Musings of a Restless Mind

This essay will probably be disjointed because it’s about my third year taking the cross-country railroad trip from San Diego to LibertyCon in Chattanooga. It will be disjointed because I’m trying to hurry to finish my second book, hopefully before Son of SilverCon in Vegas in mid-July, so I have little time to make it perfect and even less brain power to devote to it. But I want to put it down before I forget the details. What? You’re shocked that a writer such as I who writes detailed descriptions of teachers and other characters from my high school days of 60 years ago might have trouble remembering? It’s true, as my high school Chemistry teacher would sometimes say after a preposterously long explanation in response to a question. As I warned many of those I talked to, “Careful or you’ll end up on my blog,” and now I feel compelled to make good on my threat. 🙂

First as the train from LA finally found itself chugging its way through morning in Arizona, I met Jayden, an Army mechanic who had been based in Korea for years. He related tales of how Americans are treated as celebrities in Seoul where he found most Koreans speak English–not so much in the rest of the country–how he had tried to play wingman to one of his socially hopeless colleagues, how he had fallen in love with a Burmese woman there. He re-enlisted in the hopes of staying in Korea but, of course, was transferred back stateside. He was heading back to his base at Fort Riley in Kansas after taking some leave, and still pining for his Burmese paramour in Korea.

At breakfast as we traversed New Mexico, I met several interesting folks including Dave, a Hollywood cameraman who has worked on a number of well-known movies. Or maybe he’s a line producer whose name is Camera. Sometimes it’s hard to hear everything across a breakfast table on a rumbling train. In any case, he had a lot of stories about how Hollywood works. He indicated that mostly it wasn’t a problem for him living in New Mexico because every film would shoot in Georgia or Canada or somewhere else based on how the accountants maneuvered the local tax breaks. They always brought in their own crews of course, thwarting the local politicians’ fantasies of creating a local film industry. If you’re a politician, I can guarantee that you won’t get the better end of a deal with a Hollywood accountant. Take that advice to the bank folks.

Somewhere across Kansas I caught the pre-con crud (usually referred to as the con crud, but apparently I have to be different.) I blame it on some poor little kid a few seats up who coughed loudly several times before I fled to the observation car. Probably not, but it feels good to blame someone, right? That had two effects. First effect was to forestall my usual train socializing since I didn’t want to give it to anybody else, and I likely couldn’t make myself heard to anybody else anyway. Second, it caused me undue anxiety because, although it didn’t cause me any coughing fits, it stifled my voice, and I was scheduled to do a reading and be on several panels at the con. Since I don’t know sign language and have always been notoriously bad at charades, that would have been hard without a voice, so I grabbed a popular brand of orange cough syrup from the train station in Chicago. Unfortunately that had the side effect of giving me a racing heart, so when I got to Washington, I switched it out with a blue, store-brand cough syrup. Both proclaim the same active ingredients in the same amounts, so maybe I don’t do well with orange food dye? I’m sure RFK Jr. is on that already.

Fortunately I had planned on getting to Chattanooga two days early to play tourist. As it happened, the train tour up to Lookout Mountain wasn’t running because of some brushfire from the previous year, so I spent the first afternoon and evening mostly in my hotel room. I felt good enough the next day to Uber to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum to ride their antique steam train, check out their museum displays, watch the engine ride a giant ball bearing turntable to take us back the other way, and get a good whiff of the raw coal tar slabs lying around outside the repair shop. By Friday I was well enough to get through the Meet and Greet and my first AI Panel, and by Saturday my voice had almost fully recovered, so I could do a reading from a couple of stories and my upcoming book. My fellow author Nic Plume who shared the stage with me for the reading and I decided to round-robin the reading. I did two very short readings first. She read a couple of chapters of her recent book then I read part of my horror story, The Devil’s Due. When I came to a stopping point, she’d read a chapter of her book and turn it back over to me until time ran out. Those breaks helped me not strain my voice. I know I couldn’t finish my whole story during the 25 minutes allotted to me, so I ended with, “If you want to know how the story ends, you’ll have to part with a buck and a nickel to get it from Amazon,” and congratulated myself on becoming a shifty salesman. Hah!

I consider the con a success since I got to hear from a number of AI guys with better credentials than I who had some interesting insights. Nonetheless I got congratulated by a few people who thought I was thoughtful and entertaining. Also, after my reading, I got a few people who told me how much they liked my writing. Mmmm, scratch that writer’s ego…, right there, oh yeah, under the chin…, just like that. Wait, I seem to be forgetting I’m not a cat. Oh well.

