Fake It til You Break It

Day Twenty-Seven, Austin

I like make believe events. Maybe I should call them happenings with a lower case “h.” Five years ago, I was living alone in Spanish Harlem and stuck in one of my most depressed ruts. I’d spend too many days hanging out on instant messenger in my apartment as my roommate Stick watched reruns of Law and Order. Somewhere around the point that my friends getting paid to chat with me had to leave their office jobs and get off-line, Stick would be ready to head to the bodega below us and pick up (his first) two sixteen ounce cans of Steel Reserve for a buck twenty-five. He’d always offer me a pair and I’d always take him up on it. Who can deny the drink with the highest alcohol content yet the lowest price in the whole bodega? After two Steel Reserves, I was drunk. Three and I was calling up ex-girlfriends. Four and I would wake up the next day to Stick asking me how the towel rack got pulled out of the wall the night before. It was a dark time.

Then one day I heard on New York One (another staple of Stick and I’s daytime television regimen) that for Opening Day of Air Tran, the monorail to JFK Airport, all rides on it would be free. With nothing else to do, I took the E out to Jamaica and boarded the free shuttle. And yes, with the exception of eavesdropping on some train nerds spout off NYC subway trivia, it was as boring as any shuttle ride to the airport normally is.
Yet I also kind of loved it. There was something about the non-event as event that gave me such a kick. Here’s this major piece of transportation that we’ve seen being built alongside rides home from the airport for years, has been a major news story with all of its delays and one death it caused during a trial run, surely taken over a handful of people’s lives, so much so that they’ve waved the five dollar fee for its inaugural day. Yet still no one gives a shit. What better to be a part of than a special something that’s really nothing? It’s sort of like hanging around a wedding and getting drunk after most everyone’s left because the groom never showed up.

Austin ended up being the perfect town to make something out of nothing (or vice-versa). Before I got there, my friend Diane originally from Texas’s capital posted on my Facebook wall a proverbial treasure hunt listing everything I should try to get done in my thirty-six hours there. Now, no big deal, right? People get these sorts of overwhelming tour guides from friends visiting their hometown all the time. Except this one was in public for all my Facebook friends to see. So in my mind, dozens of my hundred plus friends on Facebook would likely be checking in to see just how successfully I completed Diane’s missions. Of course I would fret things like, “Does following a lawmaker out of the capital to his next destination count the same as Diane’s order to check out the bar that all of the statesmen go in after work?” So I basically ran around for most of the time I was alone in Austin trying to check off everything I could that would make for the best Facebook Wall-to-Wall reply I could muster up.

I discovered my next mission for my day and a half in Austin cruising the web while riding across the state on the Texas Eagle. Friday, my day of arrival was opening day for Baghead, a big-small indie movie that was shot right in town. It actually got some press because it would be having its premiere in Austin, one of the first movies of its size to ever do that. So what if that premiere was on Thursday, the night before I arrived? Opening night is still opening night. I mean, this is the guy who tried to make a night out watching Rushmore when he realized that it was the his sixth anniversary of originally seeing it (the DVD was cracked so I drunkenly decided Say Anything would be good enough). So I dragged Becca to go see Baghead at the midnight showing even though we were both confident that we would dislike it (and pretty much didn’t).

Finally, it was a Friday. To be honest, that was the whole reason I was here. See, originally I was supposed to be in Austin Tuesday to Thursday. But when Denver was such a bust, I started figuring out reasons to rearrange the days of my trip. One of the best I would come up with was that if I spent more time in LA, it would put me in Austin on a Friday. And my main reason for going to Austin was that my friend Becca lives down there. Now last year, my birthday fell on a Friday. No big deal right…except it’s only my most favorite day of the week! No one seemed to notice that much except Becca, who celebrated it by sending me a gift card to TGI Fridays. So when I realized that I had the chance to reciprocate the sentiment by arriving in Austin on a Friday and taking Becca out with my top notch birthday surprise, I jumped at it. It seemed like magic to me.

