In a White Room...

...with black curtains near the station...

Not really, it doesn’t have any curtains at all, black or otherwise, it’s surrealistic southwestern art deco marble, tall, aching empty and echoing... and sure, feel free to get out the old Cream, it’s their song set the mood of the moment.

It’s really just a little local running across Oklahoma and part of Texas,  but it’s still a train with a name, and that gentle reader?  That is something I wish I saw more of.  Anyhow, one morning a couple of weeks ago I took a buddy of mine to the city to catch the train.  Of course I went to fetch him from the return trip, that’s just how it’s done where I live.  The departure was early in the day, but the arrival was at night and the difference was most literally night and day.  You couldn’t really feel them with the morning sun shining, the echo of all the souls that had passed through the place, but at night it was all but unavoidable.  No one stayed downstairs to listen to the whispers and the echoes, most everyone was up on the platform waiting on the Flyer to pull in.  Everyone that is but me, I did stay downstairs for a time communing with the past.  Ghosts, yes, but they have their story too.  I did them the courtesy of listening for a bit.

...I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines
wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves...

They look at the empty room and ask what has become of their land, their people.  They ask where is everyone?  It was hard trying to form them an answer.  So many of them passed over well before television had come into it’s own, the world as it is now is a total mystery to them.  All they know is the feel of those few souls who wander through for one reason or another, and they do wonder what has happened.  They wonder at the emptiness and the fear.  I think a few of them are convinced Hitler must have won the war.

...platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.
I walked into such a sad time at the station

As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning...

How do you explain to souls who out lasted the dust bowl and the depression, who bested the war machines of Hirohito and Hitler, how do you explain to them what has happened to their land?  The answer is you really can’t, the truth is (mercifully) beyond their comprehension.   I did the only thing I could think of I knew we’d likely share: I started whistling Amazing Grace, trying to set a pitch and pace to make a harmony against the echoes.  Amazingly, from around the corner came a voice taking up the song, a woman’s voice clear and clean rising up to shatter the silence of the place with lyrics of faith and redemption.  I shut up, and so did they, the whispers faded away, you could feel peace fill the space. 

...I'll wait in the queue when the trains come back
Lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves...

I went up the stairs to the platform with the others to wait for the Flyer. She was only twenty minutes late, these days the freights have priority.  She arrived looking a trifle way worn and weary, in need of a bath really, but still... if you’ve ever met the train you know what I’m talking about: the throb of those big diesels resonating in your chest beneath the whine of the dynamos they drive, the motion and the mass of the thing that will not be denied, her cargo of humanity stepping down onto the platform as they have since the days of steam... yea.   For so many, many reasons trains with names are a good thing.

Lyrics excerpted from the 

1968 “Cream” song “White Room” 

written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown

An Abandoned Paper...

You find them often enough, the newspaper someone was browsing while getting around a cup of java.  They get up to go on their way, leave their newspaper behind and someone like me comes along and goes “aha... reading material!”  Over the years I’ve found such abandoned papers are one of fate’s better ways of pointing out something in need of attention.  I always take a look, and I always leave it where I found it.  After all, fate might have had more than one person in mind when it tickled reality to have that paper laying there in the first place, you never really know.

Last night such a paper found its’ way to me.  Burned out on drawing, tapped out on the fictions, totally bummed out by the diner drama (have you ever noticed how the less there is to fight for the more ferociously people fight for it?) the paper was sanctuary.  I dove right in.  A couple of pages in I found what I’m thinking fate wanted me to take a look at, and look at it I did.  Then I thought about it, went home, slept, and got up to think about it some more.

Ball in hand...

That’s what they call it, the folks I’m playing pool with these days.  To be specific it’s cue ball in hand, put it down on the table where you’d like, where it suits your needs.  How do you acquire such an advantageous situation?  You get ball in hand when your opponent scratches, drops the cue ball in a pocket by accident, fails a shot in some particular manner pursuant to their rules. Ok, rules of the game the way they play it.  One player’s goof becomes the other player’s gain.  Fair enough.

It’s a good game, and like most good games it’s accepted because it echoes some fact or facet of reality beyond the game.  Not that those playing the game recognize such similarities intellectually, most often they won’t, don’t, they don’t have to, that’s why it’s a game.  But still a fact, and watching the way the rules of a game influences the play gives solid clue to the way those playing will deal with what they don’t consider a game. Considered beyond a pool table ball in hand translates as a fresh initiative, a new line of circumstances and causalities, the goof broke an old line and allowed someone else a fresh start.

It’s pretty common knowledge that our society is now and has been for quite some time  pretty well polarized, two camps feuding for political power to support their vision of the future.  The question of the day is in the game of brainwashing America (ok, not a full washing, not really, just call it a light rinse) into behaving as someone else desires just exactly what is it that constitutes a scratch? If the digital spying and media manipulations of the last decade or so isn’t a scratch then just what is? From what I see one thing after another has been taken off that list to the point it just isn’t all that common for someone to scratch, not anymore.  One by one the things that enable a new line to begin have gone away to changing times, changing moralities and changing standards. I’m starting to think it’s not very likely that was anything to be called an accident. Seems to me the rules (that live in the minds of the general public) have gotten so loose as to hardly matter.

Watching the pool players watching their respective games has left me wondering just what would it take to get them to watch the world around them with even half of the intensity they watch billiard balls rolling around and vanishing off a railed table.  If, if only, they’d pay as much attention to what’s really going on in the world it would be such a fine thing, such a gain for humanities ultimate chances of maintaining real freedom.  Of course, them being them if they did pay that much attention to things the first and most likely thing to happen would be a bar brawl, and given the last thirty years of history it’s pretty obvious that’s well and fully accommodated within the tyrants strategy: once they start brawling you can kick them out of the bar where they don’t get to play at all.  Democracy... one rail, corner pocket.  *clack-thump*  Freedom, where it sits...

Portrait of Cassandra...

No, she’s not a real woman, not that I know of.  That is if a fictional character is held as being unreal by reason of being a work of imagination.  Cassandra is a character who will appear in the forthcoming Sundown story All the Colors in the Box, a pivotal character actually.  As the story has been in the works, as the character has been evolving to play her role in the plot I’ve had to do a little practical origami with my own psychology where she’s concerned.

The essay Art of the Dreamweaver speaks to the skills of someone who helps turn a half formed imagining into a full dream for someone, someone who can craft a full simulation of reality for someone else.  What I’ve realized (as a work of introspection) is that ever since I had the distinct privilege of keeping the company of a full dreamweaver (Hi Alex... muah! {{  }} ) I’ve been trying to build a semi-isolated version of those skills within myself, an inner dreamweaver who keeps company with my inner child to appear in the metaphorical corner of my eye to help hold things stable when imagination fades at the edges of some constructed vision. (side note, joke to become obvious once you actually meet Cassandra... Pandora serves up the classic Animal’s tune “House of the Rising Sun”... is random play really so very random?)

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy...  Is Cassandra she?  Not sure yet, but she’s showing good potential, very good potential.  I suppose the question is this:  Am I sane enough to have a full dreamweaver living in me head?  It’s getting to be an interesting question the more I get to know her...  I got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train... she is one hyperfox hot work of wickedly wise womanhood... and I’m goin’ back to New Orleans... oh well, the song never does name his crime, perhaps he like I was convicted by the court of macho masculinity of conspiring to empower his feminine side to the status of dreamweaver... to wear that ball and chain (go for it, no pun penalty on this one).

There ya go world, for those who are ever more convinced I’m totally insane Cassandra should make you a fine and timely exit off this freeway leading to Hotel California.