The way back was interesting, in the proverbial Chinese curse way. It started out fine, catching an Uber at 5am to get to a shuttle that would get me to the Atlanta airport in time to travel across town to the Amtrak station. My driver Gabriel liked to talk, and when he found out I was from California asked, “So you’re a Democrat?” I laughed and said nope. That made him even more interested in the views of someone like me about him being a Jordanian immigrant in the US since 1988. Did I change his mind about anything? I doubt it, but I satisfied his curiosity about someone who is as rational as he obviously was, but disagreed on the proper solutions for the agreed-upon problems our country faces. I love finding people in real life that can respectfully talk to you even, and especially, if they disagree with you. Just try that on social media sometime. 🙂

Despite my getting to the airport in plenty of time, and despite Uber initiating van rides from the airport for an introductory bargain of only $5 (thank you not-so-smart phone for not letting me know until it was too late), I took the MARTA train up to mid-town only a mile away from Amtrak. For unknown reasons I couldn’t contact Uber for a ride from there. (I suspect the Atlanta metro blocks the Uber cell phone app because they want you to take busses.) I kept walking, hoping to catch a signal until I gave up and decided to hoof it out toting my 25 pound duffle bag and, with my innate sense of misdirection, got lost just long enough to hear the train to New Orleans pull out of the station just as I came within sight of it. So I stopped to get breakfast and rest my out-of-shape old man bod. Then I ubered back to the local train station, snatched a hotel room next door for a night to plot my next move. Since Amtrak insists on sending you a couple hundred miles in the wrong direction to New Orleans where you can catch the next train up the Mississippi at 2pm the next afternoon, I realized I could book a 7 hour Greyhound ride west to Jackson Mississippi and have plenty of time to catch the Amtrak going north. Even though my hotel was next to the metro station that would take me straight to the Greyhound depot, the metro trains don’t start running until 5am, which is when I had to catch my bus. So I ubered back to the Greyhound station. The rest of my improvised plan worked perfectly.

Of course, the train heading for Memphis, where I had planned to spend the night and next day, got caught in a lightning storm, and a tree fell on the tracks. Since Amtrak doesn’t own, but leases, the tracks from the freight carriers, they had to call back to the previous station to get somebody to remove the tree. Consequently it was 01 am instead of 10:20 pm when we pulled into Memphis. When I booked the hotel, I knew if was within easy walking distance of the Amtrak station, but I was in for a surprise. They had built the hotel into the same building that housed the Amtrak station. In fact I ended up in the hotel before I found the station. It was quite a combination of modern and rustic, featuring a 6,000 album vinyl collection played by a DJ and piped throughout the hotel. I got a good night’s sleep, a decent breakfast the next day, and headed out for the Rock & Soul Museum, stopping first at the Civil Rights Museum. Someone had repurposed the hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated into a museum featuring the century-long struggle for black civil rights even after the Civil War. They even had a bus you could board where you were told to sit in the back, just like Rosa Parks. Even though unburdened by my duffle bag that I had left in care of the hotel, walking in Memphis, contra Marc Cohn, is a much more physical than spiritual experience in 95 degree heat and high humidity. Nonetheless I managed to tour the Rock & Soul Museum and even hit the Blues Hall of Fame on the way back.

At the Blues Hall of Fame, I met Levi Frazier, a playwright who was curating an interactive hologram of Taj Mahal (Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr.). Of course, I chatted more with him than the artificial Taj Mahal. It turns out he has a play featuring W. C. Handy being produced in San Diego next Spring. Despite it being put on at an obviously leftist venue, I promised him I’d attend as I gave him my card.

The trip to Chicago was much simpler. I also discovered my 3 years of riding the trains as cheaply as possible, gave me enough Amtrak points to allow me admission to the first class lounge at Chicago Union Station where I enjoyed comfy chairs, free drinks, snacks, and banal TV from various rooms, making my long layover there quite pleasant. From Chicago I was seated next to Sajaad, a high school science teacher, surgical mask wearing Muslim with roots in Pakistan. Despite our obvious differences, we bonded over our shared religious fasts (Ramadan for him, the Apostolic Fast for me). We also bonded over the similar teaching philosophies of himself and my late wife.

In the observation (or lounge) car, I also intruded upon Stephanie who was reading a tome called Living Mortal, that I remarked seemed heavy reading for riding the train. Originally from France, she lives in Santa Fe and works for several non-profits. She’s lived in the states for 28 years and was returning from taking her monolingual brother to see Chicago and New York City, acting as both translator and tour guide.

I also met Caroline who probably won’t be offended if I call her one of the last hippies. She has spent a lot of time in Vietnam and southern India, immersing herself in various ways of seeing the world. She takes on itinerant teaching jobs and was heading to San Diego to pick up the car she was shipping back from Hawaii where she had spent a long time with her mother. Her father lives in Ocean Beach which I told her was perfectly fitting. IYKYK. In any case I entertained her on the trip from Fullerton to Old Town San Diego with a collage of my fake accents and alleged humor as well as stories of my wasted youth watching California morph into its current state.

So what ties all this together? Did you think I was talking Geography with the title? I love America where white boys can play the blues and venerate their black predecessors and where a Black man can become a top surgeon, a Supreme Court Justice, or President, a Jordanian can make what he wants of himself, and a surgical mask-wearing Muslim teacher with roots in Pakistan can happily converse with a right wing Orthodox Christian SF writer with roots in Ireland. Despite what the powers that be try to convince you, most of us would be happy with that. If my trips across America teach me anything, it’s that.