But when I revealed my grand plan at our lunch after we met up, Becca didn’t seem as excited. Isn’t that the worst? When you have such high expectations to blow someone’s mind and they’re like, “oh.” Good thing I don’t try out for American Idol I guess. Nonetheless, I forged thru. At the very least, I knew I’d get some good Flickr photos from Fridays. And if there’s one thing Flickr has taught me, it’s that photography is more than an ample substitute for what turns out to be real life disappointment.

Mostly I think that it came down to Becca. For months last year, we used to send each other emails back and forth while we worked on Fridays about what our weekend plans were in our respective cities. At some point we’d start pretending that we were just a quick drive away from one another and begin setting make believe date plans. I guess I had hoped that somehow we would rediscover the spark and that my last extended stop on the trip would turn into an impromptu date weekend. But there was no spark. Any chemistry we had as a romance drifted away ages ago. I guess that it’s easier to make something out of nothing with events than it is with real life relationships.

Ripe for a Chicken

Day Twenty-Eight, Deep in the Heart of Texas

My friend Ben Rodgers and I were once standing on a 4 train platform at Union Square on a weekday night around midnight when one of the garbage trains passed by. Ben was staring it down pretty hard when he said to me, “One of these days I just wanna jump on those things and see where it takes me.” He was deadpan serious. Aside from permanently shaping the image I had of Ben and the role he plays in my life, it also has stuck in my head as a potential catalyst for the spirit of adventure I want to exist. So in the five years since Ben said that to me, I’ve watched as many a garbage train has passed by my platform and wondered to myself, “Is this gonna be it? Is this when I decide to leap?” But I never do. And I’m left to wonder whether I actually do have this thirst for adventure that I think I do. And if I do, then why don’t I just face the danger on the other side of that garbage train? Well if anything, this trip has taught me that if I readjust the parameters of where my search for adventures lie, then I have a better chance of finding ones that are ripe for a chicken like me.

Take Greyhound. No seriously, take Greyhound. Take it for say ten or twelve or preferably about forty hours at once. Especially if you’re running for president. I dare you take a Greyhound for twenty-four hours in order to get a better understanding of poverty in America. That’s what I had to do a few years back when my friend Ashley Moser was getting married in LA and I was broke as a skunk in Portland. A few hours in,I quickly realized what most everyone riding with me had in common: even if they could afford a plane ticket, they probably wouldn’t be allowed into our childproofed airports. At the first rest area, someone offered me crack in the men’s room. Two hours into the trip at Salem, a woman riding alone with four kids (all under three!) got on heading south to the border. No, it was not Grant’s Pass unfortunately, but Mexico.

Salem was the same Greyhound stop I had to deal with in my next interaction with Greyhound: booking a ticket to the state fair for Peter and Patty, the retarded married couple at the group home I worked at. Right in front of Peter, Patty once told me out of the blue that he had been molested at the mental hospital he used to live in. “Someone put his dick in my husband’s butt,” she put it. They both stared at me blankly as I faked being upset-slash-a cough. There’s no doubt in my mind that they wouldn’t hesitate to have the same interaction with me if I had been their seat neighbor on the Greyhound ride to Salem. You just don’t overhear those sorts of conversations at the bar during yr Delta layover in Salt Lake City.

Despite all that though, the allure of Greyhound had crossed my mind at various points on my Amtrak trip. I suppose it’s only natural to start to wonder if you can take it to the next level. Plus, a big thing in common that I shared with the  the girl I met at Sasquatch was that she takes the Greyhound across country every year to go home for the holidays. I almost started wondering if I had wasted four hundred bucks and should have bought a thirty day bus ticket for some nitty gritty traveling instead. Luckily on my next to last leg of travel, fate stepped in and answered that question for me.

After leaving Austin Saturday night, the Texas Eagle took me to San Antonio where I was scheduled to have a three hour layover before the Sunset Limited would bring me to New Orleans for my final stop of the month. However, when I checked in on the Eagle throughout Saturday afternoon, I listened to the automated message tell me that it would be arriving in Austin later and later until finally it settled in on a five hour delay. When I asked the agent how that would affect my transfer in San Antonio, they told me it was a guaranteed transfer so not to worry. What didn’t tell me that the transfer to the Sunset Limited might not be guaranteed thru the usual means, but that I should get on a special charter bus in Austin that would catch the train en route to New Orleans so that it could leave San Antonio on time. Thus when I got on the train in Austin and learned of this, they basically told me that I’d be heading to San Antonio where I’d be up shit’s creek. And by shit’s creek I mean that they’d be sending me on a sixteen hour trip to New Orleans on three Greyhound buses.

