Love for theater, literature forms bond between ‘old fossil’ & student
I was going to a huge gala wedding shindig for a close nephew in a swank venue in downtown LA on Amtrak’s Surfliner. Photo by Stacey Warde
By Dell Franklin
We pulled out of the San Luis Obispo Train Station promptly at 6:11 in the morning, and for a couple of hours, at least, I had a seat with a view of the California coast and nobody beside me, until we stopped in Isla Vista, a UC Santa Barbara enclave for college students, who began piling onto the train, like a mini-stampede of young people heading home for the beginning of the Veteran’s Day weekend.
In my bag were the rolled up remnants of the only semi-respectable attire left in my closet. I wore shorts, a hoodie and sneakers. I had been taking notes as I always do on trains as I studied students seeming so young as to look like children.
It seems young college students are not only disinterested in conversing with old fossils, but have grown so inept socially they wouldn’t know how.
Then a young person stashed a bag above me and, without even glancing at me, sat down and turned partially away from me, withdrew a book (Salem’s Lot) by Stephen King from a smaller bag and began reading.
I continued taking notes. I was not affronted. It seems young college students are not only disinterested in conversing with old fossils, but have grown so inept socially they wouldn’t know how. I was at first unsure whether this was a small boy or girl by the attire—baggy cargo pants, hoodie, black leather shoes, dark hair cut fairly short, large rimless glasses.
But I noticed the hands were small and white and delicate, a girl’s hands.
I continued taking notes and, since she was turned away, the notes were mostly my conjecture about her. Then I put my notebook away and we stopped in Santa Barbara where more students piled on until there was standing room only, which meant for the rest of the trip to LA, people would be standing and awaiting vacancies at the next stops to grab seats.
Somewhere between Santa Barbara and Ventura, the gal beside me put the book back in her bag and withdrew writing material and began jotting notes.
“Are you a student?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said in a soft voice, turning to me. She was pretty, her expression pleasant, but presented no sexual edge whatsoever.
“What are you studying?” I asked.
“Theater arts,” she said.
I asked her if she acted in plays and also if she was a movie buff. She said she was. I asked her if she liked Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Edward Albee, and she said she did and that she had been in a play by Tennessee Williams in school but that lately she had been captivated by the Beat Generation writers, and especially Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. I asked: Did she like “Howl” by Ginsburg? Yes! She loved it. The Beat poets were her favorites. Had she read Gary Snyder? Not yet.
I said I’d noticed her jotting notes and asked if she wrote, too, and she said that writing plays and stories and poetry was what she really wanted to do – and was doing. She then mentioned that she noticed that I was jotting notes and asked if I was a writer. I told her I was, and mentioned writing for a local online news and opinion outlet, and having a couple books out.
Somehow, we began discussing just about everything literary. Our conversation transitioned from cautious to curious to comfortable to trusting.
She had originally gone to a small prestigious theater arts college in New York City that she loved, but then the pandemic hit and she was inside for days and weeks at a time and she has ADHD. She said ADHD made her think and do crazy things. She melted down in NYC and came home broken and desperate, saw a shrink, who put her on Prozac.
“That stuff’s horrible!” I expressed.
“I was on it two months and went crazy. I actually thought I could jump off tall buildings!”
“So what happened?”
“I went off it. My mother doesn’t believe in any drugs anyway. I went to junior college in Santa Monica, where I grew up. And lived with my mother. I did two years. I got back into the theater. They have a great program at Santa Monica JC. And now I’m at UCSB.”
“How do you like Santa Barbara?”
“I love it. It’s beautiful. I love where I live. I’ve made a lot of good friends.”
A lot was divulged, all on her part, about her mother, who is a divorcee and frustrated ex-hippie artist and lifelong CPA. Her father? Very little. In about an hour, I heard her life story—so far. She was a thoughtful, sweet, sensitive young person, probably around 21, who had nevertheless struggled, but was doing better; yet I wondered about her future, as I know nothing of ADHD and what it does to people in the world in which we currently dwell.
