Trains

Trains have a certain atmosphere about them. I've never really understood why they feel the way they do, but every time I'm on a train I find myself overcome with a very specific feeling. Something very close to my core buzzing, maybe.
Certain music amplifies the feeling. Sigur Ros, The Chemical Brothers, Royksopp...room filling tracks. They fill my and push the train feeling against the walls of my skull, which.is where the receptors for that feeling live.
I like it.

Theory!

Our minds are like inverse projectors. Images, sounds, and other input come in through a lens and are reflected off a mirror into a core for processing. The mirror is actually the surface of pool of underlying thoughts that we don’t really notice in day to day life. A mirror made of subconscious. When those thoughts change, the surface and the reflections change and subsequently the world seems to change. Our differences in perception are based on pools full of stuff we can’t see.

Early morning logic

You know how when you read a fat book, and you get near the end and you think "i can finish this off in no time, there's only this little sliver of pages left,' and then the sliver is like 200 pages but just looks small because you've already read 700?

Then the next 3 or 4 times you pick up the book, it's frustrating to nit be able to finish swiftly?

and it changes the mood of the entire book because of that mindset that's bestowed upon the last 9 chapters or whatever?

That's totally happening to me right now. I want the goddamn book to be over.

But I wouldn't want it to be over if I didn't have to see that there's just a sliver left, because I like the book.

This is why I think i want an e-reader.

To eliminate the sliver effect.

Onion Bagel,Toasted With Peanut Butter Please

The deli round where I work has bagels. One day, quite by accident, I ordered an onion bagel toasted with peanut butter.

How does one do such a thing by accident? Feel free to let your imagination feast on that one.

As I unwrapped the bagel, I saw the impossible combination of flavors and may have actually physically backed away. This physical response may have elongated the time that the smell of that combination took to waft up to my nose, but it may have also sped it up. Something to do with thermo-dynamics and air flow principles, or something. Regardless, the odor of peanut butter cocooned in onion drifted to my nasal receptors. Suddenly, it required further examination.

I sat down. This was an event worthy of a sit.

After unwrapping the bagel fully, I turned it over. It had been bisected twice, first into two bagel shaped halves each with one flat side where they would apply the peanut butter and reassemble it, then again to form two ‘c’ shaped bagel-peanut butter sandwiches. I took the bottom half of one of the c’s and tore it in half, leaving me with an eighth of a bagel. Peanut butter side up, I took a bite.

I was happy with my decision to sit.

What a bite.

The crunch of the onion and the slight oily-ness of the cheap bulk peanut butter made for an amazing textile sensation. Like there was a sea urchin in my mouth but it didn’t hurt because the sea urchin actually a planet with enough gravity to keep an ocean of painter’s putty just deep enough to cover over its spikes, leaving few islands. Also, the urchin was made of a bready substance, not urchin.

The taste could not be explained in the same way.

The bite of the onion set against the backdrop of that peanut buttery curtain was unexpected and amazing. Onion never lost forefront, but at the same time the PB was always a key player. Onion was the snare and PB was the bass drum. There’s nothing I love more than drum solos in my mouth.

Before I knew it, the bagel was no more. All that remained was a crinkled sheet of wax paper with small peaks of escaped PB stuck to its insides. Thus started the first day of the rest of my onion and peanut butter based breakfast life.

Some Situations Seem So Simple, Some Suggest

It’s sort of like being bound to the earth by one leg, and using one hand to hold a leash attached to a rocket.. I really like the rocket. I’m not willing to let it go. However, when it decides to leave, I can either let it go or let it rip me apart. Another option, stay strong and drag my whole world through cold dead space killing everyone.

I guess killing everyone is always an option.

Man Made

There’s a stretch of NJ Route 29 just south of Trenton that is unique. On one side of the road is a sewage plant, and on the other a landfill.

 

The landfill is built in such a way that the fluids it might generate are gathered at the bottom in a moat of sorts, which drains into a swampy basin. From the road, my only dared vantage point, the basin appears to resemble Hell almost exactly. Fallen trees, black murk, and a subtle haze laid there like a blanket made of stew brewed from truck exhaust all make the sight notably horrendous to behold.

 

The plant across the street is much more civilized to the eyes. The huge vats of waste and the various pipes that run between them are all painted in lovely green and bright yellow, much like a children’s play set. The plant’s lack of assault on one’s vision is well made up for with ulterior attacks, though. Without elaborating too much, I will simply give this warning; There’s a little button in your car that makes the air circulation stop bringing in outside air and start recycling the air within the car. Find it, and be ready.

 

These filthy hot messes do have one wonderful element. On a crisp morning, the various basins at each will create clouds of fog, and if it’s a breezy crisp morning, that fog will crawl over the road. This lends itself to two experiences. One is the experience of driving into white nothing, and then right back out. I imagine it’s what pilots feel like passing through clouds.

 

The other experience happens a bit later in the morning , just after sunrise, when the road has seen more traffic. Every passing car disrupts a bit of the fog, and for a short time in the morning the fog structure that forms is a sort of archway. Approaching it, you see a short tunnel of fog, and driving through it is just surreal. The banks of the road become vanished, and as you pass under the strip of cloud the sun blots out for just a moment.  I like to think of it as the man made natural phenomenon of passing under your own refuse.