The house always wins. We are all told this, we all know this, but we play on, we put it all on red, we play our cat’s birthday, we spray our house with Lucky Money Spray (alleged) because the most important lessons we learn in life, are those we already knew. And we feign shock at this pattern repeating. That we lose every time. Except once, in this casino, where we played $20 for over an hour before losing it all.
In New Orleans, as in just about every city in Amerika, there is a casino. A tacky-tacky bling-bling old people in Jazzy chairs with oxygen tanks leaning against machines, Thug Life with cigars, tour buses of Chinese, and the pensioners, dead-eyed grandparents putting their grand-kids inheritance into blinking burbbling machines because somehow they didn’t get the memo to buy a Winnebago and drive about the country at $3.65 a gallon until they’ve either seen every state, every World’s Largest ____________ (noun), every Walmart parking lot, or drained every Chevron station of their precious “juice.” When in the Big Easy I figured I best better take a peek in to this fun palace of Dead Souls since I had been in Motor City Casino in old Detroit as well as Atlantic City and may as well compare these venues. As the others, it was exactly the same. As if central casting had ensured that a corpulent couple in automatic scooters, romantically sharing oxygen tanks (or nitrous oxide perhaps) and feeding the slot machines with a look on each face somewhere between their orgasm face and the face of a union shop steward operating a die cutting machine. Another couple was discussing what numbers to play on a $5 a pull game as if they could outsmart the algorithms, as if this was an investment decision and they had read all the articles on the company, compared stock pics, and talked to their financial adviser… which, considering the economy, perhaps is exactly the same… Considering I had paid about $20 for a room for the night, and could use a little cash, I wondered if they’d give me $20 if I allowed them four pulls… Their chances at a payout would have been far greater, backed up by a certain amount of evolution and biology… There was the poker tables, many filled with Blingsters. It was 10:34 AM. On a Thursday. The dull waitresses moved about the tables, about the crap shoots, the blinking chanting ringing machines. I wondered if this place gave out free drinks. Atlantic City does. Watery, bad, but free, and free makes things taste almost as good as stolen. This was not a free booze space, but I thought I may as well play a few of the penny slots, just to round out the experience. After all, I had won a few dollars at Motor City. Maybe my luck would hold down here and wow, I’d walk out of the place with a few extra dollars for my budget, maybe even enough to pay for an upgrade from the place I was staying, a hostel of character and charm, there were good people staying there, but the house was falling apart, the place worn by love and travel, my bunk was in a dank and leaking room which stank of rancid men and where the beds creaked at every movement, so I wouldn’t mind exchanging this for the chance that Lady Luck may shine on me. So, I put my $20 into the first machine, expecting to play perhaps $5 and then call it quits. I lost quickly. How did that happen? I should at least win once. So I played another $5. Moved to another machine which may be luckier, then moved to another. Was very tempted to press the little button to summon a waitresses to get a drink, but I had already burned down my beer budget and anyway, it looked like the staff in this section had led a fast life and slowed it down by using her face as a break pad. “Come on!” I thought very loudly when I almost almost won. A woman the colour of the crayon that used to be titled “flesh color” sat near me, smoking away as her eyes reflected the flashing lights. “Dun! Dun! Dun! Dun! Chinga-chinga-chinga! Dun! Dun! Dun!” the machine went. I cashed out for the last time. The fake noise of coins being dropped into a bucket ridiculed me since I had managed to turn my $20 into 20 cents in a matter of less than an hour. Even a shit film, fake butter popcorn, and corn syrup soda would have entertained me for longer and given me more, even if that more was anger at Hollywood and cancer from preservatives.
I picked the ticket marked “Winnings” out of the machine. It was a tongue stuck out at me. All the cameras in the house trained upon me, the Knowing Ones up in the back rooms laughing as another sucker was born. I was ready for a drink, but had used up my funds for the day. I wandered out of the penny section, through the quarter, the dollar slots, beyond the plastic pirates, the waitresses in the poker table areas trying to catch my eye with their whimsically displayed tits, beyond the plastic pirates and fake carved fiberglass, flashing this and blinking that, beyond the hot dog stand where two Jazzy Scooters were parked each with a fatty perched on top, again as if the Department of Stereotypes and Cliches had ordered them there. “Hi Alan, baby, it’s Larry! How’s it hanging kid? Look, I have a job for you! I need you to play a fatty in a trolly in a casino in New Orleans! Oh of course it’s AFTRA what do you think I work for dinner theater? Oh Aspen? Yeah, but I told you, that was all crossed wires, I need you to strap on your fat suit and get out there baby!” I stumbled past the machines used to cash in the winnings, seemed these were not in demand this early in the morning, and for a moment thought to trade my ticket marked $0.20 in for an actual twenty cents, but thought better, that at least this was a good souvenir of my trip to the casino in Nawlins and a reminder, again, not to enter these places unless accompanied by the Oceans Eleven team or James Bond, or a suicide bomber.
And then the other day I bought two Powermegascratchoff Ball tickets. In an instant, I was out $4. But, I had a dream. I was included in the mix, I had a chance to win big, to change the world around me using nothing but money. The woman behind me held tightly a little kid wearing sports gear in one hand and with the other paid $50 for a trak phone and used the remainder of her C-Note on the lottery, which was up to $600,000,000.00 at that point.