As soon as I arrived at the bus station, I encountered the guy pictured above. Except he hadn’t yet made his way to the comfy nest you see on the station floor, but was passed out on the sidewalk the foot of the front door. The last thing I heard was the driver in Baton Rouge making an announcement before the final ride to New Orleans not to have any incidents like last Sunday’s ride, specifically “if you have cologne, do not put it on at your seat and definitely do not spray it on the person next to you.” She did not want to have call both an ambulance and the police like she had done the week prior. In the hours in between, there weren’t a lot of drawn out chats about God and death nor any spontaneous dress-up dates at the Exxon rest stop.

By the time I got to New Orleans, I felt so lucky that their bus station was adjacent to the train station. Sometimes I think about immigration issues and wonder just how different life could be from the poverty back home in Mexico to the inevitable poverty they’ll face wherever they end up here (without their family) in America. But I think that I shared a little bit of that poor illegal immigrant bliss when I crossed over from the Greyhound to the Amtrak room in New Orleans.

Throughout this journey, a lot of people half-jokingly throw around Jack Kerouac’s name in relating to what I was doing. My friend LeMar put it best when he encouraged me to “do some sort of Jack Kerouac shit. Sleep in a barn one night or something.” There has been no barn. The closest I’ve come to Kerouac was an exhibit on the Beats and the letters they wrote to one another at a free museum in Austin. But maybe accepting that you might never be a rock star isn’t the same thing as to stop rocking. So I rock on in the comfort of my lounge car, with a microwaved Gardenburger I bought for three fifty and a twelve dollar half bottle of Cabernet.

Let’s Give Em Something to Talk About

Day Thirty-Five, Upper East Side

One of my guiltiest pleasures is how much I enjoy having a reputation. Thus the highlight of my ten year high school reunion was learning that not only is the Class of 98 still regularly referred to as my school’s worst class ever (alleged comment from school officials to current students: “You guys are bad–but you’re not 98 bad.) I learned this from Anthony Aulisa. He was quite upset about the accusation and did not seem especially amused by how thrilled I was at our legacy.

Growing up, I always assumed that the, “You’re the worst group we’ve ever had” phrase was just an overused adult tactic to stress just how deep the shit was that us as youths had just stepped into. I can recall hearing it in jv basketball, altar boys, summer camp, in the local newspaper (about our neighborhood gang). But hearing that teachers and principals at my high school still use it for our class ten years later, it dawned on me: what if I heard the worst group over rant not because I discovered a verbal chink in grown ups disciplinary armor but because I actually was regularly involved with the worst behaved group of kids that particular adult had ever come across.

To make Regis matters worse (and again, to me that means better), my name has apparently been singled out as a culprit in leaving us with such a reputation. You see, on the final day of school our senior year, our graduating class participated in the traditional Senior Prank Day. Chickens were released into the gymnasium, bouncy balls were sent flying down the staircase, and “Fuck the Police” was played on cassette after confiscated cassette until Dean Dan Doherty finally pulled the senior stereo plug out of the wall. But the senior prank mission I was put on by some buddies I had stumbled upon plotting in the newspaper office was a little more sinister. I was given a paper bag filled with utterly rank dead fish and encouraged to spread it around the school anywhere I saw fit. In the light bed of the faculty elevator? Check. In the art teacher’s coat pocket? Check. Buried deep in between the stacks of the library (the day before school would be shut down for a week)? Check. I once read that the way we remember people as time goes by usually breaks down to two moments: the peak event we shared with the person and the final occurrence had with them. Apparently that last deposit into the school library has left a remaining bad taste for both me and my class.

Yet I am nothing but proud of it because I enjoy being memorable and I love being Number One at almost anything. Am I a sick person or do I just have a disturbed sense of humor? I wonder sometimes.

