A Little Bit Shady

So. I've gotten somewhere, Seattle, to be exact.

I got off the train at 8:30 p.m. Disorienting in itself. The train, taken for 35 hours, becomes a little ecosystem to itself. In front of me were two mothers, each with two children. They got off in Oregon (Eugene and Portland, respectively). By the time they left I felt like I knew their small children better than I had known any small children, ever. I watched the kids go from beamingly ecstatic ("Hello? Hello? Hi!" over the top of the seat in front of me) to sobbing maybe four hundred times. It's the tragedy of the small child: no control and the endless possibilty of pissing people off for reasons only imperfectly understood.

The other key element of the train ecosystem is the group of rowdy guys. There is always a group of rowdy guys on the train. Back when trains still had smoking cars you could find them there. Now they're the guys clustered at the door waiting to spring off the train for a cigarette. I watched one guy, the drunkest and the strangest, recruit others into the group, giving them pot at the train stops, careening his way around. He watched each new arrival for potential, would get into confidential conversations. By the end he was wearing his sunglasses full-time, and had switched to the tank top from the tie-dye he initially sported.

I'm only scratching the surface. I had two older women who were a little lunatic and loud explain their personalities to me in terms of astrology ("I'm bipolar and I'm a Gemini and I'm going through the change of life; what do you expect?"). There was the guy who was assigned the seat next to me who was reading through a book of facts about cannabis and who told me that he had heard that the spirits go to sleep between 2 and 4 in the morning, but he thought that was bullshit because spirits don't sleep. My drooling sleep (in the sleeping bag) was surprisingly restful.

Most important of all, there was the rhythm of the travel. The first 2 hours were hell: no smoking, the anxiety of leaving my assigned seat (will the car conductor yell at me? but I don't want to sit next to this guy all night. maybe I'm just a jerk - I couldn't get over it and I couldn't leave it alone). The next 7 hours pensive. You admire the scenery, you listen to music, you start to feel like you're seeing things, learning things. Then sleep. The next morning you start to make friends. You make fun of the other people on the train. You watch the scenery, but not in the same obsessive way. You notice your own smell. Do you change your shirt? Is it even worth it at this point? And the last hour you twitch uncontrollably, ready to be somewhere.

In Seattle I veered between the expensive respectable hotels, partly to prove that I was reputable and bourgeois, partly for the pleasure of the nice hotel, and the shady hotels which seemed more fitting. I walked and walked and wished I had asked the cab driver to drop me at the nearest Best Western. In the end, I opted for the shady. Which is where I am now. The morning I left, I ran into a friend from high school on his way to his job. He was in a car, I was in flip flops. In that moment I felt my own immaturity ramming into my belly.

But, still in my unchanged shirt and flip flops, I had dinner at the bar of a restaurant near me, where I ran into a group of internationalites chosen by my government to tour our country. A Lebanese human resources consultant told me that he had been assured by a worker for Lyndon LaRouche that Dick Cheney was behind the wave of bombings in Lebanon. A Serbian journalist told me that ours was a shitty country.