Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 5:53pm
Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 5:53pm
Six cold minutes walking to South Boston this morning; six cold minutes walking back here to South Station just now. Cold indeed, but this would feel a lot colder in October or November when my predisposition would lean back towards a much warmer baseline.
The train this afternoon is berthed at Track 1, and though the chances were high that this would be the Worcester train, I’ve brought enough clothes today to stand outside long enough to make sure. I’m probably dressed warmly enough tonight to walk home from Boston to Ashland should the emergency arise – though for now no emergency looms.
Instead my downy coat and windbreaker hang limply ahead of me on a cast aluminum hook while my gloves are wrapped into my mountaineering hat tossed in one lump onto the overhead rack at the back end of this carriage. A scarf along with several coat sleeve tentacles garnish my laptop computer screen feeling a bit like I’m sitting at the wrong end of a preposterous jellyfish.
During the winter most people do not doff their coats and hats aboard the train, at least not right away. Perhaps this is because they are not dressed for an artic expedition at either end of their railroad commutes, whereas I would melt if I didn’t get this stuff off as soon as I board the train. There is no exact solution to the cold weather. At times I may be walking fast at standard Boston pedestrian foot speed, then lingering atop a station platform in marvelous cold, and then with winter gear stowed I find myself sitting at room temperature until the carriage doors are opened to disgorge passengers and engorge the cabin with newly freezing cold outside air. So there is no ideal solution.
On the coldest days, where the air itself has an arctic high pitched clarity, some people ignore the problem altogether – determined instead to maintain fashion with no hat or scarf and nothing more for a coat than a breezy thin stylish something – as in a few cases I saw today. Perhaps they endure the few minutes of agony in the hope for preserving their look. But personally, just personally, I could hardly find anyone very attractive if I came to believe that their vanity outweighed common sense in weather this cold.
This evening, the old art deco Hancock tower shows a steady blue column up the sides of the weather beacon with a bright white cap. The meaning is lost on me, but I suppose one day I’ll think to look this up when I’m in a position to do so. For the time being let me interpret this to mean fucking cold.
For trivial answers like this it might be handy to have web access on the train, but then I realize that if I did have web access, I would never feel this free again – which is an odd thought until I think it through.
It seems to me that my crucible for writing is happening in a twilight era – a time in history just before ubiquitous internet access ties us forever to the notion of an inescapable information superhighway. Of course I can turn the computer off or chose not to access the web, but that is not the same as the freedom from the need to choose that comes when the choice is not present – when there is no choice at all, and the freedom is the freedom from needing to think about the options. For 50 minutes each way aboard the train plus my sidewalk treks I am free by default, not just by choice.
“Hi, how ‘ya doin’…” I hear from over my left shoulder, rather than the usually hollering of “Tickets!! Tickets, please!!”
I have to say that this pleasant greeting is a lot more consistent with the feeling of the train. If I were a conductor, I’m sure I’d be more of the “how ya’ doin’” style than bellowing the obvious. By his very presence we can assume that he’s here to collect tickets, so a simple friendly greeting does the job. On the other hand there is a certain mythic authority that comes from hollering “TICKETS!!”
Arghh!! Just now I’ve again somehow stumbled onto some goddamn Microsoft hotkey – turning all of my text red, underlining it, and striking out whatever I try to delete! If I ever find a way to disable all MS Word hotkeys I may write the solution in permanent ink in the corner of this screen!
After investigation – this is a ‘feature’ called ‘Track Changes’ and after ten minutes of digging through help menus I’m slowly figuring out which incantation of hot key combinations are used to reverse the curse. How this was activated in the first place remains a mystery I’m not about to solve right now. I’m just glad to unspring this trap.
Technology that tries too hard to be helpful only gets in the way, and sometimes the only solution is to toss the whole thing into a plain text editor and strip out the hidden formatting and editing histories. I also should comment while on the topic of excessive helpfulness how Word is constantly flagging my grammar and spelling. I appreciate it to some extent since about 80% of the time it’s worth another look. But sometimes I leave the text intact when I really want to say something this way. So far I haven’t added any words to the custom dictionary because I consider it a success when I can think of some word that Microsoft in its infinite wisdom did not consider worthy of their own official dictionary.
So here’s where I draw the line with impressions – I collect unbiased impressions of people as best I can until forming a healthy and well-considered opinion based on a set of genuine experiences. But for now I am not extending such courtesies to giant faceless money-grubbing bean-counting institutions!
“Ashland next”
Thank God!
If I persist like this I’m bound to sink into a truly foul mood.