So, why not trade in a few dollars for a dream? For the chance to win big? Gambling is perhaps the third oldest profession after whoreing and taxing. For the states involved, it is a win. They keep about %40 of the total take off the top in order to pay administrative fees with for a state like New York is about $261,000,000.00 and California $156,000,000.00 according to the National Conference of State Legislators (2006). So of this “pot” of money, they’re already keeping some $240,000,000.00. Then there is the winners who pay taxes. About $210,000,000 to the Federal Gubberment, roughly $110,000,000.00 for the state, and perhaps another $900,000 for certain cities leaving some slob or set of slobs with $279,000,000.00 which is a lot of money. Then, if that money is taken over time, it is again taxed each year, which considering it is a shit ton of money, still is a good deal if one invested $4, or $50, or spent every penny of one’s benefit card you sold on the street in order to get cash since one cannot (yet) buy lotto tickets with such a card, nor hot food, unless that food is made to be eaten at home… which is why my local Micky D’s takes foodstamps, but only for take out.
So in about a week, the economy moved almost a billion dollars one quick pick at a time. In ghettos across the land people of scant means traded their actual money for imaginary wealth. While people of all backgrounds participate in the lottery, and at times when a jackpot is high many who not usually spend a few dollars may chip in to the office pool, the majority of gamblers are from low income areas, representing a diverse population where lotto and liqueur are sold side by side, each providing the service of escape monitored and in some way provided by our Good Government.
The lottery numbers were selected, and I did not win. A friend of mine won $4 but had spent $10, but that was about as good as the payout on my 401K so really, still no difference between investing and gambling. I assume since I checked my ticket at the same place I bought it that the lady behind me with the kid also did not win. I wondered if she was going to use that pay-as-you-go phone as a lifeline, and call someone to help get dinner for her kid. Maybe the state can use the money she gave it for a program to provide her kid food. That is, after lottery administrative fees and food program administrative fees are paid for. Which I assume won’t leave much left over from that fifty bucks.
Bring Out Your Greatful Dead
Back to the hohumdrum world. Back to listening to NPR every morning and the tide of news about the government doing this or that that thing that either erodes our rights and outrage of the day or the things that others tell us are the outrage, something small turned into a gigantic issue we all must talk about since potential mass extinction from climate change is so 1979. I turn on the radio and listen to this or that report. “We’re not running out of oil, oh no, we’re printing oil the way we print money, we’re just innovating it out of thin air like everything else we do.” We are indeed becoming a producer nation, and not just handbags and homebrew beer, we’re coming up with The Way Out of our problems, soon there will be a return to the Old Normal, to 2.5 cars in the garage or a kid in every pot, or a gun in the oven and our colours and whites can be washed together and that red thing won’t bleed all over the linen sheets making it look like we spilled an entire plate of spaghetti as we ate in bed watching The Late Show with [whoever NBC hasn't fired this month]. The world keeps on, as it always has, but why does it feel that so many people are holding their breath expecting something to happen, yet it appears we’ve entered the world of Waiting for Godot, we’re all Gub and Fug or Ned and Nel or whomever as we crouch in the brush expecting word of this or that solution to our many and growing dilemmas.
Returning to the world now means returning to a steady connection to the World Wide Interwebs. I can rest back into my routine of catching up with the Daily Show every other night – “Hahahaha, he is so right! How can no one else see this? Hahahaha” – Oh another award for Colbert? That’s great, we’re the smart ones, we can see what is going on, we just can’t do anything about it because… because… We’re not sure why, but we’re sure it has to do with Millennial Quiverists and Fifty Shades of Gray. I have returned to waiting as I eek out a living, half hoping something happens so I don’t have to fill out this or that form, follow up with this or that phone call, expecting other shoe to drop, or perhaps just waiting for nothing because this is the next day, the day after tomorrow, and it looks the same, except that my debt on one thing is 6.7%, another thing 5%, something else 12% and I need to pay those costs with what I have in order to remain in a good standing with the credit agencies so that my car insurance doesn’t go up or if I seek employment in some corporation that my job prospects won’t be squashed because I missed a payment on my TeeVee and who would hire such a boob who cannot even pay their debtors? Not that I have any additional money. Considering that costs have gone up, one would expect in a rational world that benefits would go up too, but then, those are questions that should remain unanswered, will remain unasked except by hobo-looking professors. So here the news, a few more bombs go off in the world and kill people we’ll never know, a few more laws are passed that screw down the clamps, a few more bills come in the mail. That’s not news, we need to talk about social issues that impact a select few.
It is amazing how far a car can coast in neutral. Especially when it is a flying car of the future… except that that one flew into a tree… We’re in neutral but this sucker will continue to coast and the events are but small parts of the scenery that are passing by our windscreen. The director who has their entire staff quit because they are so incompetent gets promoted. The transit leader who parks trains in a puddle is forgiven with a “everyone makes mistakes” (just 200 million dollars which is OK, because it will be Federal money and we knows how much Republocrats love Federal money). The IRS apologizes. The leadership seems to continue along no matter what, there seems to be fewer repercussions for those in charge and it is The Little People, those who Leona Helmsley said were the only ones who “paid taxes” and while that was a long time ago, few would remember, it seems that this opinion has grown, spread to infect others like the Rage Virus turning all the ruling class infected with a disease of the mind. The opinion of these people is so deranged and out of touch, enumerating the transgressions against logic and counting the vacillations, tracking the contradictions is useless. One only counts these if there is some reason. A therapist may track the times a patient slips, a doctor may itemize this or that, the hospital may charge just so much and maybe more for the same thing as the hospital across town, across the city or state. Unknown what drives our economy unknown what drives the world, and we fear that which we cannot control, so we refuse to name it, collectively, we look away.
According to the scientists, we should be dead. All of us, not just a few. Something something reached a million parts per billion and the air we breath is somewhat worse than the air the dinosaurs inhaled, which considering they’re all dead is perhaps worst than that of smoking a pack of [your brand of unfiltered here]. Seeing how… they’re all dead. However, nothing has happened, yet. Nothing that we have collectively noticed. That is. Which is OK, since I have a lot to do this weekend. I don’t need shit to end yet. I assume neither do you. We still have so much to do, even if it all is stupid.
