# A Year of Trains part 5 of 5



## Rob Nothing (Mar 13, 2017)

[ONE MORE FISH IN THE BUCKET: Winter 2015] part 3

Freight Savers Inc, Boxing, Old fuckers, Alcohol and Ayahuasca

The outdoors are good therapy... it's half the reason I've stayed homeless so long, and half the reason I've been riding freight as hard as I have. A day spent wandering through the woods or the desert or through the steel, castellated press of cities is like getting steam-rolled, gently... It's the massage and the message of organic silence that works deep into your marrow.
But winter has a way of turning that into a full on ass-beating and it becomes too much too soon. Winter has a way of turning you on yourself; you get tired. You get worn down to such a degree that you become willing to settle with less than what was promised-- what you promised yourself. So long as it means warmth.
Somehow it usually happens that I make my move, my grand exodus, the great embarking back out into the storm and the outside when it isn't yet safe to do so -- the late fall... 2009... 2012... 2013... 2014... 2016... 
But in my defense it was only the third go that this old game I was carrying on with, this steadfast journey into darkness with all my certainty and resolute fire that had been keeping me so insulated and numb inside finally broke. Finally I could feel the real cold, the soul of it.. that savage bone bending brutality of it that steals into the feet and then the heart.
I had never felt the cold because I had never felt lonesome... not until the day in November of 2013.
The day that the wind blew so hard and sharply the leaves themselves everywhere seemed to die twice, so that the ones still green and hanging on must have been etched by the devil in marble. And all the commuters buried in their hoods and scarves looked to be running from something. Running with sunken brows and hollowed eyes and sallow faces.. Hurry! Hurry home to bed, or you are all going to be snuffed out like a candle at dawn.
It was also the day I'd bought my first piece of essential train riding gear: my first carrhart jacket, green and Sherpa lined. So in the beginning I was just fine, I was immune as ever and still eating fuck-all wrapped in nothing and suffering a hatred only of the numbness in my hands and mouth, but... But then down out of the big empty wretched blue jetstream of razors and oaths she dropped, like a ghost or an epilepsy, climbing down to me like my very own personal death. 
I am looking up the steps for footing and there was the annihilating angel in her blue hoody and groceries in the little hands - probably skulls and souls to drop into the Lethe - I paused and she paused and all my insides crumbled and fell away and every step upward and thereafter as we passed on that stairway there felt like some strange new tattoo, on parts and places I didn't know I had. And then I was cold.. cold like a beggar cold like a thief.

That was two years prior, and only relevant here because that was the winter I decided to settle for less. To move back home to Washington and cultivate our unused land there or become a welder or student or louse it didn't matter so long as it was home and it was heat.
The new outlook that had been carved into me, that that wind had, was a lasting one where new aspirations had taken root. And so I was convinced with every passing winter that I would go there and stay there and put my feet down with conviction and finality in Yakima and grow roots of my own. That is how it seemed, and that is where I went in fall 2015 for the third or fourth or fifth time I don't know anymore, to make that all happen.

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So on my way back up north from socal where I'd gone for a week to see my mom who'd just completed rehab, I caught the fabled IDATA outta Bakersfield straight up into Portland, and from Portland I had what looked like a zg3se that stopped in auburn unexpectedly... Now, I'd been wanting to do Stampede pass for literally 20 years, since I was in grade school riding the bus over the tracks everymorning. So I got off and marched out to the yard like destiny itself, fucking slated to finally be doing this, and the next morning caught on the fly practically straight out of a dead sleep, east. It was the most beautiful shit I'd had the pleasure of riding through on a train, then or since. And I figured for a long time after it that it was a fitting exit from the lifestyle I'd been trying to put behind me. The flora all newly threshed with autumn, in golds and hazels and auburns and crimson. Vermouth abandon and vermillion...
_You, you would make good pillow talk. And I wonder whether that same tumult of joke and nudge characteristic to your writing translates over into the movement of its body, the character of your action, of your flesh, not just fingers but toes eyes and nose.. does it translate. Would I find the same candor in both throats.. vermouth abandon and vermillion._

I think that it is a new life, and it is for a time. I gain weight and sign up for boxing lessons which I'd always wanted to do and which I still hope to continue when the opportunity presents itself. But I am still violently lost and spending 50-100 bucks a week on beer. I buy these massive subwoofers and a laptop and I sit faded in the back of the garage every night washing the day out with good music and plenty of booze and I stare at the wall and night after night go to bed with sweet blissful nothing in my heart. The world is lonesome but I'm warm and the work is good. My coworkers are all old dogs, and the dog himself is our mascot with his one eye and the cat is good people too with his worm-bloated belly and tail broken in several places. There's Don my boss who is instantly reminiscent of Scruffy "the janitor". There's Ron, Jeff, Steve, Hooper, Adam, Little Steve, and crazy Jeff. . . These guys are all the friends I'd wished I had. All worn out and soulless and crooked and all fucked like slave ships in Bermuda or whores in January and prolapsed assholes in the pool drain. Fucked and feelingless like me. Like family. They are the fathers I could bring myself to hate and the mothers I never needed. 






I worked for that sorry sack of cocksucking cracker-jacks for six months, and with every week that got warmer and closer to spring I began feeling guiltier and more evil and cold as balls as any of them put together .. because I knew that I was about to leave them. I was already fading out from these long lost brothers, scheming in the dark to ditch them forever and ever like everything else. But I kept my mouth shut and my hell to myself like a good boy. 
These old bastards, all fucked and warped by religious upbringings and the subsequent drug abuse that is ever present and like a negative of their upbringings, like a negative from a polaroid of a murder scene with all the same stars and stripes of it. Those personal torments that hung out like guts out of new-dressed swine stung and strung for the knife.... those motherfuckers were roasted charcoal roasting still over the spit, the fires of the imprisoned self, the inward crucified child. 
They handed us the torch so that we could leave them to death eternal... and I know that the day will come that you too will leave me, to die bone and burden with them for good and for all time.
That is what they showed me. Moreover, showed me the ugliness of it that is neither good nor bad but simply part and parcel to the blood that pulses and the pupils that open and the sky and the dirt.

My family sold our property there in Washington, and my plans changed. I went back to chasing the horizons and to daring to be myself, I went to the east coast to do more farming.


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## Deleted member 2626 (Mar 18, 2017)

Great again. Meant to save these for reading later but digested them now. Having a job and scheming on the next move in silence I can relate to so easily. I start to gain a quiet animosity for people sometimes at jobs though it is harmless and unintended. keep on trucking


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