All this trauma kind of stuff is new to me. Did not exist in my youth as a teenager or college student or young soldier in the Army, before there was PTSD. Looking back, it seemed all of us were somewhat “fucked up” one way or the other, but we just plowed ahead, did a lot of boozing, survived as best we could.
When we arrived at the magnificent Union Station in LA, we said our goodbyes and finally asked each other’s name.
“I’m Shel,” she said.
“Oh, like Shelly…?”
A shake of the head, and a firm, “No, Sheldon.”
I was not surprised. I don’t understand much of what’s taking place these days, but one couldn’t find a more pleasant and stimulating encounter on a train than this young person–whoever you are.
Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif. The Surfliner leaves for San Diego from the San Luis Obispo Train Station, just minutes away, first thing in the morning every day
The land we are burrowing through is the land of the forgotten. I have never observed such an amazing amount of junk along the edges of towns. Photo by Stacey Warde
By Dell Franklin
We are rolling along, through the high desert, headed for Denver on my second day on the California Zephyr and words cannot describe how soothing it is to sit in the observation coach watching the country flow by – clickety-clack, clickety-clack – a sort of mesmerizing effect unrivaled for whatever ails a human being: restlessness, boredom, a mind-deadening rut bordering on depression….
The world is reawakening before me, like a flower blooming. It is all the same yet different. I am surrounded by people who eschew normal modes of transportation, and savor the train.
The land we are burrowing through is the land of the forgotten. We are in the middle of Nowheresville, approaching Grand Junction, Colorado, and I have never observed such an amazing amount of junk along the edges of towns, piles and piles of steel and ancient rusted debris, wind blasted tractors, various farm equipment and cars, adobe huts in ruins, long faltered prefabs and trailers, mangled furniture of every type, on and on until we are in Grand Junction.
Slowing down, we pass through dilapidated outskirts of broken fencing and small square nondescript homes with old dusty pickups in back, and into the drab horizontal sprawl of Pilot Gas, John Deere yard and building, Steel Supply, Red Roof, Conoco Station, Tractor Supply, Outback, Dairy Queen, Mesa Mall, a bowling alley, Hobby Lobby, Walmart, etc., etc.
And, finally, a small dusty train station.
I think to myself, this place has to be a cultural wasteland in which I’d be bored to tears. What do they do around here, and in the surrounding mini-bergs? I envision scowling MAGA Boomers—instead of the more sophisticated Wall Gang in Cayucos of educators, entrepreneurs, artists, a lawyer—ensconced in coffee shops, clad in plaid flannel shirts, ball caps, and baggy Levi’s hitched up over proud pot bellies by suspenders.
What are they talking about? Trump. What else is there in this isolated desolation? He came into their lives in 2015 and has been there for them ever since on their TVs, which have to be on Fox News night after night, nonstop—a jolt of joy, excitement and reaffirmation as their charismatic idol sticks it to the woke, kale-munching coastal elites, those promoting queers and commies and minority mooches and immigrant parasites from shit-hole countries, and wanting their fucking guns!
Every night an anticipation of genuine, enthralling reality TV, and not those goddamn Beverly Hills and New York housewife bitches throwing food and expensive wine at each other while their rich, entitled husbands cower in fear of a lucrative divorce payoff.
Vote for Trump? Hell yes! Things were so exciting when HE was in the sham of a White House goosing and infuriating the precious pussy libs on a daily basis, standing up for real men, the cops and the soldiers, the hunters and miners, by God, and never appeasing those academic mollycoddles in their ivory towers!
Oh, I could “feel” it as I stood outside, among other passengers in Grand Junction, savoring a Haagen Daz bar after visiting a small grocery during a half-hour wait. And, truly, I relished what I felt. Why would or should those who live here and work the kind of jobs available, and face the kind of stifling boredom they do, feel any other way, especially when the wife mistakenly turns on MSNBC or, God help them, Trump’s mortal enemy, CNN?
“TURN THAT SHIT OFF, WOMAN!”