So the Millennials or generation Y or whatever the fuck the marketing people of X-Box or Mumbai telemarketers are calling them are lazy and obsessed with the iEveryfuckings – the iThings they have been marketed their entire lives…. they want to buy them and use them all the time…. so, I guess score one for David Ogilvy or Kaplin or Yum, Inc? Generation X, the Whatevers, the Generation of fucktards who spoke only in air quotes and farted Daft Punk and retro-80s failed to change things, most didn’t even try, they weren’t given a chance to move into using air quotes in well paid jobs, but this generation was also supposed to be slackers. Shifty little Hootie and the Blowfish-listening numbnuts. Hell, they were moving in with their parents long before the kids of today even thought about it. For a slacker generation, I am not aware of any of my friends who have not been hustling in order to stay employed or otherwise making less than they expected and working twice as hard without any real savings. The generation that was told that benefits were for fools, we had to be consultants, we were Work At Will people, Freeagents(tm) who knew we’d never get just one job, but move about from one job to another as we advance or get board or tire of eating Ramon Noodles raw out of the package with just a little butter but never tire of being Life Long Learners(tn). So these generations, the kids plugged into Friendster and MySpace (kids, ask your older siblings what those are), the grunge-band clerks, these generations are overshadowed by the previous, the Baby Boomers, and that Me Generation not only eclipsed the previous, the kids born during the depression but not old enough to fight in The War, but are holding on to their place in the High Command, allowing a few wiz kids here and there to come forward, think up the new app and reap the bounty but otherwise are holding on to the draining pile of American wealth. The rest of us, we’re just something to consume 5 Hour Energy Drinks in order to work our three jobs nit together.
Perhaps we need to launch a council, those of us from these different branded generations. We cannot allow market segmentation to actually partition us. The older generation has set its sights on divide and conquer, to make us constantly returning to school until we go, ‘well, I guess my degrees are all shit and I’ll become a nurse, they need nurses,’ the Boomers ensuring an endless number of ass-wipes to wipe their actual asses. Gen X, Y and Z… It’s time we stopped fighting over Soundgarden, Pink, and Skrillex, and see if we can stop waiting, hoping, expecting change from a boner-driven, social-issue worshiping, identity-mongering, selfish generation and stop following their dead banks, poison politics, and antique divisions and battle lines drawn so many years ago. We must stop adding “gate” to a scandal, we must stop comparing every conflict to Vietnam, we must stop listening to a system that has gotten old and out of touch even if it has gotten slick and more nimble in its propaganda and social control. There are a lot of good people in every generation, there are plenty hidden in the Baby Boomers, some of the best died young, but this voting bloc, this polarized and fragmented generation must be set aside, retired as they deserve.
If we don’t rest control out of this soon to be senile Me Generation, we can look forward to another lost generation of Generation Aa, Generation Bb, or whatever comes after Z in the marketer’s handbook, as those kids fight us for the Walmart greeter jobs which by then will require a MBA. The radio reports another identity story, Fox News is made fun of by the comedians, the corporations file for tax exemption, and we slip into the future.
People Places and Things
It was good to see that old Beatles Guy is still there in the subway belting out the same Beatles songs I have heard for over a decade. Guy looks older than before, for a time he had a shocking blond Afro, other times his hair was half-shaved or some other style. I usually pass him when he is singing Love Me True, which I guess must be on heavy rotation. Street musicians are everywhere, and more of them in the summer, they cover Gotham as I have seen they abound in other cities too that attract visitors – I assume Birmingham, AL or Compton don’t have street performers. In Gotham there is a healthy mix of those who are passing through and those who are the regulars, the old guard holding down the noise of the city with their own cacophony. The old guy with the accordion who thumps out a beat using the case as a drum, sometimes he is making a horrid noise with what looks like a fiddle but sounds like six cats fucking a fox with a strap-on weasel. Still, his “tub-tub-tub saw-saw-saw tub-tub-tub” is a sign that I am at the half-way point in my trip, the transfer from one line to another. I miss the old recovering drunk who only seemed to sing “Lay Lady Lay,” which he more panted some days and heaved out on others. There was a trumpet dude, old guy, but I haven’t seen him in a while. There often is the guy in the cape, he plays the pan flutes or a guitar, I think he escaped from a larger band and went out solo because I swear I saw him with others years ago when the Peruvians were making their trek north replacing the Mexican Gauchos or attempting to, since the pan flute invasion and that fucking Condor song have removed themselves and the Mexicans are back, sheepish country men who always bring a smile to the people on the train and unlike the Peruvian bands, perform on the train car itself rather than parking themselves on the platform. There are the kids playing saws or banjos, or whatever they can get their hands on, they come and go and I can’t remember one of them clearly although some are good and all of them have CDs which is strange – I mean, who uses CDs? I miss the guy who sat in a heap with a microphone duct-taped to his head. Yes, taped on. He would mumble, strum, make small sounds that were overcome by the noise of the rails screeching, the hot sweating commuters, crying babies, farting little dogs stuffed in boxes and NPR tote-bags, the smell of piss would drown out whatever lyrics and rythem I could only assume were much, much louder in his head. His tattered amplification system looked like it worked last in 1983, and was always there, strapped to a dolly also covered in duct-tape. I wish I knew the names of some of these people, but perhaps I don’t. I don’t want to really break down the fourth wall. I believe the audience should keep their hands inside and stay put for the entire ride until it comes to a complete stop.
