Blog by numbers: Number in the title, call to action

You wished you had done internships.

You're glad you went to college.

Spending all this money.

Sitting on the floor with a copy of 'The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest.'

4 pack of Jello.

Wasn't the best student.

Made his way in the world.

Meta-commentary not welcome.

Hologram Johnny Damon.

You're feisty.

Vegetarianism is not the only answer.

The internet has become commercialized.

A motorist honked at me for cycling.

Matte paint jobs on cars.

PDAs went out in the 90s.

Smart cars are too small.

Wheelock's Latin and accompanying story book.

Winter trains part 3

There might have been a sense of community in the broad atrial waiting area of the station, but it was quickly drowned out by the survival instinct that emerged among comfortable people who are slightly alarmed. Lines formed quickly at the handful of fast-food/coffee places and people scarfed pizza with wary eyes trained on their neighbors, eating as a dog does: quickly and too efficiently to relish the alimentation. Sulking overcoated patrons trudged everywhere to and fro or circled shark-like for the remaining seats on the benches. Smart ones read to stave off impending madness, with ever-more erudite reading fodder glimpsed around every corner.

I was reading Tony Judt with two different frowns. Alternately I displayed my public-transit-has-forsaken-me-never-will-I-see-home-again grimace, and then my furrowed-brow-because-Tony-Judt-is-postulating-a-complex-political-idea-in-clear-and-readable-prose-and-I-am-striving-to-understand frown. I have discussed with my significant other that I ought to stop frowning when trying to understand something or flesh out a thought because the expression is frightening at close range. Maybe I'm often puzzled. I do feel the need to manifest what's going on in my head to the world at large. I furrow my rather prominent but nonetheless brow and try to work out a sentence that might express what I'm thinking.

Winter trains part 2

Our train that was set to depart at 6:25 had not physically reached the station until 6:45. The people turning and sheepishly working back through the Lowell deluge after the official boarding announcement were Newburyport commuters with a scheduled theoretical departure of 6:45. What cheek to think they would leave the station within 10 minutes of on-schedule. Their delay was heard fading as I shuffled the platform with the horde, and it gave me a vague sense of justice served. The perverse mind of the frozen delayed commuter; his misery is actively seeking company, and he condemns those who aren't foundering with him yet.

word for word

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is the 7:30 pm train to Lowell, making the following stops in West Medford, Wedgemere, Winchester Center, Anderson, Wilmington, North Billerica, and Lowell. This is the train to Lowell; if you didn't hear it, we don't go there, and it's still not too late to get off."

The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home

Trains have this certain majesty that you can't deny. They're long and sleek, though they lumber. Trains have the quality of being undeniable, too. You couldn't easily stop a train, unless it wanted to stop itself (giving the train agency here, but you understand what I mean). They represent ordered grace, militaristic in clean lines of gray and chrome. Not low and rounded like the subway cars; broad and tall, noble, with long miles to go before they'll sleep in rail yards in Woburn, Melrose, Fitchburg, and Lowell. The engine's thrum and steel wheels bumping over rails accrete into a heartbeat that the train has. Long, low, falling-away note of the horn gives finality to the journey, like the trip a president's body takes home by rail. Sometimes the train will shudder, shivering, maybe in the icy damp. We spend so much time with it, we'd hope to consider it a friend.

Yet another short post about trains

-I am the pointed sweatshirt hood of the hardscrabble Lynn youth. Slightly starched, and improbably towering, I have become an entity unto myself, shark-like and telling of dozens of seamy dives and two-room tumbledown apartments I have seen, you haven't

-I am the train tunnel into Salem—dimly lit, always nightbound. Too ramshackle for the gleaming cookie-cutter housing complex not 100 yards away

-I am the shining water at Beverly, bright expanse, unfrozen, spared by brackishness. Boats bob, ready for pleasure or lobstering. See the mirror of the sun, with an orange sheen flashing flat across the wavelets

Get a stew goin'

I love cooking, but sometimes the prospect of all those ingredients having to be put together by just me, working against time and hungry bellies, is completely daunting. Daunting enough to make you give up. This is why I always make soups or stews.

Nothing has to be timed or perfected, or cooked just so. Everything just comes together in a big, soupy mess. The soup is the most forgiving dish known to cooks, save grilled cheese. No doubt there's an art to getting the broth to taste good (or appropriate?) and getting the vegetables to have just the right bite, but what tastes better and is so consistently easy to assemble, if not soup. If not soup, then what?

I will spare you the answer. It's soup or nothing. The joy of the warm, savory broth. The satisfaction of adding some arcane ingredient which won't actually figure in the taste, but makes you feel like an expert all the same. Soup, which nourishes our bodies and contains enough salt, when done right, to pickle our organs. Soup, the signature dish of fall, the autumnal enterprise of slightly shivering city-dwellers. It does a body good.

[Also, a good part of the conception of this post was how much I like to hear my fingers clattering on the keyboard while the words simultaneously appear, marching ahead on-screen. Strunk and White advise that you should delete or heavily edit things you write for these reasons, but they were writing before the existence of blogs. So I will have my cake and post it too.]

[Brackets are so much more entertaining than parentheses]

with my ear to the ceiling

/;.


first things first, always

dream a little dream of me

shouldn't i quit it with all the rhetorical questions?

the writer

over his shoulder gleamed the radically bald and goateed visage of trent dilfer, professional yes-man former pro athlete

as preston is my editor and my witness, i will not see this post through to its logical termination

not alone by choice, by myself only because i want to be

from her to eternity

Mass Bay 153, OK to go!

pewter pot

The audacity, really, of these train advertisements is what's appalling

intention

fatwa

it has none

lackluster

Mr. B— felt deep in his bones that Contador was a coward and Schleck had been wronged. His mind could never change on this point; it was as a closed book. This was his strength and greatest weakness: consistency.