Back on the train, rolling out of GJ, I observed a man whom I was sure was Chinese, dashing back and forth across seats from window to window, snapping photo after photo with his phone. Everybody but me—no cell phone—was doing the same, but this smiling man was the swiftest, and I complimented him on his agility and prowess during a lull and asked to view his photos. He laughed and showed me a long reel of beautiful pics, and we began talking.
He’d been a Taiwanese immigrant, now a US citizen. He came to the states in his teens, joined the Army, got into intelligence, earned a college degree, retired after 20 years as a major, and now works in Washington, D.C., in tech. He seemed happier than anybody I’d ever known. His wife, also Taiwanese, smiled and waved. He was intelligent and astute. Itching to inform him of what I “felt” about Grand Junction and the immense flat lands, he listened intently and nodded.
Finally, when I ended my little observation, he said, “Sometimes, my friend, a man can walk down the street and something will come down from the sky and hit him in the head and kill him.” He looked into me, still smiling, as if he was my friend. “Enjoy yourself while you can. Life is good.”
We talked for over an hour, until we hit the Rockies–where the libs populate wholesome ski resorts with gourmet restaurants and health food stores–and my new friend resumed his frantic photo taking.
Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he makes time for the Wall Gang, some of whom might be considered “coastal elites.” He is the author of “Life on the Mississippi, 1969” and of the forthcoming book, “The Ballplayer’s Son,” due out in September. Dell is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice.
As I changed my wet outer garments into something dry, the conductor announced that the train isn’t exactly weather proof, there may be some seats that are wet, due to leaks.
Searching for a home during a global pandemic
By Stacey Warde
I woke up at 4:45 a.m. to catch a six o’clock train, Amtrak’s Surfliner, in San Luis Obispo to Santa Ana. I slept fitfully in a Motel 6 not far from the station.
Had I stayed here the previous night, it would have cost me nearly $300, which I don’t have; but Sunday, after prime time, it’s only $80, which is still more than I want to pay on a fixed budget. Fortunately, good friends put me up for a night and it was great to socialize and visit them and to find love in an era where love seems lacking, when so many are holding their breath, isolating themselves as I have these past two years, waiting for the covid pandemic to end, starved for affection and a friendly, warm human embrace.
Throughout the night I could hear rainfall but it turned heavy and started dumping around 3 a.m. I got up several times to look out the window of my motel room and saw it coming down in sheets the way it does in the tropics. God, I thought, I hope there aren’t any delays or problems on the railroad tracks.
I had been worried about this supposed “bomb cyclone” forecasters had been warning about for days, a system out of Alaska that was drawing moisture up from the south, packing potential devastating rain.
I’ve been looking for a new home, essentially homeless, these past four weeks after quitting a 7-year relationship. I’ve been up to Mendocino and back to San Luis Obispo and Orange Counties several times, staying with family, friends, and in motels, hoping to find a place to land.
Meanwhile, during my travels up and down the state, I had been worried about this supposed “bomb cyclone” forecasters had been warning about for days, a system out of Alaska that was drawing moisture up from the south and packing potential devastating rain, with flash flood warnings in California’s burn areas, one of which, the Alisal Fire near Gaviota, we would be passing through on our way south. Peak rainfall, the forecast warned, would occur as we passed through the area, and debris could quite possibly muck things up.
I found a space as close to the station as possible in the long-term parking lot, and tried to wait a few minutes for the rain to lighten up before traipsing up to the train depot but the rain kept coming down hard. Finally, losing precious time, I grabbed my bags and hustled off, still a good walking distance from the station, to find cover inside the depot, when I realized that I hadn’t placed my parking pass on the dashboard of my truck. I hurried back (“goddammit!”), by this time nearly soaked, to place the pass in the window as heavy rain blasted at my back. I could feel it soaking through, my bags already glistening wet as I set them down to unlock my truck and put the parking pass where it belonged.
Inside the depot, still not quite 6 a.m., I had a moment of panic, my travel bags dripping, clothes soaked, waiting passengers milling about, shaking off the rain, some wearing masks as required to protect against Covid-19, others not, some, believe it or not, wearing flip-flops over bare feet. I hadn’t had my coffee, and I was feeling cranky, and the air itself seemed icky wet.
