our last meal together,” which to me is emotional blackmail. She’s perfectly healthy at the moment, and I assure her it is not. Still, you never know. Brooklyn is only a 90-minute train ride away…
The Cardinal is the only American train I have ever been on to have a toilet and folding sink right in the sleeper car. But to paraphrase Tony Soprano, “I don’t shit where I sleep.” The third cemetery of the run is outside Wilmington, Delaware, where those on the move pass by those who will never move again. People like to situate those things by railroad tracks. No one complains about the noise. You know, in my list of states passed through I forgot to include Ohio, Maryland and Delaware, making the grand tally 31 states in 29 days.
Half an hour late out of Washington D.C. and there is our nation’s Capitol Building, a direct hit down from the station. I came here once with a friend to see an Edvard Munch exhibit at the National Gallery. Talk about intense—we literally screamed when we got out on the street, like collateral wounded bystanders to a personal tragedy. I used to have a postcard of “Separation” on my fridge—which to me is a sorrowful portrait of the attachment and heartache of unrequited love one clings to despite oneself. But I don’t relate to Munch as much as I used to. I just don’t want to focus on the sufferings of life any more.
It’s been raining through several states now, my favorite train weather. Overcast is easy on the eyes and lends an atmosphere that sunshine lacks. “Lovely” is the most apt word for my second tour of Virginia. Charming towns, pleasant rural landscapes, what I imagine to be a strip mine, not actually knowing what that is, and here we are in Charlottesville, still one-half hour late. Sweet! I spot a wishing well outside Staunton. Let’s see, what do I wish: To do what I love, for the money to follow.
It turns out to be pretty handy to have one’s own private piss pot, with a view. A view of me, as I can’t get the curtain closed. Oh well, it’s about time I mooned someone from a train.
THE EMPIRE BUILDER, TRAIN NO. 7
Departing Chicago, Saturday, January 6, 2007, 2:15 p.m.
Arriving Seattle, Monday, January 8, 2007, 10:20 a.m.
Oh, poo (literally)—no private bathroom this time, but a little box of departing gifts awaits on the seat: a Dove chocolate, a Crème Saver, a Madagascar Vanilla Red Rooibus Tea from Celestial Seasonings, a Gold Bond body powder sample and $2 coupon, and finally, a petite tube of St. Ives Whipped Silk intense body moisturizer, which I actually need right now.
That’s not the only intense body treatment I need.
Well, no toilet, but a welcoming split of champagne—nice touch. Never say no to champagne! Our three hours of daylight will be spent in small-town Illinois and Wisconsin; nighttime in Minnesota, daylight will find us in North Dakota.
Fresh carnations in the restroom. Nice touch, once more, but I could never take seriously a man who brought me carnations. They are God’s “filler” flower, I’ve heard them called.
Here comes, or rather, there goes, the sun. It paints my sleeper car orange, then hides itself behind the trees, as a flock of 30 or more ducks waddle together across a field. The sun lingers long enough to brighten what I assume is Lake Madison.
IT’S NOW SUNDAY, JANUARY 7TH
according to the Minot Daily News slipped under my door. Woke up in the Geographical Center of North America, the otherwise unremarkable town of Rugby, North Dakota. I once wrote in an email after a 1995 trip that Rugby may possess that particular geographical distinction, but it is also “deeply ugly, a nightmare town harshly lit by a passing train at midnight.” Someone answered, “Your comments were harsh, yet strangely poetic.”
I stepped out in Minot to mail some postcards, and got a blast of the winter weather I didn’t get back east–27° in contrast to the forecast of 70° when I left New York. Minot has been called “Magic City” because it sprung up like magic when the Great Northern announced its route. Some headlines in magical Minot: “On Thin Ice—Not Your Usual Freeze”; “Avalanche Buries Cars”; “Bleak Forecast for Lake Sakakawea”; “Moose from Utah Transported to Colorado to Cure Overpopulation in Exchange for Bighorn Sheep.” You don’t get much moose and sheep trading over in San Francisco, but in Minot it’s Page 2 news.
