I’ve been up and down the coast of California riding all forms of public transit, putting in three hundred plus miles in the last forty eight hours, searching and existing in different spaces hourly. I’m running on low sleep (classic) while trying my best to keep up with participating in all the ‘interacting with’ the people around me, totaling more than I’ve had this whole month. The thing about traveling is it entices thinking, and different thinking at that. It’s as if every city you pass you leave how you thought about a certain subject there with it, and I’ve blown by what feels like a hundred cities, until now.
I’m thinking about the life I used to live back in Minnesota. The life I used to live back in Michigan. The life I used to live back in San Diego. The life I used to live in all the places that I couldn’t call home, but felt like it just the same. I’m recalling moments and memories from all these lives with clarity, which is a rarity for me, as my memory in the past has failed me and been more than unimpressive to say the least.
At this moment, I’ve been riding on a Metrolink train that came straight from hell being conducted by satan himself for the last four and a half hours (literally it’s train number is 666, so I shouldn’t be surprised at any of this) being told every two minutes that we’ll be moving again in just a couple minutes. Supposedly a person got hit on the tracks between Fullerton and Anaheim, which my first reaction was awestruck and sympathy, but that was two hours ago. Now I think that dumb motherfucker got everything they deserved.
I guess now’s as good of time as any to say that this writing is the product of a combination of listening to filthy dirty rap music the entire day trying to sit patiently in my increasingly uncomfortable seat, painfully watching the scenery go by at a pace that I could walk faster than, all the while as every single person in my train car has the irresistible urge to go back and forth between the cars by attempting to open the connecting door (I say attempting because everyone acts like this door is a hundred pounds of pure solid steel) making me want to go full UFC and drop a bitch right here in the aisle.
This morning I had the glorious experience of waking up to the sound of a couple I had never met before making out not five feet from the couch I “crashed” on (positive: only three more things left on my bucket list), snuggled up way too deep in an oddly prickly blanket sweating my balls off because I was frozen in-between the “oh shit I can’t move now because I’ve pretended to sleeping this long” and the “they have to be done soon” point. After that was all said and done (ending with me looking dead into the girl’s eyes and acting like the pervious thirty minutes didn’t happen), I spent the next part of the day holding down strong the third wheel position with a totally different couple, cruising around Venice looking at apartments for rent, imagining all the different lives I lived in each one as we went along. Closing with it all becoming apart of those memories and forgotten stories I was talking about earlier as I descended down into the L.A. subway system via endless escalator.
Leading me to now, pumping my restless leg up and down waiting to continue the journey. Knowing I have another hour long stint of last call train rides to get “home” after I get off this devil possessed train (in which later I will be told by a smoky young woman standing behind me to slide my card in the other way after she heard me audibly cursing at the ticket kiosk machine for not working), taking my grand total of travel time for the day to just shy of six hours (a flight to the beautiful city of Honolulu taking only five and a half hours(I googled it)). But at the end of it all, I’m only thankful for all these things. Because of the way they inspired me and allowed me to live inside them, causing me to think differently and become apart of my new life. A life I pray to remember in the future, though hopefully not on a delayed Metrolink train.
Andrew/Borger/Writes 