A young male adult, probably a Cal Poly student, stood tossing a yo-yo through the air not far from where I sat, barely missing his girlfriend’s face who was seated in front of him, watching and blinking as the yo-yo flew past her nose, and I wondered what her parents must think of the fella, whose only talent appeared to be wrapping yo-yo string around his fingers, and making the yo-yo itself twirl in loops around their daughter’s face. What a useless dick, I thought, feeling like a crotchety old man. Still, she seemed to like him.
I noticed one woman who had gone into the restroom with wet clothes and came out moments later in dry clothes. She appeared to be the only person in the room who felt comfortable and at ease. Smart woman, I thought. I’ll be doing the same thing on the train, putting on dry clothes, staying comfortable, not getting chilled.
The station master, who had been carefully monitoring the scene, came out, and from the door of his office announced, “the password to get into the restroom is 2-0-0-1.” In minutes, the train pulled up to the boarding platform and passengers gathered their damp belongings to go outside, where it was still dark, and board the train. Underneath a small covering, in the glimmering light of the station, we waited for the doors of the train to open and watched as the rain poured, splattering the ground all around us.
The biggest concern I had at that moment wasn’t the flash flood warnings given for the recent Alisal Fire near Gaviota, but my damp clothes, staying warm, and keeping my covid protection mask dry. “Ugh, a petri dish of…” I had to put it out of my mind. “What good does it do to worry? I’m going, so let’s go!” I boarded the train, feeling like a wet rat in clothes and a mask covering my face.
On board the train, as I changed my wet outer garments into something dry, the conductor announced that the train isn’t exactly weather proof, there may be some seats that are wet, due to leaks, and to “feel free to move around until you find something dry.” I found my place, the same as always, a seat with no one behind me. I could essentially relax unmolested, if I could relax.
We passed the Alisal Fire area without any problems, the blackened ground reeling against the season’s first downpour but not slipping into nearby ravines and clogging waterways or blocking the road and railroad tracks. I could barely see out of my window as the rain pelted the train. I could hear it on the roof of the car, and when I went down to the cafe car to get coffee, I spotted empty seats that were taking on water from the leaky roof.
At the Santa Barbara station, where mostly college students get on or off, the conductor announced again, “this train is not weather proof! Please find yourselves a seat that’s dry, and be careful walking around the lower deck; it’s very wet!”
Occasionally, I could hear the throaty hacking cough of a woman several seats in front of me. WTF? I hoped she’s ok and that it was only the usual morning clearing of the lungs and not something more menacing. Yet, I know there are those who will travel no matter how they feel, even during a global pandemic.
Upon our arrival in Ventura, the rain had lightened considerably but the wind blew stiff against flags that flapped furiously in dark horizontal squares against the sky, and along the tracks trees had fallen. The hacking cough continued unabated, at least until the woman got off the train. I wasn’t feeling especially charitable or friendly, and neither did other passengers appear ready to show friendly faces. I kept to myself, and did not wish to appear friendly so no one would sit next to me. I was perfectly happy to sit alone for this ride.
My mask, as always with long-time wear, was beginning to hurt my ears after several hours, but at least my clothes were dry.
This trip would not have been necessary had I stayed in the unhappy situation I’d lived in for years. Things had gotten so toxic. I try not to focus on it too much and remind myself that I need to get on with my life, and I’m still learning what that even means. “Getting on” means a willingness to risk, to be vulnerable, to find a home, to end things when so much effort goes into making an unworkable relationship work.
As we rolled into the LA station, the conductor announced that more than 100 passengers would be boarding, and that all seats must be made available. “It’s a crowded train.” Who’s gonna get the wet seats on this train that “isn’t weatherproof”? And why are so many people traveling when the risk of covid is still so great?
As more passengers boarded, complaining of how crowded the train was, I could smell the dank odor of marijuana. Someone is packing or carrying a load, I thought, someone always is. Fortunately for me, I love that smell.
