the fifth letter of darby to the new mexicans

A lot of people get killed jumping trains.
The last red-blooded American adventure.
Not a bloodless, corporate adventure
involving bungee cords, vello walls, and hang gliders:
there are no accessories /
No safety net /
No titanium cage between you and the shark /
No one to sell you a picture of the expression on your face /
You’re not on reality tv.

No.
It’s real easy to get good and dead hopping freight.

Listen:
we people, we are made of soft, breakable stuff.
Trains are made of very hard, very heavy stuff.
Any one of a thousand ugly things will happen to you.
you’ll break your ankles when you jump off.
Which is a relatively minor injury, as far as they go.
Because:
You could have a sudden shift in momentum
at fifty-nine miles an hour
Which can be a real fucker.
That’s how the ugliest things happen.

I’ll tell you some of the ugly things that can happen.
You’re rolling along at a thundering speed.
The best way to see America,
back of a dragon,
the whole bit.
And without warning,
Something shifts:
In a loaded boxcar, a little jolt
and the load will crush you suddenly.
You’ll be trapped under hundreds of pounds of sheetrock.
Squirming.
Bleeding.
Snap.
Pelvis shattered under the freight.
Coughing up blood.

As a general rule of thumb, the more dangerous the car, the better the view.
“Flatcars” are those ones that are completely open.
Riding a flatcar, a sharp jerk in momentum
and the dragon will shrug you right off her shoulders
and under the wheels.

It’ll be weeks before anybody so much as smells what the coyotes and vultures left of the various pieces of your rotting carcass.

So.
Kids.
No matter what
the distant whistle of a train
sounds like to you from the comfort of your home, know this:

A train is incapable of remorse.
A train is a machine weighing unimaginable tons,
and it doesn’t have a heart.

It has a furnace incinerating hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel.
The conductor won’t even register a drop in speed.
The wheels go right on rolling,
greased a little better for your blood.

---

from eulogy for a freight train

Albuquerque’s Abandoned Train Depot

1st street in Barelas, South of Downtown.

There’s a huddle of smallish buildings of mysterious function, interesting in a sort of urban rabbit-hole kind of way, but they’re nothing next to the cathedrals of the old traincar shops.

The whole joint has clearly been appropriated (at some indeterminate time between 1917 and 2045) by hoodlums and thrillseeking youth – high quality graffiti and low quality beer bottles being the chief evidence of such. No trains live there anymore, but the freight yard attached is still active, so watch out for bulls. Reports have it that they’ve basically accepted the hooligan pilgrims who visit the grounds: say you’re there for a school project and they might just let you stay. I got a friend that they gave a hard time to for a while – but they were there at night with drug and spraypaint, so you know.

Lock your bike to something and crawl under any one of the well-used gap in the chain-link to give your senses of aesthetics and generational identity the kind of proper cosmic fucking that your lovers never seem to manage.

It’s the light, really. It’s exactly what you might get if you shoved Nothing Gold Can Stay through a derelict shooting gallery and expanded by a factor of ten thousand things. It’s gold from the sunset, green from an impossible number of tinted panes, and dusty from Albuquerque’s hard baked soul.

An engaging but suspicious cat lives there, in an unexplained heap of archaic computer hardware and office furniture, broken apart by curious adventurers, dust mites, and whatever makes kipple kipple.

Apart from the cat and yourself, you’ll find yourself in the company of hundreds of pigeons, little coos echoing through so much space that the brain wonders for what besides beauty the thing could possibly have been designed. Way too much space and silence to imagine anything actually happening in there.

The floors are paved with bricks made for some special reason from wood – or perhaps they are just bricks so tired and abandoned that they have slowly become wood, buckling vein-like along meaningless lines.

Go there, and restore your faith in life to create senseless punkrock perfection.

1.07

personal

personal? what’s that?

not much to report, as far as i can remember. life is well. no girls on the horizons, and theatre has been eating my social life, which is ok by me.

i love my room. trying to convince some people to come visit me in the 505.

professional

bacchanalia.

revolutions theatre festival is on, and they should just call it Bacchanalia and get it the hell over with. for a taste: in one day i had a tech rehearsal, a public reading, booty-dancing with a fortyfive year old german, got headbutted, and lit my hair on fire – in, as far as i can recall, that order.

opened r and j, and have little to no sense as to how it’s going. i feel pretty good about the work i’ve put into it, but that nobody ever really pushed me. i was pushing myself, and had a lot of freedom to play, but one wonders what if… i imagine i’ll do a digestive on mercutio at some point.

got snapped up into a reading of chicago playwright idris goodwin’s Wolfman, because somebody had to go do some thing. had one whole rehearsal before reading the title part in front of the playwright and an audience. kind of nerve wracking, but totally fun. seems like a pretty awesome guy. kind of nice to make another chicago contact.

did bella donna last night, and it was a blast. i think it went over quite well. for such alot of sillyness it was an awful lot of work. the stage was a bloody messa t the end, and it was only a half an hour long, but the standard of work that went into it was pretty high. i continue to look up to tricklock company quite a bit. the stuff they do with song, by the way, is some of the best integration of music into non “musical” theatre i’ve ever heard. i certainly hope i get to come back from time to time to work with them.

start rehearsals for macbeth on the 11th.

maybe a puppet / object theatre piece in the works with loren kahn puppet and object theatre.

political

this is one i wish i had seen about two years ago. saw it at a gas station yesterday.

those stupid ribbon magnets? support our troops? you see em on a car, just peel ‘em off. don’t steal them, just move them. to the gastank cover.