At lunch with Linda, a retired art and English teacher living in Glasgow, Montana, where the temperature drops to 50 below, I am amused to spot, over her shoulder, an Andre the Giant sticker on a wall. He certainly does have a posse, that big lug.
Linda wants to know what kind of job I quit to undertake this trip. “I was an office manager for an architectural firm,” I say, “but I’m really a writer,” whispering like it’s a dangerous secret rather than a tired cliche. “Oh!” she exclaims, “I’m really a reader.” We laugh. She volunteers at a library and now, having seen Glasgow station, I’m surprised someone so educated and worldly would be happy living there. “What goes on in Glasgow?” I had asked. “Nothing,” said she. It once got and stayed so cold there that her metal-framed storm windows shattered, one by one.
A surprise Canadian flag reminds me I’m on top of America. I can physically feel the mass of this continent below me and that of Canada above. I feel I am straddling the top of one country and the bottom of another.
THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
Here at Havre, Montana (if memory serves, one point, along with Cutbank? and Shelby? of “the Golden Triangle,” a richly wheat-producing region of northern Montana) there are three flags aloft—Canadian, Montana’s, and the red, white, blue, that seem to be dancing in the wind to the Latin jazz I’m listening to.
Here’s a new one on me: the train may be stopped due to a high wind advisory. Montana is the fifth windiest state in the Union. It has 37,028 square kilometers of area exposed to wind. Apparently trains should not travel at winds greater than 65 miles per hour, and there are gusts of up to 120 mph. There’s no hiding from the wind out here—flat as flat can be as far as the eye can see. We are warned we could be delayed as much as 12, 14 hours. Oh yes.
But we make it to Shelby, where I step outside to sample said wind, and I’ll gladly wait that sucker out. Take as long as you need—whip it, whip it good. Just don’t topple my train, please God.
Looks like we’ve been spared. And now comes the great thrill of this trip: Glacier National Park by moonlight. We’re not at full strength at three-quarters, but sufficient to light the way. Call me crazy, but I prefer to go through mountains in the dark rather than daylight, if there’s a moon to give a blue glow to things. They have a frightening power when shrouded in darkness and rendered into a chiaroscuro of mysterious shapes and black hollows.
THE UNIVERSE CHIMES IN
On the Empire Builder I receive another sign from the universe. As I’m lying in bed gazing at the clouds it occurs to me that something has been missing from this trip due to mostly overcast skies most nights. And just as I am thinking that, the clouds magically part and dramatically showcase the constellation Orion, my guardian angel on so many trips, which I had not yet seen, and then close again, as if to say, just because you don’t see me doesn’t mean I am not here; keep the faith, baby. Something to cling to in moments of doubt.
But I must lay down my pen, because my eyes are needed elsewhere.
I drift off in eastern Washington and, alerted by the change in sound and rhythm, wake up in the Cascade Tunnel, longest in the Western Hemisphere at 7.79 miles, and indeed, it seems like we will never get out of the thing. I breathe deeply to calm myself down, because one thing I don’t like about trains is the claustrophobia of being inside a tunnel inside a mountain in the middle of the night.
BROWNIE POINTS TO KENDELYN,
my train-riding friend who caught my cut-and-paste error of placing the Moffat Tunnel statistics after Tunnel No. 41, “The Big Hole,” before reaching Reno. It’s in Colorado, of course, and I have silently corrected the blooper. Kendelyn once sat outside the Moffat for an hour while they ventilated the damn thing. She ought to know.
MONDAY, JANUARY 8TH, 9:00 a.m.
The stretch through the northern Rockies and Glacier Park, then Washington through the Cascades to Seattle, is one of the nation’s most spectacular. I was up all night staring, as the display of earthly beauty continually brought astonished tears to my eyes. The interplay of the moon with the clouds, the blue moonlit tint to the snow, the scary vistas of dark drop-offs; it was a tour of magnificence that can be experienced only on a train, with no competing traffic. The whole experience seems surreal to me in the light of day, like God showed me his mountain hideaway. It’s something I need to know is there. Something everyone should know is there.
