Thursday, January 27, 2005, 8:19am
Thursday, January 27, 2005, 8:19am
It appears that Frank is running the whole train this morning – having collected tickets beyond his normal first three cars, and as the lead conductor he’d only come back this far if there were no other conductors available. A couple years ago Frank filled in several days a week for some loser who thought that showing up for work as a conductor was optional – at least until the day he no longer had that option. That’s when William – or Bill R, as his new security badge now reads – first took over this end of the train. And except for the six months when Norm held court back here, William has been the reliable fixture – at least until today.
Beneath copious snow the dead level terrain of downtown Framingham forms a continuous white plain a bit like the shallow lake that must have frozen here once. In New England there is no level ground except these sorts of places slowly filling with muck when ancient glacial ponds dried into swamps, then bogs, then meadowlands and eventually woodlands.
The truly deep lakes like Cochituate may never become meadows until after the next ice age, but shallow lakes fed by muddy streams fill more readily to make places like downtown Framingham – or downtown Ashland for that matter. I need dig down only a foot in our own yard before striking the rounded granite of the original Sudbury River basin that for a time must have rivaled the waters of the modern-day Niagara River – left behind by a glacier able to pulverize solid bedrock to a depth of at least ten feet – which is as far as we’ve ever dug. For all I know the moraine under downtown Ashland extends far deeper.
At Wellesley Square I remember the Casio digital camera I’ve brought to photograph snow-covered station stops along our way – but I’ve been writing too much to scan passing terrain enough to find interesting compositions. Making ordinary photographs brings up an internal dilemma. I don’t enjoy most for how they miss the aesthetic mark. I try to delete the worst of them right away. Yet the trouble with that plan is how I often discover really good photographs only after I can see the details and textures on a decent computer screen. So unless the exposure or lens focus is noticeably horrible – or the camera triggered by accident – I usually don’t delete anything on the fly. And then I’m stuck
Why is this really an issue? Why so pained by every deletion? Perhaps fundamentally I can’t handle the loss, especially after having lost so much into the clutches of the Old Man and his sneak-attack. I’d already lost enough before we lost Jenny to an ice storm. So what if I fill up some backwater sectors on a giant hard drive. Why should I care? Why force myself to release what does not take up any space in the real world?
It is basic human nature to hold onto many things that barely exist.
Just the opposite of yesterday lots of people have been boarding at Natick and Wellesley and now this three-seater is jammed full and I’m reduced to an awkward cross-handed typing position to get these letters onto the screen. After Wellesley Farms I see recently frigid people standing well-dressed in the aisles and clumped throughout the wheel chair areas. The ride to Back Bay should only take 15 minutes and perhaps if I can find the shift key instead of the control key I’d place text here instead of popping up useless help screens along with offers from Word to reformat the entire document.
I despise hot keys.
A familiar conductor I can’t see at all joined us at Framingham and is now hollering, “tickets please!” Briefly she emerges from the clutter of humanity and in another moment she is a mere voice once again. She works her way farther east until her voice leaves the carriage.
Video is definitely the way to record what the whole ride looks like from these windows, that is, if a clean window could ever be found. The visual information is dynamic in a way that cannot be captured very well in a self-contained image. Except for station stops where the scene is mostly static, anything worth noticing happens as the train is moving where my mind integrates passing scenes into a whole that does not exist in any one frame. In most instances a collection of moving imagery falls short of the interpretation envisioned by my mind’s eye. More to the point, I mostly fabricate a delusion of sorts where I am really visualizing an entirety out the fragments that I actually happen to see.
Such delusions are called ideas.
Mostly I let the world pass each morning while focusing on the few things that stand out – then from all of this a picture begins to form over the course of many months that is more or less the sum of these parts. Out of this I chose to paint this picture with words in order to better understand what this means to me and see how I am affected by it. If I am willing to admit the truth I will say that I openly and consciously live within a world of my own imagination, rather than seeing exactly what is out there beyond the window.
Such an idea is a danger to the notion of ideas.
I don’t absorb everything. I am selective in what I notice and deliberate in constructing my notions, ideas, and opinions. I am not necessarily rational in this process, but I do follow some sort of underlying guidelines whether from an understanding of physical laws, or how I view human nature, or perhaps more specifically – how I see myself. I notice what draws my interest – especially that which supports or challenges my worldview. I doubt I ever notice much else, or at least not very often, because my ideas evolve slowly and my gaze tends to focus on those details I find most recognizable.
As the outside world verifies its presence, my thoughts trail away. Some guy on a cell phone is making excuses for why some sort of “data warehouse” won’t be wired up so easily this morning – though I believe that both the wiring and the warehouse are figurative terms and there is no mortar, brick, timber, or even much in the way of copper wire involved.
Such are how ideas evolve – we extrapolate from the known to the new – conductors who no longer collect tickets still describe their jobs using that language. People who store data use words like library and warehouse – and we still use expression ‘shopping cart’ and ‘checkout’ to describe a purchase made via some keyboard interaction with an SQL database over the Internet.
Carriages were once drawn by driven horses, then by steam engines followed by diesel and electric locomotives. Yet we still call them carriages, even if we’ve shortened the term to “car” when describing something driven by some bored commuter not drawn by anything at all. If there are no horses or horse-like engine up ahead, what exactly is he driving?
Such self-contained cars fill the Pike this morning in a completely normal-looking scene that did not exist a half century ago.