Down from Beatles Guy is the New York Times Published Poet Shares His Work. Sprawled out in a pile of papers, food scraps, bits of whatever and dabs of stained something the poet is sometimes asleep other times reading or writing or on rare occasion talking to someone. For years he has been in the tunnel connecting lines, but I remember years ago, when I was first in the city, he would be above ground, a little shabby table, wearing worn out suits, his small mustache somewhat groomed. He sat on crates as he does now, but then he was all about the lower quarters of Gotham, selling poems as he does today, but then he was more of an institution – often a table near the withered “animal rights” lady who looked like a burned out match, if matches did heron. I wonder if the animals ever took to a table and raised money for her, and I can only assume she dried up completely and blew away, but not before finding the lost kittens of the city and hording them somewhere in the Bronx. I did not wake the poet. I am in a hurry, all the time. In the years I have never interacted with this guy. I believe my ex-wife said that years before she had interacted and then regretted it. Often the lonely people are made up of words, and in the event you brush up against a lonely person, you may tare them just a little, just enough to allow all those words to come out, to splash over the ground and stain your legs, maybe a little gets on your face and makes you puke up an equal amount of words. The panic attack of knowing the day has been wasted.
Passing by the New York Times Published Poet Shares His Work, the walls of the tunnel are covered in his work, none of which I have ever read. I should, perhaps I could have written something clever about his work, maybe even quoted it to fill up space or allow New York Times Published Poet Shares His Work some greater recognition so he could add “On YouTube and Mentioned in blog no-one reads on WordPress” to his list of signs. I drop down to my connecting train. I remember this old woman who would work the crowd on this line. It was her line for a long time. “Smile People, at least you got a place to live, I’m homeless, blah blah blah.” No matter how crowded, Smile People would still plunge into the masses of kids and commuters and beg for change. “How are you?” one woman asked, seeming glad to see her, I mean, she was an institution, but not one to interact with. “Ah, I’m alive,” she croaked. I had seen her too many times to give her change. Also I had seen her get bitchy, downright rude and that stuck in my mind, however, who she was angry with or what it was about or why it stained me against her I no longer have space in my brain to remember. Anyway, she was better than the kid on there who asks “help me please, ok fuck you then,” or the guy who would threaten to pull the emergency break “god forbid I get so sick that I have to stop the train, I don’t want to be the sick passenger, I just need a few bucks for a hot meal…” The One Armed Man selling papers wasn’t on the train today, but there in a heap… Is that a Traveler?
Son of a bitch, it is. Sitting on the bench was what appeared to be a girl, slouched over a bunch of newspapers – see, someone still reads the Village Voice after all. She seemed to be suffering from the nods, a little snot was dripping out of her nose. Dressed in complete dirt, her rucksack was on the floor along with a few scraps of cardboard and a plastic children’s backpack. Other passengers were laughing at her as she tottered over. I though it a little cruel to laugh at this Traveler, nods or not, but as I adjusted my position I noticed that she had a small cage with her and in that cage was a large white rat. And then I noticed another rat, smaller and shivering a little. Thing looked like it wasn’t long for this world. The girl came to somewhat, wiped the snot off her face, and started pretending again to be reading the paper or perhaps actually reading it, which would be strange since she sort of scrunched up the papers and would then let them go again and again. She looked up and I saw her ghastly face, the face of a ruined youth looking pasty and covered with small points of acne or track marks or meth sores. She assembled her piles and got off at the stop of the warehouse district where there seems to be a safe house, a flop house or squat, since I have seen many Travelers exit at that stop and I can only wonder that there must be a reason, some place where Rat Girl can take a bath or slip in to some dirty rags that are at least fresh dirt and maybe get the rats some food.
In a few weeks it will be unofficially Summer with the unofficial start of Summer. In the subways things don’t change much as there are no seasons in the lamp-lit chambers other than hot and cold. I still know when I see New York Times Published Poet Shares His Work that I am almost home.
Trans Amerika Express
So it has been a week since I boarded my final train back to home, the shifting set of locations I live and in some way splitting my time between city and country in order to enjoy each environment and due to responsibilities to each location too numerous to name in this space provided and I am sure better documented by the FBI, Walmart, and Lowes who I am sure track my every movement but not because I am important but because it seems we all are tracked by some software these days, and increasingly will be as our Nation turns itself into whatever it will be. Apart from bad dreams, a confusion and fatigue, and a constant worry about bills, I have had no pithy revelations yet about this experience. I cannot say to join this or that cause, to drop out of society and grow your own personal vegan burrito, or to return to school and learn STEM skills, compete with the Chinese at their own game by setting up American Laundries in their country, or learn to code and make sweet apps, like an app that wipes our ass.
The travel from Chicago to Albany, New York was enjoyable, which was surprising since I was returned to the range of the commuter and familiar topography. As the other long distance trains, a group of us more chatty folks made sure to enjoy some conversation as we left the platform of Union Station and sped into the night. The morning we awoke for the views of the western part of New York State where spring was returning, the dire city of Buffalo, NY that looks like it was bombed by the Germans, Rochester, NY former Flour Flower City, the Young Lion of the West, former home of Eastman Kodak and a number of industry that brought jobs, labour strife, and created a city the bones of which remain as grand buildings still cluster close to the rail stop. The center of New York State remains a calm landscape dotted by the usual crap we have come to think of as modern life, the KenTacoHuts, the truck stops, the shitty clusterfuckeries of the New American Landscape. Between the usual assault on the eyes, fields are tilled, waters run cleaner than they have in decades, and the locks continue to raise and lower boats, now filled with pleasure seekers and travelers as once it moved containers of dry goods and allowed for the flow of fine Cream Ale. As we enter the Albany area, again a skyline, this one marred by the Rockefeller towers, a symbol of fascism if ever anyone needed one. In the station, the first sign that I had returned to the Northeast, five police swabbed elderly people looking for signs of terror and I wondered just how much this service to humanity cost a state that seems lacking in funds for so many other institutions of Civis and a strange place to stop and search our citizens since, just from my general knowledge of tactics, a great deal more [something] could be loaded at so many other stops on the line, or driven down in a moving van. It was nice to be away in parts of the country that didn’t matter. Districts and Oblasts, Parishes and Provences, counties and townships that seem disconnected from the reality that is promoted twenty-four-seven online and in our media. Perhaps we need remove these wires that we assume connect us to the world. When information becomes septic, connectivity only provides a vector for illness.
