Trains, Prairie Fires, and the Happy Fate After the Journal Factory
I’ve been holding off on writing non-music-related blog posts for the last few years because I became bashful about writing anything personal online longer than the 300 characters Bluesky allows. It doesn’t seem like people are blogging much these days compared to the 2000s and 2010s, and I keep seeing variations of “Did the journal factory explode?” It makes me nervous. I already have a few specialties (non-binary, neurodivergent, etc.), and being unfashionably vulnerable feels like it might tip the scale and cast me into culture’s deepest forsaken dark. Because I’m so culturally relevant, don’t you know.
At any rate, I was thinking about how autistic people are stereotyped as loving trains and how I seem to lean in that direction myself (although I’m not medically diagnosed because it’s bizarrely expensive). Trains truly are gorgeous hulking things, but my love of them only exists in the abstract. I’m not terribly interested in seeing real trains in person, and I don’t particularly want to ride one, but I do love them in movies (North by Northwest, Transsiberian, Snowpiercer), old photographs (both of trains and train travel), paint by numbers, extended YouTube train journeys, etc.
The following train video is just over two hours long, but there are some much longer than that:
The last train I rode was the Southern Prairie Railway in Ogema, Saskatchewan several years ago. It is a restored locomotive built in 1945 by General Electric for the Maine Central Railroad. It was fun to see, but it was a bone dry year, and the locomotive’s wheels kept sparking on the hot tracks, setting tiny prairie fires along the way. It made me nervous.
At one point, everyone who was wearing closed toe shoes had to jump off the train to stomp the little fires down, buying time until help arrived, and when that help arrived it made an impressive entrance. The nearest town’s firetruck drove straight through the stubbled field, its fastest route, kicking up a giant cloud of fine dust like it was a Mad Max movie.
Trains made me anxious to begin with, though, so the fires we kept setting only confirmed my feelings about actual trains in person. Trains are like horses: they’re gorgeous in person but surprisingly large, intimidating, and less predictable than I’d like. (In case you are worried, the fires were successfully doused.)
And, by the way, the journal factory did explode. It was terrible, thanks for asking. The most that remained was a charred A5 hardcover, but I couldn’t bring myself to write in it. It reeked of chemical smoke and mildewed glue, acting as a constant reminder of what had been lost that terrible day. Fragments of paper floated down like feathers through the air, each flake flashing hot orange at the edges where hungry embers grazed, the ash melting into sludge on asphalt flooded by fire hoses and busted pipes.
In the olden days, there were paper journals. RIP to Onion, the best cat to ever love me.
I did the only thing I could think to do in the days that followed: I packed up my pens and settled in to wait for a sign, the journalling spirit still aglow within me. It would be many months before my fate began to unfurl, so when that glorious sign finally arrived, my heart beat so hard you could see its lub-dubbing beneath my shirt. I knew that the train video YouTube suggested was my long-awaited sign by the way its spirit rushed wild and bright throughout my body.
Trains. Tell the online people that you like trains (but only in an abstract way).