 

 

Back Home, Yet Still on Vacation

Day Thirty-Four, Central Park

I came into the city to see Mike Birbiglia do stand-up at Central Park Summerstage. Who knew it would be sold out? (Or what is the proper term for a free show filled up to capacity?) The nice thing is that I’ve found a spot next to a barricade on the west side of the stage where a bunch of us sitting here can hear Mike almost perfectly. Less than five minutes after I sat down, a guy comes walking up the stairs to join the crowd of, what, five of us. And it turns out to be Ptolemy, an old comedy friend.

A big realization I’ve had recently is that I enjoy being on the periphery of events more than I like being thrust inside the events themselves. Out here Ptolemy could have a quaint little exchange about how it’s Mike’s birthday so they’re going out for pizza afterwards. Then as he was walking away, I asked Ptolemy how things were. He shouted from a distance that he had gotten married and held up his newly ringed finger. Then Mike told a punch line about how “peeing blood meant one of five things. Three of them are you’re dying. And the other two aren’t a trip to the Bahamas.” By the time he got to the end of it, Ptolemy was gone.

Now we’ve moved on to a musical comedian (pilot for CBS and three Comedy Central specials AND it’s his birthday yet Birbiglia hasn’t earned the headlining spot…sheesh). A gorgeous night has fallen on Central Park. And I can casually take out Slackbook the Macbook on a Friday night and carelessly blog away. I couldn’t be happier to be in New York with summer about to break.

 

 

King Dork

Yesterday was shaping up to be a dull one spent entirely on the train in Texas (dullest landscape in the west?). But then my seat got moved. I got plopped next to a guy about the same age and level of scruffiness and across from a bed-tanned blond with her seven year-old son eager to talk to everyone around her. Her name was Honey and she was a trip. It’s kind of fun sometimes to be around women who are really good at playfuly drawing attention on themselves (e.g. “you must think I’m the craziest person you’ve met on the train, don’t you?”). Honey did a lot of playful teasing of me and David, my seat neighbor quickly turned ally. She told him that he would be perfect for Beauty and the Geek (“you know what you should go on?…Now don’t be offended…Oh my God, you totally hate me right now, don’t you?”). Oh Honey. It turned out David went to Hope College, a tiny Christian college in Michigan that I happened to know cause my old Random House buddies Ben and Anne-Marie went there. I love being able to pull out cards like that when people tell me they went to a school they expect no one to know. It makes me feel like I’m friends with everyone (which, ultimately, is the goal, right?).

David’s the kind of guy that makes me feel all right about being a dork (or a nerd or a geek or whichever we are). He definitely is one of those and recently I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am too. He’s heading to China in the fall to teach English and set himself up to make some money over there. And I probably wouldn’t think of him as a dork if we hadn’t met in relation to Honey, who btw generally only dates tall, dark, and muscular guys and has to stay away from Dallas and Fort Worth so she doesn’t “get herself into trouble.” At some point, she was just doing a little bit of her ditz routine and I knew that anyone overhearing could tell that despite our dry, sarcastic responses to her, she totally had us wrapped around her finger. But then I watched David not be the least intimidated by her, teasing about seeing his underwear and calling him a traitor for going to China. He was just able to so perfectly play into her hands to make her enjoy the back and forth while still maintaining total control. Meanwhile once I let down my sarcasm and head into earnestness, the voice goes up two octaves and no one’s quite sure what to make of it. But still, somewhere along the way David having my back felt less like two geeks in the trenches up against this blond hurricane of a woman and more like three adults just playfully feeling each other out.

All in all, the two of them were a nice distraction from the sixteen year-old bending over her little brother’s PSP with junk in the trunk and just an awkward enough shape and demeanor to maybe not notice how shamefully I was lusting over her.

 

 

Returning Around

Day Twenty-One, The Southwest Chief to Los Angeles

The morning after Denver was sort of a gut check. The night before was probably the low point of my trip: cold, alone, and helpless. I scrapped my idea of sticking around town for the weekend and got on the Greyhound bus that takes you down to Raton, New Mexico. There the Southwest Chief comes in en route to Los Angeles.