....could only fumble at the expression "God helps them who help themselves."

cars shark-like, marauding more than driving...

à bientôt

Moving is done. I was a little sad to leave that apartment, because I had moments of great joy there, lots of good memories. It will have a place in my heart going forward. Now the relief of being done moving will settle in, and I can move on to new targets for my ravenous pastime of needless worry. I'm half kidding here, but you get the point. It's nice to not have to think about moving anymore. There's a new job ahead, and a new place, and new friends, but I'll miss the way I lived this last year, it was fun. Good-by, Allston, see you around.

[note: I won't miss the Green Line, the noise from the bars and the bar-goers, the shoddy windows in my place, the disgusting floors, or the sirens on weekend nights]

non sequitir thoughts on "King of Kong"

I was struck by Billy Mitchell saying early in the documentary that he once had someone draw an analogy for him. What kind of person doesn't even draw their own analogies, I asked myself. The analogy itself was also less than stellar. It should have been obvious then that he was crazy, but I gave him too much credit for having a family. I allowed myself the thought that the director of the documentary might be manipulating me, but it still seemed obvious that Steve Weibe was the better man. It did give me pause to wonder, however, why he wanted to be involved in competitive video gaming so much, when he had so much aside from that world, and the people in it were so petty and sort of small.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

The car rocking forward and back in the driveway last night.
The cycle screaming through the Esplanade this morning (back on the old racing wheel).
The trope in literature about how mournful a train whistle always sounds.
How nervous he was to see her, even after they had contracted a certain intimacy.
The almost infantile fears people have when others leave; That which is not here now may be gone forever.
How easy it is to talk about trust and how very hard it is to practice it.
If you're a train conductor you can't be embarrassed by the sound of your own voice.
The graffiti read: "Sorry Chris". A farewell.
The look of amused mock-awe and surprise on her face when she is presented with something.

Purported Russian proverb

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory


but I've also heard


Don't divide the skin of the bear before it's killed

those Russians and their beets and their clever proverbs

When did Scott Weiland show up? How long’s he stickin’ around?

Michelob Ultra: the beer for people who like holding beer bottles, looking cool, and ingesting flavorless liquids, but don't like drinking beer

Try one today

With bland beer comes limited responsibility

Discretion is the better part of valor

Pat Robertson, please do everyone a favor: make like a banana and split. I don't recall anyone asking you for your take on the tragic situation in Haiti. No, I don't recall that. Give it up already, it's a tired, sad shtick. What could be less Christian than to kick Haiti when they're down? You make me sick.

Pat Robertson is insane. I shouldn't have even dignified his remarks with a response.

God bless everyone in Haiti

ramblings again?

* There is the mundane, there is the banal, and then there is the conversation on the T with an acquaintance from some previous phase of your life that you used to know and haven't talked to since. And then, in the next circle of hell below that is secondhand listening to one of these conversations that someone else is loudly carrying on.

* We should totally hang out some time!

* Have you considered, while eating, whether a juicy steak is worth the future high blood pressure and heart disease, and the attendant increase in healthcare costs overwhelming an already dangerously strained American healthcare system?

* Don't you just love looking for things to get angry about and rage at with righteous ire? Things like reality television. And righteously angry conservative television commentators who bemoan the rise of reality television.

* I never turn down the chance to have my back to a wall. It's just safer that way.

* A sausage is only a sausage, unless it's andouille. That stuff is spicy!

* The Journal of Economic Entomology: real or fake? That depends on how you feel about apiaries.

Ramblings (customarily the crutch of the uninspired sportswriter)

-Considering all of the strange esoteric sub-groups and industries that have their own periodical, couldn't I one day hope to have my own?

-I cannot ridicule anyone for wearing a bandanna on their head since the death of David Foster Wallace. For all I know, that person could be DFW returned. Or Jesus, for that matter.

-Healthcare: something has to be done. This is not going to work long-term. Or short-term, for that matter.

-Writing down a menu plan is far more rewarding than you might imagine.

-Mice are crafty. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you vinyl siding for your house. You never have to paint it!

Seasons change, mad things rearrange

October showers bring....November snows? Extreme cold in December? Not as nice as the spring equation.

It's gonna be a long winter. We will need some tea, some hard liquor to warm up with, flour to bake bread with and heat up the house, and assorted other supplies to keep from freezing.

Again, I oppose fast food

This guy in the Phoenix said it better than I am currently able to:

"Watching folks eat at national fast-food outlets depresses me. Not only are they paying for advertising, but they're getting so little give-a-damn in their food."

Can we stop eating at these places already? Obesity will kill you! Yes, it will.

While the sun and moon endure luck's a chance, but trouble's sure

Here's all the evidence you need that Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is a great book.

-I carred it around urban metro Boston for a few days, and got no less than three comments from complete strangers about how much they liked it, including from the conductor on the Commuter Rail.

-I was walking in front of North Station and a woman passing by on a bike, who was presumably homeless, said "Great book. Great man. Too bad he offed himself." You can't say it much better than that, and that's really all you need to know about the book.


-I am still almost completely unable to describe the book to people who ask me about it.


I strongly urge everyone to read it.