We are now closing in on Seattle. I could use another day and night on The Empire Builder. Is it just to delay getting home—losing the adventure and excitement of a new perspective or experience around every bend? Or is it fear of what the future holds? I wouldn’t blame myself; I am only human—but my fear would not be of external circumstances, like losing my flat, but of failing myself. Of laziness, time-wasting, of my brain short-circuiting and double-crossing me. The stakes are high but I’m going to play this game whatever the outcome.
BILL & DAVE’S PLACE, SEATTLE
I have a curious reaction to Seattle. First, I am back on solid ground in Pacific Standard Time, which is already a “normalizing” feature—being back on the west coast—dulling the exotic tinge of the trip. And Seattle, Bill and Dave’s place particularly, already feels like home, like I’m just visiting friends, not culminating a grand cross-country journey.
I am someone who occasionally requires an entire day of rest—of not talking, writing, going anywhere, seeing anybody, doing anything, just restoring my energy, usually while watching movies. I long ago acknowledged that no matter my well-laid plans for productive activity, I will always require such days at irregular, unpredictable intervals. While working, I spent many a Saturday this way, just breathing. And I need one of these days in Seattle after the nonstop comings and goings of the past weeks.
I have a sluggish day spent in my pajamas while Bill tends to his 11-month daughter Gabriella, and I offer to make dinner to snap out of this doldrum. But while shopping with Bill for spaghetti sauce ingredients, I am trying to conceal from him that I am in danger of hyperventilating with anxiety, whether he notices or not. I can’t possibly handle even making this dinner, much less life on this planet for the rest of my allotted time.
In this familiar home of friends I have come face to face with my face. There is no disguising myself. I will be going to sleep and waking up without the framework of an imposed schedule (a “job,” I mean). It’s all on me.
GLAD I’M NOT SO HAPPY
It would seem that Bill and Dave have it all figured out. They have each other, a beautiful, happy daughter, satisfying work, a cool house; they are to be envied. Dave was made a managing partner of his architectural firm and there’s good money coming in while Bill does the stay-at-home-dad routine, occasionally doing adoption case study consulting in his capacity as a certified social worker. It’s a modern-day alternative family American dream. But the dream has its challenges. In contrast to my own life, Dave works like a mule while Bill strains to keep up with Gabriella. Their lives require a lot of maintenance, and it would be a big deal to make changes to the existing situation. Not to reduce lives to a glib paragraph; they have the joy of love for each other and their child, in a city they love. I too love Gabriella—but I am glad I don’t have their responsibilities and can just take off on a train.
A former coworker sent me this email:
You’ve become one of the people that I bullshit about to my friends (most married at least 20 years like me). It goes like this - I have this friend that quit it all to write. blah blah blah, and then we all say wow, holy shit - wish we had some damn talent, or guts. What we would do if we didn’t have tuition, mortgages, husbands………… (We’re full of shit, most of us wouldn’t do anything). But you have balls (hate using that expression, but it works) and we love it.
Though we would never trade our family life, children, husbands (well ????) for your life, all of us are pulling for you and hope that we do see your name on the NY Times best seller list.
Though occasionally I have thought to myself, like Joan Crawford in “A Woman’s Face,” “I want to belong to the human race,” and have been a mother and wife, have a family, like other folks do, it is only a harmless fantasy. I am just not suited for it, not up to the task, and the reality of raising a child, as demonstrated by Bill and Dave, and the restrictions and awesome responsibilities it imposes, is something I could not handle. My kid would be saying, Why did you even have me, then? Of course, what I am not figuring into the equation is love. My love for my family and my family’s love for me. But that’s for the next lifetime. In this one, if I quit my job it affects no one but me. I can’t imagine not being able to go on this trip at this time because I feel like it and need to. It’s why I’ve avoided “real” jobs all my life. I don’t want to be tethered to anything.