This has indeed been an eye-opening trip. A trip that this blogger recommends as many people take as you can for the time that our rail system still exists. There is no security for the continuation of these rail lines since with the current mentality of our corporatist government a rise in rail travel may actually make the car companies, the asphalt makers, the guard rail assemblers, and truck-stop matrons and lot lizards take notice and work together to drive out this system in order to maintain Happy Motoring. There was no one thing that I saw or heard that makes me be able to give any prognosis or claim any authentic ability to see the future or make any accurate predictions, however, the sum total of the experience made me consider that indeed something will break open in the next decade. Break open or become broken, perhaps one is different from the other, but there will be some movement in our strange land as social and economic tectonic shifts occur. The nation is too big to fail, but not so connected as to remain the sort of Union we assumed had been forged at Appomattox. A global regionalism may be the shift as people set up more boundaries, draw more lines, confine movement and at the same time are connected or the liege of Somalian Pirates, South African mining companies, Chinese Communist Commissars. As I predicted in 1999 that the United States and the Soviet Union would change places, our country becoming more Stasi and the Russian Federation becoming more the wild west of early America, it may be that rather than citing every failure or stumble of the European Union, we should consider how we are becoming more of that Old Europe as Old Europe gathers itself together into a cohesive unit. We may see that rails or roads, invisible lines become clear, our drive for diversity actually creating a diverse and Balkan land.
This may not lead to a conflagration as we saw in the Civil War, but perhaps a reverse process of Bismark’s old endevour as our states drop into principalities, and it is no longer a question of Federalism and State’s Rights, but an American Soviet Central government setting up outposts in a number of semi-autonomous regions according to lines that do not exist on our current maps and to which may not appear as those old state divisions but crisscross and cut through the same land, one neighbor enjoying one kind of America while another one experiences a much different existence, perhaps that of the Townships and Favela minus the music and gritty artists. A frightening direction, but I believe that this is possible as we see a quickening erosion of individual rights and a furtherance of corporatist interests, a continued impoverishment of people who now take two or three jobs or have no employment at all in order to buy even the cheapest shit at WalKtargetmart, and more and more people saying “this cannot continue.” So many people seem to be talking about taking small steps to drop out, even if it isn’t completely. This conversation was not relegated to Brooklyn’s hipsters, New Orleans drunks, Portland’s tree-huggers, or that crazy guy on the train who lives on a boat. It seemed that apparently normal people are seeing the cracks in the system and finding a place in order to barter a little space of their own and to avoid as much of the corporate society as one can and still remain (socially) in the middle class, paying for corporate subsidies, allowing cookies to report on our brand preferences, ignoring that the government watches our browsing habits looking for signs of terror, and not joining some Freegan commune camped out in a squat in the Mistake by the Lake or the wastes of Detroit.
A darkness falls and the sun sets over a strange weather. I am safe for the moment, having paid my bills to the mortgage company, bank fees, insurance company, electric and gas monopoly, trash monopoly, water bill to the village, registration fees to the DMV, fishing license, and various other expenses as I drink the beer that I brewed myself. You need not be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. That’s what the drones buzzing outside your window are for.
The White City
Entering Chicago, this ends the wilderness journey, and put me in the place where long ago so many other set forth in the other direction in order to trade what passed in those days for the comforts of the Old East for the adventure or opportunity of the West. Whether it was land claims or gold rushes, or cows herding, or golden cow herding or whatever. For many decades Chicago launched people out into the steppes of America to either raise up their lives, or sink into madness and cabin fever, starvation and the bleak flatscape that roasts in the sun baking the hard pan soil tight as a clay pot and at night opens up the deafening starry expanse to humble all those hard scrabble pioneers of the infinitesimal specular insignificance of a single life and the futility of creation. That those people were not born out in that wild place, but moved there, step by step, mile by long mile intentionally perhaps made it harder for those who fortune did not smile upon to rest at night in either comfort or pride at their accomplishments. It is no wonder that so many turned to fundamentalism and devout rigid belief to hold on to some meaning in that open and frightening land. Savannahs we may have evolved from, but we evolved in order to escape those flat places and get somewhere more interesting.
The train passes with ease those vast expanses, good people burred under bad lands, moving beyond what the train’s bar car attendant said were the last photo ops before we just sink into the trip, and into Chicago we go returning to the industrial age’s remnants and modern issues. The girl from Montana on the track the other day wished me well, wished me good travels wherever I was going, even through I had said very little to nothing to her, but she did talk the ears off of other travelers and just sitting in the observation car I learned of her husband cheating on her with a bridesmaid, her miscarriage, her abusive rebound relationship, her working with children, trying to eek out a living in Montana, and sundry other points of her life and details unasked for, to the chagrin of the others at the table who turned gray and took on a sheen of sweat and grease slowly having the pores of their faces clogged by her stories. Upon her leaving the table they looked at each other… the girl at the one side of the table admitted to the others, “she gave me her email…” to which they all looked on in horror… “She’s a little much,” the other girl said, to which they agreed in a few nonverbal mannerisms that no, they would not friend her on the book of face. This group were perhaps the same age as that Montana Girl yet unversed in those slings and arrows that life can bring you once you leave behind college and graduate school and life gets messy.
