Friday, October 15, 2004, 6:01pm
Friday, October 15, 2004, 6:01pm
I’m feeling especially tired and unfocused this evening – and just as I write this I’ve hit some unplanned combination of keys and the last few words have vanished. I press Control-Z and they are back, but I have to be careful because if I press that control function again this editing session will go back to an even earlier state.
After most paragraphs I issue one of the more useful commands of the editor, giving it permission to fix typos and from time to time suggest improvements to my mangled syntax. Sometimes I like my own syntax so I tell the software to take a hike. Other times I acquiesce – most often when the editor inserts missing words I thought were already there!
Underway aboard the 6:05pm Worcester Express once more there is no sign of William. If he’s not here when I return from Virginia later in the month then I’ll have to conclude that he’s rotated to some new schedule – or perhaps given up the profession altogether.
I’m not yet sure about writing in this journal when I’m away. I’ll have fairly lengthy bus rides and plane flights at each end of the week, but most workdays only 10 minutes driving a rental car – hardly a railroad commute with time for contemplation and a keyboard at hand.
My colleague, James, heard the big clunk when I dropped this PC yesterday afternoon and this morning I told him the thing survived except for some bashed plastic. Among his many talents James takes care of the computers at my office, so instead of a high-five for simple survival, he shrugged.
“Still under warranty? I’ll get you a new case.”
Considering how much profit Dell derives from their warranty plans James has no qualms making sure this isn’t a free ride. With a new case just about everything in the way of hardware in this machine will have been replaced, and only the underlying consciousness of data copied from older disk drives will remain from its earlier days.
From a curving road defined only by headlights I surmise that we’re rolling under the Mass Pike overpass where the railroad runs alongside Storrow Drive and the Charles River beyond. Aboard the express train mile-on-mile progress is as fast tonight as a train is allowed to go on these tracks. And yet the darkness beyond this window is still too much to handle – like a bad dream freezing me with little apparent headway – or like an endless indoor Disney ride jostling for effect, though not quite believably.
To find an exit from this cave I imagine myself a ghost walking through the Ashland Station parking lot trudging right though a long gone wood framed nightclub where Johnny Winter once played in the 1970s. I can’t remember the name of the place and I haven’t found anything about it online. Perhaps it is now lost to the mists of time.
Along Pleasant Street a hundred feet beyond the station parking lot entrance my ghostly form continues east across the original Boston Marathon starting line. Nowadays the memory is memorialized in a billboard simply painted and half subsumed in shrubbery flagging an elegant brick walkway to nowhere slicing deeply into the woods nearly unseen thirty yards to an uncrossable millpond dam.
It’s been eighty years since the race started here and twenty-five at least since anyone’s had a beer in that old nightclub, but the spaces still exist and only the difference is the offset in time that lets me inhabit a ghostly consciousness right through the middle of it all.
