Thoughts from a train, August 20, 2024

I want them to be better.

I want Charlottesville to be a place where people work together.

I want America to be a place where people work together.

What fuels me is a sense that it can happen and the “United” in United States of America is an aspiration. I want humanity to excel, and to do that, there must be a sense of commonwealth. Fewer fiefdoms. I don’t want to be the best. I want to be part of a happy, clean river.

I’m writing this from an Amtrak train and am ridiculously happy as a result. I love being on these trains. 

The thing is, you see, the thing was, you see...

What next?

I often wonder if I can really go through with continuing to be a journalist in a country where everyone seems to hate each other. The past eight years look different now that we know what the next four will be.

Where would I go? What would I be running from? 

I don't know. So I'll just continue to live a life that is disappearing every day. 

Not tonight, seitan!

In years gone by, I would be ready to report in real-time.

These days the world has moved on. 

I yelled at someone today in a crosswalk as they crossed against the light. I do not feel good about this, but they were in the wrong. I asserted what I wanted to say, and they told me to fuck off. 

Today I wrote about people asking for improvements to the pedestrian infrastructure two blocks to the east at that same location. A woman died in a crosswalk there while crossing and there were no lights at all.

That was not the case where I was trying to get through.

I wasn't inconvenienced. I just think it's important for people to follow signs if they are in a place that tells them it is not safe to cross.

I feel bad about yelling. And on this Election Night that's what I hope to remember. I feel like I need to be able to describe situations in my professional life and also be able to express concern when someone is breaking a rule.

Wanting rules doesn't mean you want to be a fascist.

I want order. I want people to realize they are in a system. Systems need some basic idea that there is a way things are to be done. 

In this case, I wanted someone to know if they cross a street that has a signal saying "don't cross" they might get hurt or killed. It's on my brain. I want people to survive. That means you pay attention to some of the rules and don't decide you get to flaunt one of them in the name of your own story.

And now I worry that maybe this person will report the transaction. That would be fine. I already acknowledge I maybe should not have said anything, but it was dusk and I see people driving very aggressively all of the time. I was not aggressive, though I did respond in kind to the fuck you.

I'm both a person who writes about public infrastructure and someone who coexists within it. 

It happened and I hope to meet the person to try to explain. It was not just that moment. Each of us is an intelligence with memory co-existing in the same space. 

No matter what happens, I'm going to keep trying to flesh out all I can.  

Tales from dreamland during the time warp

Part one

I woke up during the time warp after sleeping for about four hours. I had to exist for a little while on this plane.

In the dream, I was with a partner and the relationship wasn't going well. We were in a parking garage that had been a train. I've been there before in other phantom moments.

Something was happening and no one was getting out of the garage. The cars were all lined up and it didn't seem we'd be moving any time soon.

The partner and I weren't communicating with each other. Something was tense, but I didn't want to pay attention. I had realized that we had arrived in a city I like, and it was possible to get out and go have a drink somewhere.

The partner didn't want to go, and neither did anyone when I announced it to everyone. I went down the stairs and arrived in a spot outside this bar I know I've seen in my dreams before.

I had a moment where I felt such joy I was there, by myself, able to experience life on my terms. I was in a crowded city at night and there was life everywhere.

Nothing else really happened. I remember just feeling very happy and somehow by typing it out I know I'm creating a pathway back to that moment that didn't exist yet will be with me as I continue to draw air and adjust to the winter hours of waking up in the middle of the night just to feel alive on my terms.

(I did chores while listening to podcasts, laughing, grateful that this is the life I have and not some other assemblage of moments)

Part two

Sean Tubbs

I had three other major dreams in the night, though they've faded.

But after this one, I had a hard time getting back to sleep. My mind wanted to be consuming information and responding accordingly. I played keyboard for about 30 minutes as I spent a lot of yesterday setting it up in a place I can record.

Sometimes I begin to dream as I am awake and my mind gets confused about what's real and I snap out of it. This is known as a hypnic jerk, which sort of describes me quite well. But this reflex seeks to prevent me from falling into a mind trap of something that may not be real.