When we got into Raton, the five of us who had taken the bus to the Amtrak station quickly learned that the Chief was running two hours behind schedule. So our layover would be significantly longer than we had expected. A couple of middle-aged guys traveling alone bitched to the Station Manager about being held up (amateurs). But then they eventually headed into town to sit down for breakfast at a coffee shop. I had spotted some storefronts in Raton that I wanted to take pictures of, but first I decided to sit with a couple of ladies who were relaxing and chatting while taking advantage of the free time to sunbathe.

Carol was a self-described “big gal,” probably in her late forties, heading back home to LA after a week visiting friends in Colorado Springs. She immediately drew me into the conversation, asking if I wanted to watch a DVD with her (she told me she had “only brought really good ones”). She was blunt in a very light way, telling me how my jacket caused me to remind her of Napoleon Dynamite. When I brought her a root beer, she started pouring it onto spots of the ground around her, telling all the red ants to “come enjoy the carbonated high you get off that.”  When Carol began telling me about her daughter who was a puppeteer at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater right near Aris and Ashley’s in Echo Park, I was so engaged that I started to wonder if there was something in the air inviting me to stick around LA. My plan had been to just get off for a few hours and get right on the Texas Eagle that afternoon to Austin.

Now while Carol had definitely been the driving force in our conversation as we lounged at the Raton Station, there was also a steady presence of a red-headed woman who was  a little older, probably in her sixties. Her name was Marietta and she quickly shared with us that she was heading to Flagstaff because her mother had just died there. 

There seems to be a steady presence of death amidst the passengers who ride the train. Of course some of that probably just stems from how much airfares skyrocket when you need to fly out on the spot, while Amtrak keeps its prices consistent no matter when you book yr travel. But there seems to be more to it than just the practicality. Death seems to come up an inordinate amount of the time in train conversation even when a funeral isn’t involved. Maybe a woman mentions that she’s moving from Minnesota to Montana because she needs to get away from the town where her daughter died two years ago. Or maybe an white-haired man from Wales mentions that he’s been traveling different countries by rail on a regular basis ever since he became a widower early on in the decade. I think that people who have a lot on their mind gravitate towards the catharsis that comes along with a slow trip where you watch yr surroundings whiz by passively.

I got to learn quite a bit more about Marietta on the ride to Flagstaff because we ended up getting paired next to each other as seat partners. She joked that our common shade of red that ran thru our hair would probably make people think that we were mother and son. And in some ways, she really confided in me like a son. She told me about her life as a florist, how she enjoyed the beauty of surrounding herself with flowers but felt that she limited herself in choosing a path where her artistic aspirations were left less than fulfilled. We had frank discussions about God and prayer, the immediate answers she gets from God, her aversion to darkness, and her wonder if the ways in which our world seem to be speeding ahead at a breakneck pace might have something to do with “lifting the veil between heaven and earth.” But a lot of our talk was about the event that had prompted her on this ride to begin with.

Marietta hadn’t slept in the two nights since she had learned that her mother had passed away. She finally felt comfortable to nap soon after our trip began once she could feel herself getting away from home. She related that to her grieving process when her husband had died. When I asked how long it had been since he died, she told me that it was twenty-five years ago. Then she added that he had committed suicide. She took me thru her last phone conversation with her mother where she shared that she hadn’t smoked in over three years, a feat due to Marietta’s two collapsed lungs. But she still worried that her mother suspected her to still be a smoker. Her demeanor in sharing all of this was so soft that none of it came across as shocking, let alone overly sharing in an unhealthy way. She just seemed to intuitively know that she had discovered a welcome ear.

There was only one moment when our conversation took a turn from feeling anything but matter-of-fact. Marietta turned to me seemingly out of the blue and said, “Carol’s a special person. I’m really glad that I met her.” I concurred and gathered that the two of them must have bonded more than I had realized while I broken away from them to go into Raton. Then Marietta looked me in the eye and said, “You really should stay in touch with her. She might be someone who can help you out along your way as you continue to find yourself.” Her gentleness was still there, but there was also something more pointed about this than any other topic we had covered. 

