Friday, February 24, 2012

Down Time

 





It really is quiet out here on Robinson Road. The wind has died down and all that I can hear now is the fire burning in the stove and the computer spinning. The refrigerator is in its down cycle and the clock ran out of batteries long ago. No, wait, there’s the wind in the branches again, and now a car passes. In the early morning, and I’ve recently discovered, early afternoon you can hear the lonesome whistle of the Indiana Railroad on its daily rounds, miles away. The refrigerator just kicked on and of course there is the sound of my fingers clattering on the keyboard. I don’t count the workings of my own brain. Are those even properly sounds?

Yeah, I’m really enjoying being unemployed. I’m ever so slowly unraveling the detrimental involvement with the soul sapping, resource depleting unsustainable world. Not that I hope to ever actually escape, this is but an interlude, a little down time. The cat rustles in her nesting place near the stove.

So how’s the job search, you ask? I’ve found work, we’re just waiting for the bank to come through. If I can hold out until then I’ll be building a house for a few months, and more jobs will likely flow from that. If not and after if then I can always do like Pete said and follow one of those semis down I-65 and take 800 numbers off of their trailers. I have applications in other places and I’m terrified lest I get offered a job in a factory, or delivering produce or something.

The photograph is by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, as seen in my recent trip to the the Chicago Art Institute.

 

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Toy Trains


I'm sitting here drinking coffee, waiting for the kids to get up. From Shoshana's apartment you can see the rail yard at the terminus of the Red Line. I like watching the trains snake around the tight turns, their segmented bodies complying in turn to the form of the track like a silver snake. Sometimes two trains follow each other, amplifying the effect, sometimes there are trains going in opposite directions. I haven't quite figured out the layout of the yard, how the flow works. I particularly like it when a train comes down the long sloping s-curve ramp that is, I believe, the southbound arm of the Purple Line heading toward the city from points north. They come in fast then slow to a crawl.

I always learn so much when I come up here. This time I learned about transporting fishes and coral, and in more detail how you ship a Beluga Whale. They go Fed Ex. Of course it's more complicated than that! I hear about these things over the phone but get so much more out of a face to face conversation.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Go Fish


And now I don't know what to say. The past week I've been considering angles, thinking of things I'd like to share either about the job itself or the fact that I'm quitting. Just now, on the drive up here to Chicago I had a spiel mapped out, but it's all evaporated.

I'd been traveling in silence since hitting the hinterlands, the radio desert between Lafayette and Gary. Oh, it's not like West Texas were there literally are no stations. There are plenty of radio stations, but none of them come in clearly, for very long, unless they're proclaiming the power of Jesus. He's got one hell of a transmitter out there!

I hadn't noticed the silence. I'm used to the sound of my own head, an engine and wheels over pavement. I realized that I was long out of the acoustic doldrums as I exited the Dan Ryan onto Lake Shore Drive. I tuned in WXRT playing some funky old blues just in time to ROCK OUT through the big city. It was awesome.

I sound like a Driver don't I? Well, I was one, for twelve and a half years. Today was my last day. Not that I won't drive for a living again. I mean, what else am I going to do at 54 years of age in a technologized un-humanistic era, be an artist? I'm used to a "median income," as humble as that turned out to be. I have bills! But I'm going to hold out as long as I can.

So is this a seminal moment, or merely an interlude? Probably the latter, but it sure as hell will be nice not to live life on the damn highway, for awhile anyway. Let's see if I can make it to March before I disappear again into a cloud of diesel exhaust.