Post date: Dec 26, 2019 9:48:50 PM
i've spent sixteen hours on amtrak trains in the last six days, which inevitably leads to a lot of moments staring out of wide windows and into a blurred melange of suburban sprawl and razed-but-undeveloped land. there are occasional trees too, but this time of year only the skeletal remains of trunks and branches appear.
even the trees are having hard times, i guess.
cloudy grey skies suggest that night is somehow falling preternaturally early. brighter blurred landscapes from earlier are being blackwashed into shapeless grim silhouettes. it's as if earth and sky have ceded their distinctive selves, given up to the entropy of twilight and become a single vague thing.
eventually even this entropy disappears and there is no more inside- vs outside-the-train. the darkness disappears, leaving you with a dim reflection of yourself. it's a version of you looking for something, only to find that same version of you, still looking.
...
here are some thoughts from three days ago:
i'm tired. this is the third railroad train ride i've taken in three days. i feel bloated from eating station takeout again ... some halfhearted, overpriced cylinder that bears enough of a passing resemblance to a falafel wrap as to be called one.
...
i dream of waking up early in the morning and then going back to bed. i dream of not being tired anymore, not having to clutch my morning cup of coffee closely, with both hands, as if clutching a less-than-ideal wakefulness more closely than not.
i'm heading home. i've eaten too much and drunk too much and had too many familiar conversations with familiar faces. i haven't done much thinking. i haven't had much empty space and time ... both physically and mentally ... to let the mind roam and let thoughts take shape.
two weeks ago i had a what-if-we-just..? [1] kind of thought while in the shower, but i was in the middle of marking students' papers. i couldn't even spare the spacetime of gauging the plausibility [2] of the idea, let alone any of its technical aspects.
...
the semester's come to a close. work trickles on. the office can remain empty for a little while.
for that little while, i can choose how to be and how to live and what to think about. my life has lost shape for a while and it's strange to think that i can choose a new shape for it.
[1] for those of you who are curious, it has to do with trying to reach a known fact through a simpler setup and a smaller set of hypotheses; in other words, i suddenly wondered "does it have to be so complicated? what if we just assumed the right scaling parameters and" etc, etc.
[2] put another way, there are many, many levels of plausibility. for instance, "the moon is made of green cheese" seems completely implausible because scans and other sensory readings suggest the chemical makeup of the moon differs from that of dairy product, whereas "there are more craters on the dark side of the moon than the light" can actually be substantiated as true or false, and regardless of the answer, how you can verify such a statement is itself interesting.