It turns out that Marietta had been concerned that Carol may have felt left out as we bonded while she had been seated several rows behind us. So I assured her that I would get Carol’s contact information before we parted ways in Los Angeles and even shared that hearing about her daughter’s puppet show was enough of an inspiration to get me to stick around LA. When I told her that Carol’s daughter was twenty-four, she raised her eyebrows. She told me that I could use someone a little younger because we both knew that it was going to be awhile before I was ready to have kids; it would be better to find a girl who could use some time herself. When Carol passed by us, I made sure to reunite the gang in order to ease Marietta’s mind about Carol feeling out of the loop. They quickly bonded again when Carol had the perfect solution to Marietta’s futile craving for a cigarette. She passed along a couple of pieces of the Nicorette gum she had packed in order to get thru some of the longer stretches of rail. Flagstaff was quickly approaching and the three of us made plans to meet up and send off Marietta along the platform.

As we prepared to pull into the station, Marietta looked out the window blankly and said, “It’s just not possible that my mother is dead.” These long trips can sure bring a lot of peace of mind. But they still can’t completely free us from what lies ahead, awaiting us at our final destinations.

Live to Tell About It

Day Twenty-Five, Los Angeles

The highlight of my day yesterday was writing postcards while laying by the Echo Park lake, occasionally stopping to take pictures of ducks who would come close to me. One post card I wrote was to my old job where I told them about all my grand plans for the night involving a crosstown jaunt to my favorite ice cream sandwich shop and an exploration of Lakers celebrations near their arena after Game Three of the NBA Finals. But instead I did neither. I hung out with friends watching the game and then met up with other friends for beers at my old bar.

I’ve had this idea for years that someday I could write a syndicated column about my day-to-day called “Life of Leisure.” But I just don’t know where I’d find the time to get it done.

Rocky Road

I had really hyped Denver up on the trip there. After arriving, I went right to Coors Field tried to score a cheap ticket to the Rockies game, but ended up buying and returning one when I realized it was already the bottom of the sixth and they wouldn’t let me bring my suitcase in. Then I decided I needed a beer, so popped into a Cheesesteak House (are cheesesteaks a national trend right now?) and pounded two PBRs. I called the two hostels in town and both were about to close for the night, but offered to stay up if I came over right then. For some reason, I decided that instead I needed to get to the Times New Viking Show asap, despite the fact that the band didn’t go on for three more hours. When I got into town, I decided the solution to all of my dilemmas of which route to go next might be to just stick around here for the weekend. Yet for some reason winging my first night in town without a set place to stay also seemed like the way to go.

I get to the show and start putting back beers at the bar. On the way to Denver, I decided that Times New Viking might totally blow me away the way Ghostland Observatory had at Sasquatch. When I got to the show, I realized two key differences: 1) seeing Ghostland came from a heads up from Jen (always a solid bet) versus Times just having a good Pitchfork review (much less reliable) and 2) a big part of the joy of witnessing Ghostland’s incredible set was having Dan next to me being equally blown away. Sitting at the bar by myself, I was not having much luck at finding a fast friend, let alone a place to stay. Unless you count the girl who had started to drink my High Life when I went outside to answer Sean Hart’s call. She bought me another one and was then mortified in embarrassment every time we crossed paths the rest of the night.

So I started to freak out. Well, maybe not freak out, but get really lonely. I started calling and texting all sorts of friends while sitting at the bar. I continued to put back a steady stream of beers. And then I got so sick of it all that I left barely halfway thru Times New Viking’s set when I decided I was bored of them.

Sean tried to give me a pep talk that not knowing where I was staying or even going in the morning meant “Your trip really begins tonight, brother.” When I whined to him about getting rejected by a girl back home, he told me that there’s no reason my mind should be back in New York at this point. And even though I knew he was right on both accounts, I was drunk and unable to turn my mind elsewhere.

To top it all off, I broke my promise to myself and called Erin just to talk. I guess today will have to be a new Day One. Am I girlcrazy or just plain crazy?

Recognizing the night (and in my mind Denver) to be a bust, I wandered toward Union Station to crash on the benches until I could take the first bus out in the morning. But it turns out they lock it up in Denver, so I was really forced now to fend for my own.