At some point, I made it past a hypnic jerk and ended up in a room with some friends. Or the friends showed up in my room and I was there, desperately trying to sleep. So I tried to force myself, and imagined that the way to sleep was to fall through reality. And I kept trying, but their voices kept pulling me back.

Finally, though, I peeled away and fell into an underwater cave, and I had to swim toward the light, maybe ten feet. I took a deep breath and then realized I didn't have to because I knew it wasn't real.

I passed into an empty room with a large window facing either the sunrise or the sunset. I didn't know which because I had just arrived. I opened up the window and passed into a small town somewhere, and proceeded to spend the next little while exploring, trying to talk to people, taking in so many details that have now faded. I was aware I was a being of power and I tested this by trying to control whatever I could. I made people fly. I shot lasers out my hands.

All the while, I could hear my friends through the underwater cave, taunting me. I didn't want to pay attention, so I tried to hold on to whatever this new reality was. I knew it wouldn't last, but i wanted to test out the parameters of it all. At one point I attempted to fight a pirate, but he wasn't going to mess with me.

I began to worry that maybe the voices were concerned. Maybe I was dying in the real world. Maybe I should just check and see what happened.

So I took one rise into the sky, a power I love having in my dreams. I could see on the horizon a large city beckoning me, but I had to go back to that little room.

So I laid on the ground and repeated the same process of trying to will myself to fall into the next world. And it was easy to wind back up in the underwater cave, so I swam through and as I got closer to the people in the room and the reality of my existence, I became aware of a red liquid all over the place and decided... I don't want to go back there.

And I woke up.

Reordering things for better stacking

I changed the style of the blog again to make it easier to read. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but when I'm no longer breathing this will be a collection of who I was. Maybe I might want some people to know who I am when I'm still alive?

I don't feel alive a lot of the time anymore. This is because all I do is work, because that's the only way I can go through existence without screwing up too much. It remains to be seen whether I should have made it easier to tip toe through the last nineteen years of my life. 

The now has always been the thing

The 29 Capitol Limited to Chicago speeds through what I imagine are the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Once we stop there, there will be several hours remaining. I could travel this pathway every day working, soaking up all of the energy of the millions of people in communities I've passed through already.

The laptop battery is running out and I get the notice there isn't much time now and I want to try to get something in about this feeling I have about being taken across the country on rails countless other people have built over the years. I have spent the time so far working, working as hard as I can to get information out that I ant to get out.

I look up and we're going past a recycling center where so much life screams out to me, all of those cars people rode in, all of those individuals experiencing the same thing I can experience, just differently on account of me having my own origin.

But a same origin! I am heading back to Illinois for the second time in a year! I am fighting upstream against a pattern that makes no difference or impact on anyone who isn't me. 

At any point, the ability to write the words in this space will go away, but I will then look out the window and try my best to enjoy what I can. I want to know every single place I am heading past, want to know what comes next and how to make it all better. 

This will fade, like every other night will fade, and then I am not sure what happens except the rest of this journey and then the next one back. Until now, I will pass through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo between now and the next time.

For now, I slowly remove myself from the typing in order to hopefully rest. With so much stimuli, I wish I could keep it going but there are limitations, challenges, parameter shifts. 

Would you have it any other way? There is no choice but to comply with whatever needs to happen next. 

This hamburger is not going to eat itself. 

An access point to Charlottesville Community Engagement is now alive

I'm trying to do new things 49 months into the launch of the newsletter and I can feel the anxiety from not having someone to attend a party today. I work all of the time and would rather be alone than go to a party alone. This makes no sense, I know, but I am a human being and often times what I do makes no sense. 

In any case, now you can look at this QR code and get access to Charlottesville Community Engagement and I think I will put it on a QR code. 

In many ways I feel like I am at the beginning of this journey and I think I should continue it and find ways to get over the anger that happens occasionally. That happened in the last blog post and I'm okay with what happened afterward. I rearranged an important room and I was deliberately vague, the way I want to be as much as possible. 

Now off to do other things.