It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Alrighty, I'll be the first to admit posting has been intermittent at best. Hopefully this makes up for that. It's no rumination on life, the universe and everything in it. It's a descriptive and unrelated to me as possible. So, hopefully that makes it worth reading. There are pictures, unrelated, below, so be sure to read through this beast (or skip it, for those with an ocular fixation) and see those below. Enjoy. Oh, and yes, the post is purposefully structured and no, I don't intend to give any context. Just an exercise in creative writing devoid of any personal relevance. Hah.

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Spectacular sunrise to the East, on the right side of the train. A light fog hovers close to the ground, particularly over the dewy grass, giving the earth a steaming, spectacular mystic appeal. The pink swiftly grows a ruddy orange, rendering the scene (complete with the militantly industrial skyline) even more unearthly and queer. Streets that lead to nowhere in unpeopled industrial parks, a solitary light in a long, low warehouse, and the mound of slag rising out of the smoky haze cloaking the uneven earth; the forms of a working city rendered captivating by the dim, hopeful light of morning. Throughout, the skeletons of trees waiting for spring to struggle back into life, but for now mournfully standing naked, appearing be defoliated by the toxic products of man’s manufacture. The lifeless apartments stand unlit, their tenants seeming to sleep the sleep of the dead and damned, as they unconsciously mourn the sun’s arrival, dreading the assault of another day in this place of metal and grit. Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. Somehow, just beyond the city’s limits, the ground transitions into cultivated earth. One can only imagine what is produced here, but more than anything the area seems to be an amazingly effective means of disguising the city of grey and black that is hidden in the fog to the north. Incredible. The agricultural apologist for industry, the green mask for grey, the green enabler of chemical abuse, the haphazard balm for the open sore of Milan’s metal canopy and concrete massifs. Even here, though, the demands of the primate’s primacy overflow, amassing garbage and waste. The fields and groves can suddenly give way to massive warehouses, sleeping, awaiting the frenzied approach of a thousand trucks, but for the moment only nursing one hungry 18-wheeler. Out of the fog stretch smokestacks, awaiting the moment when they can belch forth acrid smoke and searing flame. The fog in the distance grows more sinister, concealing the baleful infrastructure of a noxious, noisome beast, an arrogant monster that sneeringly betrays itself at will.

The occasional townships soothingly caress the eyes. They beg you to believe with a bucketful of pastel paint, a weathered bridge and an antiqued train station, the cancer in the mist beyond can be forgotten, at least for the moment. The power and telephone lines weakly imitate the slender trunks bunching along the train’s path. Irrigation canals, usually pacific, are here open wounds, scarring lacerations that bleed water across the countryside. The most vibrant and authentic corner of the town was the sole graveyard, packed with marble headstones decorated with gaudy plastic flowers and oversize ribbons, as the living try to fashion the beds of the dead into something more attractive than their straw mattresses in life. A cell tower stands menacingly amid an industrial farm, seemingly empty of animals itself; the tower’s beacons stretch out, distorted ears trying to eke out the whispers of discontent and pass them to a distant authority. Suddenly, the “countryside” is riven by the cylinders and stacks of some chemical plant, already fuming with a white smoke, declaring the selection of the papacy of industry is complete. White smoke for a blue sky over a black city and lime green fields. The soil, seeming to be broken into fertile brown furrows and vibrantly emerald strips, periodically reveals its pale, stained alkalinity. Even now, the familiar blooming trees, waving their proud pink and saffron creations, defiantly declare the vitality of the earth. But still no humans. The unpaved tracks of the evildoers plod to the horizon, but even as the sun climbs, platinizing the low-lying fog and inspiring the heart with the rhetoric of golden beauty, poetry fails to include people walking among those footprints, now stagnantly gathering seeping sewage. In this entire time, there’s only been a single black car on a distant road, its lone presence even more cryptically menacing than the complete absence of vehicles. That one speaks of a hidden threat, instead of an extinct species. The spreading contrail pretends a plane has passed, just as the concentric circles in the still river deceivingly suggest a stone’s throw.

There. There, people for the first time. Standing on a platform in the station in the shadow of a pair of enormous smokestacks jutting out of a corpulent factory piercing the cold morning sky; unmoving, like the solitary figure in the stationary train, they might have been mannequins artfully arranged to argue persuasively for life. The train peels on and the masquerade passes, unrepeated. The world beyond the cold glass feigns no more animation; the rows of tanker trucks and postal jeeps await the arrival of countless embittered letter-bearers and exhausted truckers. But none are approaching to mount the empty chariots and oxcarts of this modern mechanical empire.

Soon, the people will roust themselves from their hard sleep and return to shatter this darkening illusion, just as the rivers run with whitewater, and both will sweep away the anti-septic poisons of the mirage accompanying the train’s journey. But until then, I content myself with the faceless buses, ghost hamlets, and refuse-strewn banks of the creeks that hurry, fearfully and furtively, under the rail’s way.