As the conductor made announcements about federal regulations for wearing masks–“yesterday I removed five passengers for not wearing masks”–a young woman, probably in her 20s, on her cell phone raised her voice to be heard above the din: “I had the bruschetta…” I was having trouble hearing the conductor. What is wrong with people, I thought as I tried to listen to the conductor’s instructions, that their personal stuff, which isn’t really personal because everyone can hear them, is so much more important than the conductor giving instructions for riding the train during a global pandemic? A friend soon joined her. Neither one wore a mask.
I’ve been hearing so much about the tensions between Boomers like me–“OK, Boomer”–and younger folk like this woman, who was so rude and selfish in her tiny little world of sharing her dinner experience with everyone on the train. I didn’t understand those tensions; now I do. Basically, I realized, we’re all sojourners of a sort, looking for a place to call home. Yet, I also know that home is a state of mind, where friends and family welcome you into their arms, no matter how wet you are, or how difficult your life has been.
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Stacey Warde is editor of The Rogue Voice. Please leave comments.
A couple of guys in shirts and ties board the train in LA.
“Yeah, sure, we could probably add another million dollars in sales if she didn’t have such a volatile personality,” says one as the two organization men take seats across the aisle. “She’s a diamond in the rough. She’ll be all right.”
“You’re too soft on your people,” says his companion.
“Yeah, well….” the first starts to hem and haw, and concoct a story.
He is too soft, I think, just as his companion says. He’s probably a lousy manager, no worse than I’ve ever been. I hate managing people. I’m too soft too, like this guy who’s trying to tell a story about giving people a chance.
His companion stops him and counters: “If you create goals, with clear-cut objectives, and set a timeline….”
“I know, I know,” the other interjects, unwilling to hear what his companion has to say.
I try to listen over the rattling of the passenger car, the frequent whistle of the engineer’s signals, and announcements from the conductor over the intercom, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. It’s better, I think, that I can’t hear. It’s all bullshit any way.
My instincts tell me he’s not saying anything; he’s creating another fiction, feeding the corporate machine that will eventually eat him alive. “What a waste of time,” I think, “put on a shirt and tie so you can spend the day making up stories and kissing people’s asses.”
Time stops for me on the train. I don’t’ do business. I stop, and listen, and watch people; and daydream, and try not to pay attention to dubious talk about diamonds in the rough.
The only diamond in the rough I care about is the one who’s supposed to pick me up at the end of the line tonight. She’s not happy with me; at least she wasn’t the last time we spoke several days ago.
I’m pretty sure she wants me to move out. I’ve been gone four days and haven’t heard a word from her until this morning.
She sent an email: “I’ll pick you up tonight. Will you be buying sushi?”
For a few days, I wasn’t sure I’d have a place to call home. Maybe I don’t, I reason, but at least I’ve got a ride back from the train station. I can always find another place to live. “You fly, I’ll buy,” I wrote back.
The suits, coats thrown casually over their shoulders, jump off the train at the next station, still yakking away about money and setting timelines and goals.
I stretch back my head and arms, reaching as far back as I can with my fingertips, almost touching the panel above my head where the light and fan switches are, and take a deep breath. “Jesus Christ!” I mutter, “what a shitty fucking life those guys…”
I could argue that mine’s no better. I mean, until this morning, I wasn’t even sure that I had a home. In any case, there’s really no need to worry about that now. The train, as it runs, takes care of all my worries. What else can I do but sit back and enjoy the ride? §
Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at roguewarde@gmail.com.
Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison. Photo By Stacey Warde
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.—Pablo Neruda
by Stacey Warde
At the Camarillo Amtrak station a young blind couple, walking arm-in-arm, slide the red tips of their seeing-eye canes along the platform next to the train.
The tips of their canes make a parallel search of the ground, tapping out the echoes of potential obstacles, swinging this way and that. Between the sliding sticks the pair are joined at their elbows.
