The conversation so transcribed is not exactly verbatim now is it. Dramatization, for entertainment, of all the things we really wanted to say but could not without risking a flare of temper or a bruised ego since ours were then both quite fragile wherever the hammer fell.
The echoes of the complications of the west's dying masculinity are everywhere. And as for the truth if that is what you think I am covering for, I don't remember details like these so well whether it was last week or last year. The exchanges were sparse, and kind of just faggy at worst. In that impotent and inconsistent sort of way. Wholly unremarkable. Until the last days that is, then there were some hard words involved and then all a guy really wanted to do was talk with his knuckles. But we were headed for the east and so we relied mostly on civility, hoping it alone could keep us tied. Because there was a cold season ahead of us both in the backs of our minds.
Hinkle
I want to talk about fung shay for a moment.. feng shui. No one of us ever thinks twice about sound and magnetics and chemistry and what until something unexplained happens. They say that sound is but a partition of color, and color of light.
And light of space and space of time, and I don't suppose time is but the half shell on the back on the turtle of the turtle on the next and so on. So many turds in the swan pond to me, brothers and sisters honestly but there are places that all of these things seem to come together to create something strange. Not that nonsense about amphibians, I mean there is a continuity…
There is one night in the week, for instance, one night, the same night every week, a thursday that I'd found that if I'd turned my head at the right angle sometime after midnight on the pillow in my bed I could make out a harmony. Harmony as in the dual sounding of two notes at certain places down the neck of a stringed instrument, okay. Every thursday night, say, somewhere after midnight and provided I angled my one ear down, the right temple, there would be perceived a sound characteristic of a low hum. One is the vibration created between the lower one half-pane of the bedroom window that slides to open into the upper portion... the other source more mysterious but after some deliberation I decide is a low hum coming from the nearby hills out toward the training base beyond east selah. Every one or two nights in the week, the resulting harmonic as I said, created through resonance.
So that is what I came to look forward to as I would drift off provided I had not already, there at the old farm in washington state.
There are also these things they call geoclysmic symmetrations which when one is in place to see it, the entire western face of a mountainside for instance may approximate some semblance of a bear, or of a man laying on his back, looking up at the sky. Think of the face they've claimed to find on mars. Fung shu folks, fung shu guys. That is, providing that it is the right time of day and the sun to the south is south enough that the shadows are long and the furrows all furrowed such that you can make out the earnest grimace on the man's face … obviously the martians didn't get enough lay. But maybe they were too busy. Busy building faces in the dirt, fellas. Faces for posterity or something, I won't be the judge.
So too; there is this section of track on the columbia line, some miles after Boardman riding the final hour into Hinkle, that I remember especially for the same reasons. There, shortly after the columbia curves off from us into the trinities and looking off to the south there are again those same thousand red eyes blinking in unison for miles and miles and you are hypnotized. Without phone or radio or watch to force out the dark, laying back to close your eyes there is this distinctly cacophonous low pitched groan created by some defect peculiar to that section of track. It is this wall of noise at first, but then, after a moment of adjustment all harmony. It's like a symphony in the clouds that seems to bend and bow and billow out of every 3 winged wind powered angel out there and it sings to you. If you'll let it.
We must've hit in sometime after midnight. I already know the place well from aforementioned previous excursion 10 months prior. I knew already the immaculate desolation one jumps into if one should hit in at night into all that emptiness. The first time Hinkle is like stepping ones first accidental step on the moon or any moon in a dream, it's spooky and downright alien. It even smells strange out there. The second time Hinkle is nowhere near as aweful because the memory of it hits you again all at once and you know enough not to head for the light in the farthest distance, in the case that you are hungry or thirsty. Unless of course you're prepared for an hour hike, or a swim. A total wasteland.
Odd thing when we'd stopped. They'd detached just at the throat of the yard and without breaking the air. So we had lain there, in our respective cars, wide awake for half an hour or more before roadie jumped out to survey the head and realized that they must've sealed us off. All the way out there at the asshole of the headless worm the fred still whirred.
We take cover in the old dormant units a couple miles up at the Y at the west end and sleep off all our whiskey through the remaining dusk, and in the liminal thirsts of first light I am already sitting up again, cracking sunflower seeds, tiredly nursing my sleepless head. I hear engines and stand up to watch china bring us some stacks down the main. It grinds to a halt and I wake the dogs. As some would guess we don't find anything good the whole thing over so we start for the pushers on the double to the rear when a hiss of air warns an imminent departure.
"See those?...
Roadie points to a string of triton outfits, giant neptunal prongs embracing each end of the containing barges. They provide terrific coverage from the sides, but zero to fore and aft between them and are in such wise not ideal rides.
"...only in a pinch."
I have to reflect on his words for a minute before I remember the Veteran-Student arrangement again, the terms we'd started with. He's still showing me the ropes I guess. I'd not seen those peculiar well cars just yet sure, but its not like I'd never consider climbing up into one myself if I was ever desperate, whether I knew what the hell they were called or not. And I supposed then that appearances are an important part of coping under pressure for some people. The smoothing your hair back stratagem.
"Ahh-huh.. interesting!", Says I.
We waited a long time before china pulled, and then it was a drawn out sidling along over pasture and sages and some river for a couple of hours, PJ fiddling with the nobs on the radio in the conductors chair and me in the brakeman's seat with my feet up on the speedometer, contemplating existence all and sundry.. Meditating on every plant and bee I can conjure in my field of vision, waiting immortally patient, as I suppose myself to be, for the autumn quilt that blew right off the perfect bed she made.
