Archive – Day 3
Monday, April 12, 1993
Looking Back...
Day 3. Stalking the girls again. What a pathetic horndog.
On this day I go on and on about my self-loathing and my “dispassion”. I just want to reach back through time, slap myself silly, and tell myself to start writing about the trip.
I’ve also probably made a few enemies in Illinois.
We switched trains in Chicago, getting off the California Zephyr and hopping on the Lake Shore Limited.
It turns out those were the Rockies. That canyon was the highlight of the voyage yesterday, and not just because of her. That was the best part of the Rockies. Disappointing.
But, it’s a new morning and we have a trainful of new people to get familiar with before four o’clock today. But, we are now in the Great Plains, specifically Nebraska. Although the skies are overcast the wide-open spaces still feel uncomfortable to me. I want to feel cramped in and cozy! Not out in the middle of everything and nothing.
I haven’t found anybody to take her place yet. (Her being the girl of intrigue) But, it’s surprising how hard I have been looking for one. It seems to me that I am not satisfied with a trip unless I find an attractive girl to focus on. Everywhere I go, I search until I find one, and then I am content. Why is that?
Perhaps it is a side effect of my search for beauty. Perhaps it has become a desire for beauty, where I cannot be happy until I find it. Or it may be that I like plotting and planning, and in these cases I can plot and plan how to introduce myself to this girl.
I was just recently reminded of how unreal this trip seems to me. We’re in Iowa right now. Iowa! Yet it does not seem like it. Logically, I know my physical self is in Iowa. But my mind doesn’t function that way. I am where I am. It doesn’t matter where it is on a map, or in relation to other places, because it is where I am. Later I will be somewhere else, but still it will be where I am. Even the fact that I’m on a train I take for granted, because it is where I am. There is something wrong with that thinking. It reeks of dispassion, yet I do not know how to change or alter it. I should live for the moment, but I should enjoy it for what it is, not how it relates to me. That is the way to put the passion in; embrace things for what they are. Iowa. Home to Captain Kirk. Heart of the Great Plains. Corn and wheat.
Look at the farms. Study them. Think of what they stand for. What they represent. An honest day’s work. Earning your living. Up at dawn, raising animals so you yourself can eat them. It’s a way of life. It’s Iowa.
That’s the way to look at it. Put (classical) passion and romance into your trip. Actually look for true happiness and feel those intense emotions while the moment lasts. Appreciate the train, the people, the cars, the personality of the doors, the dining car steward. The passenger whose friend is married to one of the employees, and they didn’t know until today. Take these things, love them and embrace them before they become memories. Take opportunities as they come and run with them, squeezing every drop of happiness and then hold them as memories. Do it! Find the passion!
Dispassion! Why am I filled with so much? We are about to cross the Mississippi River. Yet I feel no excitement, no apprehension, no passion! Why? What have I become, so Vulcan-like in suppressing emotion? Help me! Change me! Fix me now! Appreciate the present, damn you! Live for it.
I have to cross a river now.
This train is so long now that we have to stop twice at each station! Once for the front and once for the rear. We have six coaches and three sleeper cars. And, from what I have seen, most of them are full. But, we are now only a few hours out of Chicago. When we get there, we have to get acquainted with an entirely new train and set of passengers.
We are now in the town where popcorn was invented. And, I don’t even remember its name due to my dispassion.
I now see out the window that its name is Galesburg, Illinois. They have plenty of room for crowing corn around here.
Illinois looks surprisingly like Northern California and the Sacramento River delta. Smog on the horizon, yellow grass, orange sunlight, you’d think that’s where we were. But still, it is Illinois, that cannot be denied.
Illinois is a damn lot of nothing. Especially this time of year, when everything should be planted. But nobody has turned their fields. They are full of weeds and dead stalks from last year’s harvest. Desolation in what should be a fertile cornucopia. Life from death, year after year. Cycling through forever. And from it comes sustenance for the very creatures whose numbers threaten areas like this. Unwittingly helping the enemy thrive. Tragic and ironic both at the same time. So goes the world.
Walking through the train, I find that it is most absent of life. Nearly everybody is involved in thought, music, or sleep. Some even can juggle the last two at once. There is very little conversation being thrown around and even less activity. Basically, our entire train is in an afternoon stupor.
I have found a few attractive girls, but none worth focusing on for longer than they are in my field of vision. The next car down smells like sour antiseptic, the dining car smells like artificial flavoring and ammonia, and the car farther down probably still smells like leather.
Most everybody is near-comatose, and I can suppose the landscape is a prime cause. The desolation is relentless. It knows no boundaries. Even the disappointing heart of the Rockies is preferable to this. The towns are beginning to run together, water tower following water tower more closely, but in between the yellow death and flat horizon persists. Every field is identical to the last, carefully planted rows of dead dry twigs. This is why they are called “Plains”.
It’s now much later, and we are on a different train — the Lakeshore Limited. Chicago was quite a dirty city — “Industrial Revulsion” I call it. But now we are on our new train, and I don’t like it. I miss the Superliners. I miss Boris the dining car steward and knowing that each car had its own personality. But mostly I miss the design and layout of the Superliners. I in my dispassion did not embrace it and now I only have memories to anguish over. The loss of the California Zephyr has also drummed up the memory of the canyon yesterday. Yesterday was the best day on the train, but as usual I did not embrace it. “You don’t know what you have until you lose it,” they say. Well, I want to know what I have when I have it. But, my dispassion stands in the way.
