Everything is Foreshadowing in Real Time

I traveled for work last weekend, leaving Delmar for Jersey Sunday morning and catching the train to Rhode Island Monday. I hate traveling for work but love taking the train. I usually leave from the space age Moynihan Train Hall at the new Penn Station New York and probably haven’t been in Penn Station, Newark since I was a teenager. The place is a time capsule.

You can still smell tobacco smoke in the platform waiting room’s wood benches, heavy, impressive things worn smooth and oiled shiny over the decades. The long narrow rooms can’t have been updated since the 50s, and I wouldn’t be shocked to know they’re older, given their art deco vibe.

The windows out to the platform opened, and I tried to imagine a scenario where the stuffiness inside that long, narrow, smokey room was so great that people felt the need to open the window to the diesel air.

I don’t really mind the exhaust and diesel. Since I’m not a regular commuter, it’s nostalgiac. It’s pretty much the same with cigarette smoke.

Earlier that day I’d stood on the platform in Hazlet, New Jersey, waiting for my train in the sporadic drizzle and missing smoking. I didn’t crave a cigarette, but I got a ping of nostalgia recalling how I’d budget cigarettes to mark time.

I’m wary of nostalgia because what we miss is the us we were, people with a future that didn’t lead inexorably to where we arrived. People who didn’t know any better, beset by dramatic irony we’re only just getting. Nostalgia lets us be both the author and the audience, imposing control where it never existed.

The trip was nearly five hours, so I took it with the prospect of at least 10 hours of writing (up and back) to offset the zero hours of writing I’d do during the week. When the man six rows behind me started having a loud phone conversation, I knew I was screwed.

For the first hour of his conversation, I thought he was just one of those tedious sports-betting bros. A black guy in his 40s with a neatly trimmed beard wearing a ball cap, he held forth on the prospects of colleges I’d never heard of.

At hour one, the guy in the adjacent seat grabbed one of the conductors and asked if this wasn’t a “Quiet” car. It was, I guess, a subtle appeal for intercession, but it fell on deaf ears. The quiet car was forward, with narrower seats and less legroom.

I accept that people have to talk about football a lot. It’s a disease affecting so many. My best friend in the world knows a shocking amount about Division III college football. I don’t think it’s a moral failing.

ASIDE: While I haven’t fleshed it all out, watching my grandson play recently it occurred to me that, rather than accept how little intellect football takes (at best it’s rote memorization) people add layers of unneeded analysis and complexity.

This man knew a SHOCKING amount about a college called Bryant. So much so that, at hour two of his conversation, when I finally moved from my business class seat into steerage so I could get some work done, I realized he was involved with the team. He wasn’t the Bryant coach, because he had already detailed how that person (whose name escapes me) is the right man for the job. He spoke like he worked in the front office.

Some people believe spirits influence the world. God or luck or whatever pushes experiences and obstacles into our way (or removes them) to ends that only become clear after they’re relevant.

“It was a sign.”

While metaphysics isn’t my bag, thinking in terms of literary devices, while no more useful, is amusing.

We are story-making machines, imposing the best order we can on a sensory cacophony our brains spend an improbable amount of energy filtering. I’m no fatalist, but I love the idea that every action is dripping with foreshadowing.

Driving home from Philadelphia an eon ago, Route 95 North was a parking lot for miles. I was heading south, so it wasn’t my problem, and, once the northbound traffic abated, I mentioned to my daughter that I felt bad for those drivers. They had no idea how awful their commute was about to get.

“I wonder if they’re thinking the same thing about us,” she said. (They weren’t).

Foreshadowing only works if the story already has an end, or at least a trajectory. From that perspective, it doesn’t “happen” in real life but nothing describes the human experience better: wandering in ignorance toward the unknown convincing ourselves that whatever happens was inevitable.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks. I hope to experiment with the chat function and use it as a kind of road journal. We’ll see how it goes. They’ll be shorter and you can respond or not, but I don’t think every update will hit your email.

Speaking of dramatic irony, I had no idea how off-the-rails shit would go here when I promised to finish that Object History story by two weeks ago. I honestly haven’t cut audio like this in a long time and I think I lost the thread. I’d love to get it done this week. Hope springs eternal.

I’ve been doing some ghostwriting on the side, and truly get a kick out of it. It’s funny because everyone seems to think their life story is more interesting to other people than it probably will be, but it’s fascinating to me and not in a gossipy way.

In lots of ways, I’m like a cheap therapist, but in most ways it’s a lot like philosophy, helping people make sense and meaning out of the random occurrences that make up their lives.

Anyway, I’ve developed a taste for it and I’d like to write more about the experience without violating anything I’ve heard, so it might take a while.

TR