i think someone is trying to ensure that i see strange things all the time, just so i think i'm going crazy.
the other night, at 3am... i've been on-line for hours now, talking to a friend and being basically completely absorbed in the conversation... andy's on the couch, watching late movies... the house is dark except for the light from the tv and from the monitor (and the monitor is mostly dark, anyway)... and there's a tap on the glass of the window next to the front door. reflexively, i look up over the back of neal's PC's monitor to see who's at the door... i see merely a large-haired silhouette, framed against the window and backlit by the mercury vapor streetlights, peering in the uncurtained porthole to see if she's gotten my attention. it can only be one person. my reaction: "oh, give me a fuckin' break." i simply hang my head in resignation. i know she's seen me prairie-dogging, by the body language of the shadowy form. andy asks, "who is it?" "who the hell do you think it is?" he merely laughs at me. i make no move to get up. i just go back to what i'm doing. it's three am. when you've received less-than-warm welcomes in the past, why would you continue to show up at a completely dark house, uninvited and unannounced, at three am? after about three minutes i poked my head up again, and the coast was clear. she did, however, manage to destroy my mental state completely. that's one thing i won't miss when we move...
[moving. i hate moving. with mortal passion do i hate the stressful ritual of packing up all your shit and carting it to a new place, only to unpack it slowly, having lost everything in the myriad boxes... actually, the thing i hate most about moving is that i've had to move at a bare minimum once a year since i graduated from high school. into the dorm, out of the dorm, into the dorm, out of the dorm... i've moved eleven times in the last 6 years. the newness has kinda worn off... it should be pretty cool to start over in a completely new place --- except that i'm merely relocating around the same town. a true source of muppet insanity, this is. *sigh*]
anyway... the reason i sat down to write, the thing from which i got almost completely sidetracked by my random brain, bizarre sightings of randomness......
i went home at lunch to switch the utilities to the new house. that was quite surreal, because all the utility companies still had my work phone as the job i had two years ago, as though i was calling into the past to update my utility service. kinda bizarre, maybe mostly because i haven't been sleeping well lately.... maybe i was imagining it.
but i swear i didn't imagine the boxcar.
i'm driving back to work, not thirty minutes ago, along broadway... at the UK art buildings, the old converted reynolds tobacco warehouses, there's a trestle that carries a pair of railroad tracks from the student ghetto to the downtown railyards. the street dips under the trestle, and when it comes out the otherside you get a pretty cool, if fairly industrial view of the downtown skyscrapers. (maybe i should've been an architect...) and as i'm driving along, i see a boxcar rolling out onto the trestle from behind some obscuring brush on the uphill (east, to my right) side. wow, i think... it's not often that you see a train backing slowly across a trestle... but then the car moves completely from behind the foliage... and there's no other car attached to the other end. double take... slow down... (luckily there's nothing behind me...) what the hell? and as i dip into the underpass, i can see, plain as day, that this is just some boxcar rolling along the tracks by itself. i come out from the other side and it's already crossed the bridge and moved on to be obscured by more trees. it wasn't moving particularly slowly, either. there were no railroad personel standing around, no trains in sight, just this solitary rust-colored boxcar patiently transferring its potential energy into kinetic energy.
i fear someone probably got really hurt by that thing.
Mon, 19 Jul 1999 13:53:53