THE CASCADES, TRAIN NO. 507
Departing Seattle, Washington, Thursday, January 11, 2:20 p.m.
Arriving Portland, Oregon, Thursday, January 11, 2007, 5:50 p.m.
Got my winter wish for an urban snowfall here in Seattle. We had the perfect dusting of snow last night, enough to stick around and stay beautiful. It’s a brilliant sunny day and Mt. Rainier is out in full force, but we soon leave it behind for the suburban stations and rural outposts of winter wonderland Washington. Puget Sound is blue as the sky and all is right with the world.
CHAMPION OF THE RAILS,
Olympia-Lacey bills itself, meaning I know not what. But I claim the right to bill myself as such, as well. Why not? The second Centralia of my trip (Washington) is coming up. There are at least six Centralias in America:
- Centralia, Illinois—home of the Centralia Balloon Fest coming up in August. Ready to retire? “Centralia is the answer!”
- Centralia, Florida—a ghost town 4-1/2 miles from Weeki Wachee Springs, which thrived as a sawmill city cutting up to 100,000 board feet of lumber a day, from 1910 to 1917, when there were no more trees to be cut.
- Centralia, Washington—site of the horrendous Centralia Massacre of 1919, a gunfight between members of the IWW (International Workers of the World, aka the “Wobblies”) and the American Legion, wherein four Legionnaires were shot to death by Wobblies defending their Union Hall against them. The Wobblies were jailed, but one of them, Wesley Everest, who has been quoted as saying, “I fought for democracy in France and I’m going to fight for it here. The first man that comes in this hall, why, he’s going to get it,” was delivered to the mob by jail guards, had his teeth smashed in with a rifle butt and was then castrated. Everest was then hung three times in three different locations, shot repeatedly, and buried in an unmarked grave. The coroner’s report ruled his death a suicide.
- Centralia, Wisconsin—home of NASCAR drivers Bryan Reffner and “America’s Winningest Driver,” Dick Trickle (ya gotta love it).
- Centralia “You’ll Love Calling it Home” Missouri (“Anchor Capital of the World”)—and
- Centralia, Pennsylvania, which was largely obliterated by an underground coal fire that has been burning for more than forty years.
But for me Centralia is distinguished by being the only city name to rhyme with “genitalia.”
Sunset today is all mixed up with clouds of pollution as the light fails and this page is obscured in shadow. What will Portland feel like without my house anchoring it down for me? I’m the one who closed the door on a second life there. I left Portland because it was too easy, and I declined to go back because it was too easy.
Am I purposely making my life hard and courting failure? No, I am making it challenging and courting success. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
PORTLAND IS PORTLAND
As my friend Adrianne drives me to the Bipartisan Café, I decline the opportunity to drive by what people are still calling “my house.” Along the way I see a sign outside a church reading: “Growth may sometimes require a temporary suspension of security.” Tell me something I don’t know.
I’m here approximating the life I said no to. Hanging out at Pete’s coffee shop working on my column, shooting the bull and meeting friends here. This is what life would have been in P-town. Coffee and pie, matinees with Tom, and writing, writing, writing, cross-legged on my living room couch, with a fire going, Zazu and Zzyzzy wandering in and out. It definitely had its appeal. But I gave up my house for you, San Francisco. Will you allow me to stay on my terms?
THE COAST STARLIGHT, TRAIN NO. 11
Departing Portland, Sunday, January 14, 2:25 p.m.
Arriving Emeryville Monday, January 15, 8:25 a.m.
The time has come for the last train ride, commencing now. I immeasurably prefer moving to sitting still, even though while moving I am still sitting down. Solid ground doesn’t cut it. Requires too much of a commitment. I don’t want to have time to grow moss. I love being somewhere new every time I look out a window.
