328. Coast Starlight

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AMTRAK should fire that bitch Julie. 

What with a train recently getting blocked by snow and a fallen tree, and news of even more storms, I did everything I could do online to learn the status of the train I was supposed to be taking to SLO last week. According to all AMTRAKs online information, the train wasn’t running. There’s a map where you can see the location of all AMTRAK trains, there were no 11 or 14 trains on that map. When I asked specifically, I was told the same thing. When I called the only number AMTRAK offers, I got to chat with Julie, their retarded AI. She confirmed that there was a disruption and promised to connect me with an agent... before disconnecting me. I then tried to call the local stations but was unable to find an operating local phone number. I sent an email and got a reply that someone would get back to me after they opened at 8am -- I needed to be on my bus at 7:50.

I had gotten up at 6am to reconfirm all this and then went back to bed. But then I thought, would even AMTRAK be stupid enough to just leave everyone up in the air like this? I mean they had my email and cell, they should have contacted me if I was going to be left stranded. So I got up, packed up quickly, and headed for the Temporary Transbay Terminal. I didn’t even have time to trim my beard.

I assumed there would be a replacement bus, but here I am on the nonexistent 11 train, getting an interesting tour of the lower part of the East Bay. We followed the inland route through Niles, which feels rather like SoCal in it’s endless suburban squalor. Just went by Levi stadium, to my surprise. I didn’t know the train could take this route. We’re on Caltrain tracks now -- and when did Caltrain get this facility in Santa Clara? Now we are passing where I thought we would join this line, but I guess that’s just a minor siding of some kind. 

There’s a Whole Foods down here? Just to the west of Deridon Station. Even more residential development than last time I was here. There’s really only one little lot of the old industrial section and it seems abandoned and no doubt about to be redeveloped. 

And speaking of changes. The parking lot at Jack London Square, that was filled with food trucks for the Eat Real Festival, is now the site of a new building, residential I think and still under construction, that fills the entire block. We don’t work that event anymore, but this is still a bit of a shock. I wonder if they’re developing the space behind where we put the dumpsters?

2019

I thought this would be the year I reflected back thirty years on one of the best years of my life. But thanks in part to having just read Calypso, where David Sedaris keeps thinking ahead to when he will be “old,” I’m finding myself also thinking back twenty years to when my dad died and then twenty years ahead to when I will be the age my mother was when she died. So twenty years back I was helping my frail, dying parents and in another twenty years I will be that same age, and potentially in that same condition. Given that my sixties so far have not been a walk in the park, I can’t help sharing David Sedaris’s gloom when contemplating the future.

Of course twenty years is a long time. This will be my twelfth year of Greening, which is itself a long time, especially for me in one job. I can imagine doing this for another five years, maybe nine. I can’t really imagine Greening when I’m past 75. There’s a point where the years ahead seem not too few, but possibly too many.

Spring?

I think our cold and rainy weather is coming to an end. I think this not for any meteorological reason, or because of the behavior of large rodents, but because I remembered I had a long, warm raincoat at the back of my little closet. I wore it yesterday and realized I should have been wearing if for weeks now. So, my assumption is the weather will change now. And nothing Descartes wrote can make me think otherwise. (Solipsism reference.)

Last night I learned that the person I worked for at the Apple Multimedia Lab had died in his sleep. I hadn't seen him in a few months less than thirty years. I don't know what health problems he may have had. Since March is the month my dad died in the hospital -- and a Lab friend has a brother currently doing the "dance of death" with his hospital -- my first reaction was to think that this was an unusually good death.

I'm also reading The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble (more on this later), which seems to be shaping up as a fairly dark book about death and aging, so everything is going counter to the spring season -- though I am noticing the green, new growth on the maple tree out my kitchen window. I even walked past a funeral at Notre Dame des Victoires on the way here to the Bank Cafe.