I watch them from my vantage point above, through the window where I’m sitting on Train 777, or “Triple Seven,” as the conductor says in his announcements.
They have just stepped off the train heading north and west where the sun is beginning its low descent over the Pacific Ocean.
The setting sun casts an orange glow on their faces. Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison.
I’ve never seen a blind couple as this making their way together. When I’ve observed the blind, often they have been alone, or accompanied by a service dog or friend whose vision is not impaired.
The pair turns tentatively toward the road, scouting the audibles, as a yellow cab slowly passes by, and they pause momentarily as if to hail the driver but another couple flags the car for themselves. How do they know that it is a cab? What bit of information causes them to turn at the same time to pursue what they cannot see?
They walk so closely and intimately that their bodies and minds seem as one. It’s a stunning scene. It’s touching. How did two blind intimates find each other? What brought them together? Did they meet in school? At a support group for the blind?
Their closeness, their intimate knowing and safety in being together unseats me, penetrates the armor I’ve worn to avoid the history and hurt of broken intimacies. An aching, bleeding feeling, as if something has begun to melt, washes through me, beginning inside of my chest.
My eyes well up with tears and, like the couple below, I put on a pair of dark sunglasses. I don’t want anyone to see my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know that I’m having a breakdown on the train. I want to avoid the appearance of a touched middle-aged man.
As Triple Seven pulls away from the platform, I watch the pair in a final desperate attempt to see what happens to them, and feel the cauldron of losses bubbling inside of me, streams of tears burning down my face.
Perhaps I’m romanticizing the idea of a blind love that isn’t blind at all but sees everything, knows everything, and moves in unison with the melodious voices of departing passengers, the low hum of cars in the distance, the passing of a cab, and the shared need to find a safe passage home.
Perhaps I’m a fool for thinking that such passage gains more from the company of another who is willing to share the risks and responsibilities of navigating through the darkness, guided by some other light that cannot be seen.
This coupling desire to be joined at the elbows and to walk in unison with another in a different kind of blind trust doesn’t go away easily, not even after one has passed his prime and love can seem so cruel and foolish.
“When does it stop?” I asked a friend once. “When do you stop wanting the company of a woman? When do you stop feeling like there needs to be another?”
“A great love poet,” he responded, “once said that it wasn’t until he was 70 that he realized the feminine no longer had power over him.”
It’s not merely the feminine, however, that haunts and wields power over me. Something more than charms and pleasure has broken through the walls of my resistance to love.
What moves me now is the formidable intimate knowing that is built on trust, the eagerness to hold space with another, even when there is darkness all around, the willingness to traverse obstacles despite the handicaps, to do with that one what spring does with the cherry trees.
The dark sunglasses do not hide my tears. I remove them to pat my cheeks dry with the sleeve of my jacket. Amtrak Triple Seven roars into the night and my view outside the window is blurred from blinding tears. §
A couple of guys in shirts and ties board the northbound train in LA. They reek of the corporate office with their shined winged-tip shoes, dark slacks, crisp powder-blue dress shirts, and navy blue coats slung over their shoulders in a sort of “casual” way.
“Yeah, sure, we could probably add another million dollars in sales if she didn’t have such a volatile personality,” says one as he, and then the other find their seats across the aisle. “She’s a diamond in the rough. She’ll be all right.”
“You’re too soft on your people,” says his companion, as he neatly folds his jacket and sets it aside.
“Yeah, well…” the other starts to hem and haw, and concocts a story about giving people a chance, room to grow, management by positive incentives….
He is too soft, I think, just as his companion says.
He’s probably a lousy manager, even though he tries hard, no worse than I’ve ever been, I’ll bet. He means well, but he’s lousy. I hate managing people. What can you do with someone who’s volatile? Get rid of the bitch, I think, fire her, and find someone who can sweet talk customers and bring in the million dollars. That’s what I would do but I’m not cut out for the sort of heartlessness that’s required to succeed in the business world.