To kill time, I spent an hour hanging out with this mother and daughter both named Claudia who ran a street meat cart in the center of downtown. Claudia Sr. must have sensed that I wasn’t nearly as bad as her regular drunken fratty clientele so she offered me anything I wanted for free. Naturally I chose the biggest selection, an extra long spicy Polish sausage with the works, bacon bits included. She was incredibly sweet in letting me just linger near the cart and continuously offering me more food. Her maternal instincts must have taken over when I told her that I had no place to stay and hadn’t been eating on the train.

Eventually the loud groups of drunks that would gravitate toward her cart proved too much for me and I wandered back to Union Station to see if I could sneak in. No dice. So I sat on the bench outside, sobering up and shivering as the Polish sausage started burning away. And I knew that I had to LA.

One of the upsides of this trip has been getting a chance to appreciate just how many great friends I have all around. The downside has been facing just how afraid I am of being alone.

 

Cabin Fever

Day Nineteen, California Zephyr thru Colorado

I think that I’m getting bored by the train. I strike up some small talk with folks. But the last few legs of the trip, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I’ve also been camping out in the lower lounge car on my laptop and that no longer seems to be the hotbed for socialization the way it was with all of the folks heading west to Sasquatch on the Empire Builder a couple weeks ago. 

Last night I headed upstairs from the lounge and stumbled into a heated exchange going on between a woman resembling the former psychic Miss Cleo, two Quakers, and an alternative chick. The alternative chick was pressing the Quaker to accept that all religions were equal because they were just different means towards getting at the same thing. Shockingly he would not go along with her assertion that his belief in the Virgin Mary was essentially from the same myth as the Buddhist story of a blue elephant that sprung forth a magical being. Miss Cleo would only muddle the discussion by making tangential insertions about her belief that “all different religions have begun to unite and pray to the same god.” Finally the alternative chick became so frustrated that she blew up at the Quaker, “But how do you know that your God is the only true God and that all others aren’t?” Recognizing this as the most futile question posed in just about any religious debate I’ve heard, I packed up my bag and called it a night.

(Sadly I learned at 5am in Salt Lake City that I missed out on the next chapter of their discussion where the Quaker confessed to having no knowledge of what a dinosaur was.)

A couple of hours left until I get to Denver. As my boredom of the train itself has grown, I’ve become exceedingly excited about this stop. Possible options are catching the tail end of a Rockies game, a first Friday art walk, and seeing the indie band Times New Viking. I’ve never actually heard them, but their font of a name is enough right now to give me high hopes that they’ll do it for me tonight.

 

The New Urbanism

Riding thru Lake Tahoe towards Reno. I think I’ve had such a good time with old friends, that pretty scenery along the route has become mundane. Yesterday may have taken the cake for the trip so far. Used my friend Liz’s flickr tags to hunt down a hidden new Cafe Fancy coffee shop downtown, scored the free Giants ticket on a gorgeous day for baseball (first game of the season too), took a cable car up to the Tonga Room where I got loaded on Mai Thais as all the tourists leapt up each time the lagoon in the middle of the bar would have a fake thunderstorm (think Rainforest Cafe with character), and then had dinner with Andrew and Caroline at Nan King in Chinatown. You tell the waiter what kinds of food you’d like and then they prepare surprise dishes for you. It might have been the best Chinese I’ve had–and it was cheap too.

Tonga and Nan King were Kim recommendations. Glad I followed up on them. New York friends have taken such good care of me throughout the trip: Kristin setting me up with her friends, Jen sending me on Northwest missions, and now Kim having me relive the hotspots of her old NoCal life.

The scenic train’s all right. It’s nice to gain a command over just what the landscape is like throughout the country and know that I’ll be able to share that with anyone who cares. But the feeling I get seeing a bright teal lake from 7,000 feet above still doesn’t compare with the one I got yesterday at the ballpark when I got up close to the giant Coke bottle in the field bleachers and realized that there was a slide that ran through it. 

When I was in first grade, I got marked wrong on a religion test because I marked the statement “God makes the bridges and buildings” as TRUE. Six year-old me tried to argue that one unsuccessfully. I still stand by it.