We entered Chicago Union Station and the heat of the city that had just unlocked from the season of ice yet the old station is now the playground of the wealthy, an event center rented out for this or that award. This afternoon’s circle jerk is the Spire Awards which I can only assume are for Leadership or Leadership, or Leadership, which are qualities that the ruling class aspires to, evaluates, reflects upon their “soul” in order to see a sign of Leadership the way Puritans examined their lives for evidence of being their being Ordained or Mormons evaluated their being Chosen, or Marty, that kid who beat you up for your lunch money viewed you as a his Manifest Destiny. The reminder of Union Station is a series of claustrophobia-inducing chambers that funnel the poor people into pens in order to be loaded up on trains as cattle were once unloaded. Very disappointing considering Portland’s grand edifice, L.A.’s anomaly of beauty in an ocean of taint, Tucson’s little station, and even New Orleans Amshack was at least efficient and open. Not for Chicago, it has been Penn-Stationafied, an assault on the traveling public by a class of people who would not admit to hating poor people, but just can’t understand why anyone would want to spend money on them. True, many of the other station stops were dilapidated shanties, newly constructed boxes out in the middle of nowhere like Minneapolis which also abandoned or blew the shit out of or otherwise post modern deconstructed and opted for a tin box under the freeway out in the middle of fuckall, which, considering the rest of Minneapolis perhaps fuckall is what they make out there. I thought the Prairie Home Companion, the radio variety show that oozes cutsie folkie came from this city, this part of the land, but there is nothing quaint or olde timie about this city. Buffalo, NY also had abandoned its grand terminal in favor for allowing that grand building to rot and instead using a tool shed in its place. Considering the assault on rail transportation in this Nation, it is not surprising and I assume we all need to be glad, if not grateful that we rail passengers are given anything at all, and anything better than a bus terminal, which often serves as an auxiliary mental health hospice (in Chicago the news was reporting on hospitals giving mentally ill patients a one way ticket on Greyhound to points not-Chicago).
In the news today is another potential blow to rail service in Amerika. Federal dollars are being cut to rural lines or those deemed “not profitable.” Meanwhile, in Super Bizzaro World, the highways are funded and paved with unlimited tax money, subsidizing the auto industry, the gas industry and the “Geography of Nowhere.” It would be a shame if Ford and Toyota et. al. had to pay for the $600 billion deficit that the gas tax and tolls don’t cover to build the bridges and turn our four lane highways into eight lane highways. Maybe we should not allow Big Government to address these costs, I mean they can’t do that effectively, or efficiently. We could pass them on to the Corporations, but they, like Apple has shown just this week, don’t believe in paying for their true costs let alone stupid taxes. I guess we could pass the costs on to the consumer. If we did, then the market would dictate and the forces of the market adjust as-needed. With these costs associated, a car could cost $150,000 each. Then in order to drive the user would have to pay all fees associated, not just a toll every now and then. Want to drive on a paved road, you have to pay for each paved mile. Perhaps we could be like the Third World and only pave roads paid for in tolls – as I experienced in several countries – so on top of the $150,000 you pay for a Nissan Sentra, you have to pay a $175 toll to cross a bridge. How’s that 32 MPG treating you now? Perhaps rather than taking a car, maybe fly, especially out of a regional airport, since not everyone can live in a city, some people want Chemlawns for their kids to play in or don’t want to see a neighbor in any direction at any time for any reason, unless they need medical assistance. We can un-fund the airliner industry and let them pay for themselves. The air industry would have to add on about $4000 per ticket price for these regional airports, which would really put a kink in Expedia and other services. “Oh, yes, the ticket is $350 but the fee associated with the repeal of 1978 Essential Services Act is $3700 buddy. Yeah, I’m taking to you Mr./Ms. Limited Gubberment living out in the middle of no-where.”
Ah yes, but the market will take care of itself, oh yes, it’s all the regulations. The rail system should be allowed to fail, be divided up and sold as scrap. The mile of track that we have is about half of what we had a century ago. True, if we add in the redundant lines, the competing lines serving the same cities, the spurs built to travel to a certain factory (kids, factories were places Americans made shit, like what the Chinese do today for us), or in order to reach a mine or other place of temporary resource (I saw this in Canada where I traveled to an area with an abandoned mine and then three years later the mine was again being used and there was a brand new rail track going there for hauling rocks) there is some waste and perhaps we need not restore every rail mile. However, it should be seen as a matter of national security issue, the right to movement within our land, that we not only preserve what we have left in rail transport, but work to restore and renovate what we will lose to age and neglect and to bring some lines up to current and future potential.
I am not an engineer, a trained designer, I know nothing of the tinsel strength or anything or the load of such-and-such a design, but I know when something is rusted through. And a great deal of what I saw out the window appeared quite rusty. The cars on Amtrak are not bad, but they are mostly renovated numbers that have been in service for some time either originally built in the 1970s and refurbished or as-is from the 1990s. The double-decker is knows as the Superliner. This Superliner is unique to the western lands since in a good majority of the old east the bridges or other obstructions don’t allow for this type of car to travel or perhaps I just invented that reason, but it makes sense to me. Whatever the reason it is unfortunate, not so much because the cabin design is that different from regular trains, as the variations are very slight between those trains and the more typical commuter-style, but because of the observation car is part of this configuration and were this in place in much of the Northeast it would be a very different experience. Also, unlike the dining cars of the Northeastern Corridor with snack service pushed over to one side of the car as it has been for over a century, the Superliner has a snack bar on the first floor with tables and then upstairs a mixture of tables and chairs allowing one to take full advantage of the floor to ceiling windows, the upper windows allowing for view of the sky and giving more of a panorama as we race down the tracks… or crawl, as the case may be. And… I spent too much time in the observation car, and perhaps more than my budget in the snack bar, considering the increased mark up and the fact that nationwide, Amtrack sells the exact same thing for the exact same price in exactly the same way. Which… is somewhat like the airliner food, and in general, the state of travel for many of us who pull off at Exit 34 and go to a McDonald’s and order the exact same thing we had 500 miles ago, and get it exactly the same size, tasting exactly as it does the world over.