The echoes of the complications of the west's dying masculinity are everywhere. And as for the truth if that is what you think I am covering for, I don't remember details like these so well whether it was last week or last year. The exchanges were sparse, and kind of just faggy at worst. In that impotent and inconsistent sort of way. Wholly unremarkable. Until the last days that is, then there were some hard words involved and then all a guy really wanted to do was talk with his knuckles. But we were headed for the east and so we relied mostly on civility, hoping it alone could keep us tied. Because there was a cold season ahead of us both in the backs of our minds.
Hinkle
I want to talk about fung shay for a moment.. feng shui. No one of us ever thinks twice about sound and magnetics and chemistry and what until something unexplained happens. They say that sound is but a partition of color, and color of light.
And light of space and space of time, and I don't suppose time is but the half shell on the back on the turtle of the turtle on the next and so on. So many turds in the swan pond to me, brothers and sisters honestly but there are places that all of these things seem to come together to create something strange. Not that nonsense about amphibians, I mean there is a continuity…
There is one night in the week, for instance, one night, the same night every week, a thursday that I'd found that if I'd turned my head at the right angle sometime after midnight on the pillow in my bed I could make out a harmony. Harmony as in the dual sounding of two notes at certain places down the neck of a stringed instrument, okay. Every thursday night, say, somewhere after midnight and provided I angled my one ear down, the right temple, there would be perceived a sound characteristic of a low hum. One is the vibration created between the lower one half-pane of the bedroom window that slides to open into the upper portion... the other source more mysterious but after some deliberation I decide is a low hum coming from the nearby hills out toward the training base beyond east selah. Every one or two nights in the week, the resulting harmonic as I said, created through resonance.
So that is what I came to look forward to as I would drift off provided I had not already, there at the old farm in washington state.
There are also these things they call geoclysmic symmetrations which when one is in place to see it, the entire western face of a mountainside for instance may approximate some semblance of a bear, or of a man laying on his back, looking up at the sky. Think of the face they've claimed to find on mars. Fung shu folks, fung shu guys. That is, providing that it is the right time of day and the sun to the south is south enough that the shadows are long and the furrows all furrowed such that you can make out the earnest grimace on the man's face … obviously the martians didn't get enough lay. But maybe they were too busy. Busy building faces in the dirt, fellas. Faces for posterity or something, I won't be the judge.
So too; there is this section of track on the columbia line, some miles after Boardman riding the final hour into Hinkle, that I remember especially for the same reasons. There, shortly after the columbia curves off from us into the trinities and looking off to the south there are again those same thousand red eyes blinking in unison for miles and miles and you are hypnotized. Without phone or radio or watch to force out the dark, laying back to close your eyes there is this distinctly cacophonous low pitched groan created by some defect peculiar to that section of track. It is this wall of noise at first, but then, after a moment of adjustment all harmony. It's like a symphony in the clouds that seems to bend and bow and billow out of every 3 winged wind powered angel out there and it sings to you. If you'll let it.
We must've hit in sometime after midnight. I already know the place well from aforementioned previous excursion 10 months prior. I knew already the immaculate desolation one jumps into if one should hit in at night into all that emptiness. The first time Hinkle is like stepping ones first accidental step on the moon or any moon in a dream, it's spooky and downright alien. It even smells strange out there. The second time Hinkle is nowhere near as aweful because the memory of it hits you again all at once and you know enough not to head for the light in the farthest distance, in the case that you are hungry or thirsty. Unless of course you're prepared for an hour hike, or a swim. A total wasteland.
Odd thing when we'd stopped. They'd detached just at the throat of the yard and without breaking the air. So we had lain there, in our respective cars, wide awake for half an hour or more before roadie jumped out to survey the head and realized that they must've sealed us off. All the way out there at the asshole of the headless worm the fred still whirred.
We take cover in the old dormant units a couple miles up at the Y at the west end and sleep off all our whiskey through the remaining dusk, and in the liminal thirsts of first light I am already sitting up again, cracking sunflower seeds, tiredly nursing my sleepless head. I hear engines and stand up to watch china bring us some stacks down the main. It grinds to a halt and I wake the dogs. As some would guess we don't find anything good the whole thing over so we start for the pushers on the double to the rear when a hiss of air warns an imminent departure.
"See those?...
Roadie points to a string of triton outfits, giant neptunal prongs embracing each end of the containing barges. They provide terrific coverage from the sides, but zero to fore and aft between them and are in such wise not ideal rides.
"...only in a pinch."
I have to reflect on his words for a minute before I remember the Veteran-Student arrangement again, the terms we'd started with. He's still showing me the ropes I guess. I'd not seen those peculiar well cars just yet sure, but its not like I'd never consider climbing up into one myself if I was ever desperate, whether I knew what the hell they were called or not. And I supposed then that appearances are an important part of coping under pressure for some people. The smoothing your hair back stratagem.
"Ahh-huh.. interesting!", Says I.
We waited a long time before china pulled, and then it was a drawn out sidling along over pasture and sages and some river for a couple of hours, PJ fiddling with the nobs on the radio in the conductors chair and me in the brakeman's seat with my feet up on the speedometer, contemplating existence all and sundry.. Meditating on every plant and bee I can conjure in my field of vision, waiting immortally patient, as I suppose myself to be, for the autumn quilt that blew right off the perfect bed she made.