A line of ducks moves in a straight line across a golf course. How do they know to fall into perfect formation? How do the sparrows at Transbay Terminal know when to swoop, when to glide, to move as if one? I don’t know how they know, but sometimes I wish I were part of a tribe and been socialized to move with the group. My family left me pretty much on my own and that’s how I’ve stayed.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS
reads a sign in Oregon City. By mid-January, holiday decorations have overstayed their welcome and bear a sad irrelevance. Take ‘em down, folks. Mt. Hood is out, such a classic mountain peak. Canby, Historic Aurora, Woodburn, Gervais, these are lovely, rural solid-ground communities, with their orchards, their tree farms, their plowed fields, a settled life if ever. I doubt I will ever feel settled. Why?
BECAUSE LIFE IS UNSETTLING.
Life takes you by surprise. Life throws you for a loop, life disrupts the best-laid plans, life fucks you over. You just never know. In the coming months, I may lose everything in the course of gaining my freedom. And I am prepared to do that. The less you have, the less you have to lose.
See, the trick is this. When you’re traveling every day is an adventure packed with new, unpredictable experiences. Somehow one must transpose this excitement into everyday life and not knowing what the day will bring. I couldn’t live another year of going to work, Monday to Friday, being exhausted and bored to death. At least now, I have no idea what will happen. It’ll keep me on my toes, for sure.
The orange descends. After the 3:30 wine and cheese tasting sleeper car special, I return at 4:30 to the orange tinting of sunset. The fields, stands of trees, sides of houses, all bathed with a wash of orange, windows flashing like mirrors, my hands, this page, orange.
Kids live more in the present than adults. A little boy just had 10 seconds of fun shimmying around on a small sheet of ice outside Eugene station, and probably forgot about it by the time he was inside. If an opportunity arises to enjoy oneself, a kid will take it. I feel like my adult mind was already in play in early childhood—watching and assessing, taking stock and documenting. I should have had more fun. I should have had a childhood.
The fields of snow are tinted blue as twilight spreads across the land. A couple enjoys a pit fire in their snowed-over yard. The blackening trees are still silhouetted against the cornflower sky, deepening into indigo as I write. By the time dinner’s over we’re up to Tunnel 10 or so of the 22 we pass through in the Cascades, which as on the Empire Builder, we traverse under cover of the night.
July 15th, and I’ve only one ticket more, back to San Francisco from Emeryville. I’m tempted to go on to Los Angeles and surprise my friend George because I do not want to get off this train! All last night I luxuriated in the darkness of my sleeping car as we navigated the mountains. And before I know it, we’re at Martinez and I’ve been warned my stop is next. Gotta pack it up now.
Cheers!
BACK AT THE BOHEMIAN MUSEUM
as Luke Thomas has named my flat. How utterly boring to be in one place! But home feels good and the Katzes are excited to see me. Zazu paws at the door as I fumble with the key and Zzyzzy gives me a kiss. h has fixed my vacuum and has done the floors. He has even cleaned my refrigerator. But I suspect there’s been (tobacco) smoking in this place, and I find a cigarette mixed in with my giant pile of bills, junk mail and after-the-fact Christmas cards. Whatever! I fling myself on the couch and give myself permission to do nothing today.
I was talking with my friend, artist Danielle Erville, about the need to set up a routine and a disciplined working schedule—can’t hurt, but hey, I don’t need to force myself to write. Writing forces me to write. My desire to write fulfills itself. This trip did me a world of good. It returned me to the world from the narrow focus of working a job—and it has started me off with a lot of momentum. It was an indulgent but necessary journey to refresh my mind and eyes to the spectacle, the unpredictability, the miracle of life on this planet. It’s a hell of a place! I recommend it.
The author is back in town;
Meet her at the witching hour at Vesuvio’s.
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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner
"Nulla dies sine linea"
What did you do
yesterday
last weekend?
last month?
last year?
If you can't remember your day
Pin it to the page
With a word, a line or a phrase
To put your life in freeze-frame
Write it down
Shout it out
Commemorate and celebrate
Or it all fades away
Like the last light of day
And you're left in the dark
With a question mark
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I can out-bitch you, San Francisco, you bitch.
1/24/07
axfiles@sbcglobal.net
copyright Alexandra Jones 2007