The news on the TeeVee in the station is about this or that suspect in the shooting of some kid in Chicago, bombing suspect, potential kid planning to travel overseas with a few bucks in his pocket and a dream of jehad , fires starting way before “fire season,” and sundry other insanities of our current world. The group of us that lived together for a few days now become strangers again, baggage and belongings, talking on cell phones, rubbing tired eyes and staggering just a little, and we march down the platform and into the city to find whatever it is that we have come here for.
Screed is Good
Now having landed in the Windy City, it seems that I have traded the steppes of America for the same grids and plans and sundry buildings of the Old Empire, the Central City of Amerika with its many glass houses, and those older buildings build in a time when limestone and old growth forest were cheap as was the Polish immigrants who toiled in order to build this city. Chicago has been built and torn down as many times as any American city, but today it stand larger than ever, a mirror to New York City save that when the bell rings, those hordes of workers flee the city in one direction. The streets are large, wide and open for the cars, the sidewalks for the most part devoid of trees, and the buildings all variations on the square tower and glass, or some grand edifice of the past yet to be turned into a parking lot. Chicago, the Moscow of the Midwest, the Red Star on the map from whence all lines of transportation branch from, onward to Atlanta, to New Orleans, to Oakland, to Sacramento, and of course to Portland and Seattle.
I enter this city a ghost, a spent and tired soul having crossed datelines back and forth, continental divides, habitats of all wondrous creatures, and across the steppes of America, the most Model T wrecks I have ever seen being in North Dakota. This morning I was in winter. This evening I am in late spring, perhaps a taste of summer since the temperature is 80 F and all those clothes I had piled on for other station stops far too soon made me stinky and hot as I humped my bag to the hostel. A grand city, a city that is empty, a city that was our future city, before we moved further west and built others. It is the murder city, the gangster city, the place of so many legends, and at the moment a city represented in the Stanley Cup (to readers from 40 states, this is the culmination of hockey, the Canadian ice sport played with sticks and knocked out teeth). I wandered tired and strange, set upon by so many worries of the world since I must return to bills, bar-codes, and b-unemployment (ran out of alliterations, swear I’ll do better next time). I enjoyed free food at a happy hour, the noise and yelling of an old man bar, and then a final call where a random guy bought me a drink because I said he could order first. Chicago is that central city, that almost held the title of American city, but lost it somewhere, or didn’t want it, and it seems that today, no one wants that title, or New York City has that title, and few others want to further challenge that or we have given up on finding a Moscow of America, because D.C. is not it, never has, and never will, at least in the lifetimes of myself, and you, dear reader.
I am about to finish a final leg of the journey, and then must go in to reflection for a time. To ponder, to consider, to think out the things I have seen, to make meaning for myself, maybe even find something of value to others. There may be then no pithy comments, no Deep Thoughts, no Revelations after all. So many others of the chattering classes of nattering nebobs in the Twittersphere have covered over every inch of ground that there is nothing, perhaps, left to say. No profound statements, since the map has not contained the words “unknown” for a century, and will never again in the age where I can use the google to see my hostel from space, ratings from other clients, and see the very street it is on using the device my generation still calls a “phone.”
All about this nation I have texted, used the book of face, sent electronic mail… ahem… e-mail… oh, email about this nation and to friends, family, and potential employers, I have listened to my local NPR, read the Times, logged in and read the blogs I follow and of course, blogged, not in real-time, but close enough considering the screaming wilderness out the train window that over a century ago people died, ate one another, fought every inch, and I, sitting on my big fat ass, passed with all the effort of logging on to Amtrak.com, selecting this and that from the drop downs, and claiming points when I can. The oil rigs along the way pound deep into the earth, and they do so for me. Nature is raped on my behalf, and I suffer from some condition because I rage against the rapist, and then microwave up a “beef” and “potato” something I bought for $2.49 in New Orleans and have used as a MRE for the entirety of my trip in order to cut expenses. I ate perhaps eight of these things. Had I eaten on the rail, I would have perhaps spent $49 or more… Good thing there was a Family Dollar when I needed one.
And so, perhaps to keep this short in order to recover from a long leg of my journey, perhaps because the time zone I am in is kicking in and my body is still in the last one, I must close these thoughts, and sadly I have not found a central theme, a closing statement, a way to bring everything together like David Sedaris or other well-oiled story-tellers. I will think then, dream on it, and consider what I have seen, what others who take the journey may see, since travel is not to those who place pen to ink, or hands to keyboard, and no longer belongs to a select few, but currently, for the moment, in the age before it all breaks down, we can still take a few moments and get to know our land, or those lands within our reach either for pure pleasure, or to ask those old questions, how does everything fit together, and where, if anywhere, do I fit in…
Editor’s Note: I am still in Central Time, so this post meets my self-imposed deadline of Thirty Rants in Thirty Days (r).
Don’t Go Back to Wolf Point
This is a strange land, full of strange sights, and people. Between Portland and Devil Lake there is a lot of nothing. Lots of mountains at first, deep forests and high peeks, snowing in April with no appearance of spring anywhere. The wind blows across the flatscape of the remainder of Montana, then the hills and flats of North Dakota go on and on. Mountain towns have lodges or small cabins situated into the trees while as the elevation drops to the flats, the settlements are far between, a lot of abandoned shacks, perhaps where families would stay in the summer harvest before pickup trucks allowed for an easier commute to and from the fields, larger houses and farms left behind when the grandparents died and the kids had moved away. Abandoned churches, out in the middle of open space, we also passed a country school left behind by history.
I could tell when we were coming upon a reservation, the trash would be blowing all over and the town itself a heap of trailers with a few stores, lots of people loitering about considering the weather wasn’t pleasant. A reminder of the damage done by pushing people onto reservations and expecting them to thrive without support, as if ship crews were marooned on inland islands rather than out to sea. The other settlements differed from those on the reservation only in the absence in the trash blowing in the wind, the working delis, and the age and condition of the trailers.
