Greetings and salutations!
My last dispatch concluded with me attempting to keep my sanity on a bus passing Chicago’s Trump Tower (my associate Scott wrote to note that the unfortunately-named structure had not actually previously been the Sears Tower, apologies for my first mistake of the year). Luckily the frazzled group of travelers I was among arrived intact at our lodgings, the luxurious if boring Swissotel, and I promptly flung myself into a hot shower before sinking into slumberland.
The next day I hung out in Union Station for a few hours near a ridiculously oversized American flag which covered most of a wall of that transportation hub’s Grand Concourse. I wiled away the time waiting to meet up with my chum Dmitry by reading and observing the humans around me on the long wooden benches facing the stars and stripes.
Some wacko expounded at length to two hapless teenagers about the connection between magnetic fields and cancer. It’s unlikely what he was saying would have made any more sense to me if I had been able to hear every word, but what I caught involved a description of some heroic figure who drove around the country doing something or other with copper wire to suss out cancer-causing buried materials. Not exactly ripped from the pages of Scientific American. His listeners looked like trapped animals while the mystery man declaimed at them, and as soon as he wandered away they took deep dives into their smart phone screens, the de rigger substitute for relaxation these days.
On the other side of me a guy used his phone to take tracking shots of the flag, footage that I’m sure he and his family will treasure for the rest of their lives.
I was scribbling in my Corona Time journal (named for the pandemic, not the watery beer happy hour) when Dmitry arrived. He asked if I’d had a burst of inspiration from being in proximity to Old Glory, and I proudly responded in the affirmative.
It was fun nice to catch up with Dr. D, who told me about putting together and self-publishing the two books he unleashed upon the world in the past year, All Hack and Old Style. They’re handsomely designed editions which feature Dr. D’s artwork interspersed with mostly autobiographical writing (Old Style veers into fiction, how far I couldn’t tell you). Pick one or both up at the link in the notes below or grab a copy at The Green Arcade; you’ll be a better person for having done so.
After walking around outside and yakking about books, movies, the pros and cons of going to see bands during a pandemic, I bid my friend a fond adieu so he could get to whatever the hell other confab he had lined up and went back to what I now thought of as my bench.
A few more hours of reading and spying on other humans later, I left the red, white, and blue wall for good and hoofed it a few blocks to where my old East Timor Action Network comandante Karen was waiting for me with her son Jalil. The three of us spent a nice interval driving around looking for parking, which is certainly one way to see a city. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time for a tour of Muddy Waters’s old stomping grounds on the South Side but we did manage to fit in an hour at a kid-friendly milkshake dispensary, where I came to the conclusion that Jalil is one of the cooler seven year-olds on the planet. Alas, all milkshake consumption must end, and before long I was back at the station boarding the Lakeshore Limited for parts east.
This time I piled into a coach car, which meant I would be sleeping sprawled as comfortably as possible across an upright seat instead of in one of those luxuriant horizontal bunk beds. I’d crashed sitting up on numerous previous Amtrak excursions but as I enter the realm of senior citizenship I’m a little less tolerant of rough and ready sleeping arrangements. Luckily the melatonin and generic Benadryl did their thing and I got a maintenance dose of snoozing by the time we were a few states down the line. I only hope that my positive power of example will provide hope to you budding train enthusiasts who can’t afford one of those damn sleeper cars (and don’t forget your earplugs!).
If you want to spend hours gazing out the window on a run from Oakland to New York I’d advise doing it while still west of Chicago. It’s not that there’s nothing to look at during the eastern half of the trip, but after the mega-views of the wild, wild West they’re somewhat anti-climactic. So suffice it to say that the next 20-ish hours passed without incident.
Initially I planned to end my trip at Penn Station but my old running buddy Nick the Poet insisted I would be an idiot to do so since he was having his annual rural New York barn dance hoedown near an Amtrak stop the weekend of my arrival. Gadzooks, what timing! The festivities had started the day before I exited the train, so as the cab I took from the station drove up the long driveway approaching Nick and Lily’s country retreat I spied dozens of cars here, there, and everywhere. Some guy I’d never seen before walked toward us from the barn and my oddball driver said “look, there’s your friend.” Upon closer inspection I saw that the person in question was indeed some guy I’d never seen before but I overtipped the cabbie anyway dumping my day pack and Beverly Hills Polo Club suitcase (the most exclusive luggage I could find at Community Thrift) on a nearby anthill.
Invitations to the three day bacchanal had specified mandatory full vaccination for all guests but, as I noted last time at tedious length, the Mississippi Delta Republican variant had already manifested in more than a few double-vaxxed individuals. I spotted Nick’s brother Tad, another nice guy from my Beantown days, and we were soon agreeing on the importance of continuing to wear masks inside and on public transit. But we also agreed that we could safely take a few days off freaking out about the virus since we would mostly be outdoors and the barn had a ceiling about a mile high and a gigantic front door that was wide open.
[STAY TUNED FOR THE SOON TO ARRIVE SECOND PART OF OUR EXCITING SAGA!]