I’m too soft, just like this guy who’s trying to convince himself that giving people a chance in the cold corporate world of maximizing profits, increasing production and making quicker turnarounds really makes a difference, that the guys sitting on the top floor really give a rat’s ass about giving someone, even a diamond in the rough, “a chance.”
His companion stops him mid-story and counters: “If you create goals, with clear-cut objectives, and set a timeline….”
“I know, I know,” the other interjects, annoyed but conceding the point, unwilling to hear more of what his companion is going to say, looking through the window as if planning an escape, and then attempting without success to convince his companion that a softer, more humane approach will bring out the best in this volatile sales woman.
I try to listen over the rattling of the passenger car, the frequent whistle of the train, and announcements from the conductor over the exceedingly loud intercom, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying, how he’s trying to rationalize his softness in the face of the hard and fast facts of production, the cut and dry narrative of numbers, results and annual reports, the reminder that his only purpose is to produce, to whip people into shape or send them packing.
My instincts tell me he’s not mounting much of an argument; he’s bullshitting, a storyteller, like me, buying time, trying to find a shred of the humane in the inhumane and prefab world of corporate values. What a waste of time, I think, put on a shirt and tie so you can spend your days making up stories and kissing people’s asses. I feel my throat constrict.
It can’t be good for you, this life of stifling your humanity, of living a lie. Sooner or later, if you’re not cut out for it, as I’m not, corporate life, where you have to suck up all the time to people you fear and despise, whether you want to or not, will turn you into a shell of a human being, or worse, a raging sociopath.
I’ve never been a friend of the corporation. It represents just about everything I abhor: the attempt to be original despite sameness and lack of invention or originality, save for its branding; its flowery and false rhetoric; its brutal agenda to profit no matter what; and its disregard for everything humane.
More often it’s an enemy of health and well being, killing the soul, if not the body and its environs. It’s all about the money, getting rich, or more likely making others rich. There’s nothing wrong with earning a living, even making it big, but not at the expense of turning into another heartless cog in the system and destroying everything and anyone who gets in your way.
As the next station stop approaches, the organization men grab their coats to jump off the train, continuing to discuss their million-dollar problem.
“Maybe the thing to do,” the soft one says as he heads downstairs, “is to set a timeline, like you say….”
I resign myself to the ride north, relieved, five more hours of nothing to do but watch and listen, as the commuter train makes its way closer to home, where so many people like myself have removed themselves to escape this very same screwed up system that runs LA and most of the country, the one that makes us look out the window and see nothing but dollar signs.
In San Luis Obispo, the train’s final stop, and in Cayucos, in particular, you can rest assured you’ll find outcasts, escapists and “misfits,” as mom says, people like me who don’t want to live in LA, and some who don’t belong in LA, who have had enough of the corporate life and the hyper-reality of amusement parks and shopping malls that it creates.
They move up there to escape, mom adds disapprovingly of the people in my community. They couldn’t get along in the “real” world, she says, so they found a place where they could be slackers, hermits or just plain weird. There are plenty of slackers here, I agree, misfits, hermits and weird people too, many of whom, as I, would die in the “real” world, I tell her.
Still, I argue: “There are a lot of smart, independent people here too, mom, good people who just don’t want to live in LA.”
The train picks up speed as it winds its way north and the hum of the engine and wheels overtake me and time seems to stop and there’s nothing to do but let go, relax and let Amtrak Train 777 carry me home.
Then, a flash of my own life, a jolt of panic runs through me. Another diamond in the rough, my girlfriend, who is supposed to meet me at the end of the line, who also has a volatile personality, says she will pick me up at the train station in San Luis Obispo if I buy dinner. Deal, I say, knowing that our days are numbered. I can feel it. I’ve been living my own lie, pretending that my life is just the way I want it, staying in a relationship that went bad years ago.
“I’ve found someone new,” she says. “I think he’s the one. Can you move out ASAP?”
I assure her that I can, and make the painful realization that living a lie, stifling one’s humanity isn’t limited only to the corporation. It’s a household thing too, and I’m more than eager to move out. §
Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice and lives like a hermit deep in the hills where no one can find him.