On the train a biker-looking dude was reading the Bible. A few kids came on, the girls wearing dresses and white bonnets looking all the world as if they stumbled off of Little House on the Prairie, the boys had suspenders and bowl haircuts. Two of the kids had a kid of their own. Yes, babies having babies. But that’s the far right for you, that stuff ain’t just for the money shot, you can apparently make kids out of that too if everything is aimed in the right place. I guess the happy couple is 19 or 20 and the rest younger, unmarried kids. The small group read books looking all the world like students on a school trip, yet reading the trashy shit, a detective novel, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (wait, isn’t that atheistic?) except that later in the evening they were fast at reading the Bible, each kid taking turns minding the very quiet baby (after 30 hours with a welfare mom and her kiddies, I appreciate the quiet baby) and somehow getting to rest in the coach seats without mussing up those white bonnets that for all the world reminded me of the paper serving cups one gets when served coleslaw in a diner.
Then, the black hats got on. Amish Mafia, maybe, that’s what the TeeVee told me these people are like. One dude had a straw hat and what looked like Ray-Bans – he must be the ringleader. The women had on black bonnets and dresses, except for one in brown (are they Dominicans and one Franciscan?). This was full on Little House, the boys with beards and large black hats, the girls the colour of paste under layers of black, and an older one that I mistook at first for being a women in a hijab, which I thought would have given me bonus points in my religions on a train bingo card. Damn it. So close. We passed more old abandoned houses, even an entire town that seemed to have only three houses still lived in before moving in to oil country where the few buildings were newer, the derricks here and there and the fires from the towers releasing a faint black trail up in the sky marking the presence of our complex carbon chain civilization.
In the observation car a small group was talking about permaculture and seemed either interested in or were part of the Catholic Workers organization, a radical Catholic group that has all but died out in New York City. They were talking about service, inclusion, growing some community and the importance of rooting a community in faith first then permaculture since putting permaculture first, in the opinion of the speaker, was not sustainable since it put the focus on tinkering and not on the connections between the people and the longer issue of building ties to a land. One of the women (both less attractive than the Amishy women, why do people who eat organic food have such bad skin conditions?) was finishing her vegan burrito and gnawing on carrots and pondered the difficulty of moving about with a child, and the other one produced the child from a bundle and sat down, unclear if this was a family unit or just another form of collective childcare, but they all seemed nice enough, the baby with its wide eyes content and quiet. Maybe someone has been drugging the babies on this train, I thought to myself. I have read a bit on permaculture, and some criticism of it too, but this was the first time I had actually seen folks involved in this subculture, even if all I was doing was creepily eavesdropping.
Sprinkled among all these different types of orders, Amish, Mennonite, Catholic Workers, dudes in trucker hats reading the Bible, conservative family all wearing plaid, were different alternative orders. The dude with the ear gauges who had learned to be a bicycle mechanic in Portland, the chick with the ruin tattoos playing the miniature guitar, the girl who for some reason written across her breastbone was the legend “Well We’ll Get it Right Next Time.” Huh? The message on my body is what? Sitting next to the white-hat group were two women covered in tattoos, one with a child and this baby was not drugged into submission. The girl with the more tattoos of both of them was wearing a baby doll shirt, and from what was sticking out in some places and full on spilling out in others it seemed that she was the mother of this young child. She and her friend were sipping a little beer now and again. No harm in that, they had formula for the baby, so why not party on this rather stuffy non-party train. I didn’t want to stare, but I did want to see what kind of looks would be exchanged, if any, between the modest women of Little Woman and the women of Betty Page and what may have crossed the mind of each about the other. I assume something like:
“Wow, how sad, look at how oppressed she is.”
The men were not to be outdone. They had their tats and were drinking beer and counting down the time to the next smoke break stop on the line due to their additions. Some talked about cars, others about friends who had been shot. Outside passed more grassland, more sky, more wind, but little else to distract or entertain. Cell phone service was spotty so those with preloaded games or films took to watching them. In all, outside of the Mennonitey kids, no one was reading a book (full disclosure, neither was I).
It is interesting to see this mixture, these layers of religion sit next to one another as we pass through the upper reaches of the Bible belt. These costumes differed greatly than those of the South and the Sunset Limited where we passed through dry counties and saw tin churches rusting away in the sun. The philistines were the same, however. Tattoos mark them for the most part, but there are devout believers who still carry them. However, it was strange to see the divide up north between the pious communities and those more of this world. The kids playing cards and talking about college, playing with their iThingamajigs and talking endlessly about music, junk food, and travel, the same people I met all over the country, different only in skin ink. A world away from the carrot nibbling do-gooders, and another planet from the white or black bonnet kids sitting there reading about private eyes solving crime or Jesus on the Mount.
The Religious Right it has been said the cause of so much that is wrong with our current state of society, economy, and governmental policy. The radical Left it has been said the cause of so much that is wrong with our current state of society, economy, and governmental policy. There seems to be no lack of the devout, and those communities today I assume are growing fast since if one starts having kids at, say, 18 and doesn’t stop until one wears out, that could be 12-15 kids per female. In the less devout communities, there still could be 3-5 kiddies before they call their pastor and then call it quits. So today, the vast steppes of America are empty, but perhaps not for long. We may yet see a future where the country is divided up in some crazy way between Lubavitcher, Amish, Mennonite, Catholic Worker, Tazo, Jehovah Witnesses, Rue Paulists, Mormons, Muslims, and Scientology-ists.
Wow, I would love to see that Final Battle in the Culture Wars.
My money is on the Amish. They’re the ones the TeeVee tells me have a Mafia.
