Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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From the Archives - Sleeping Through College

Introduction

Having hosted teenagers in my home recently, I was astonished by how late they stayed up and how late they slept in, and particularly how late they slept in even if they hadn’t stayed up late.  I try to sleep in sometimes but it just doesn’t work.  In fact, even sleeping through the night is becoming a challenge.  I don’t sleep soundly enough, so the cat disturbs me, or the morning sunlight leaking in past the blind, or a distant passing train.  Plus, I can’t get my temperature right.  Often, the soundtrack to my dreams is one heavy metal song for like four hours, so the sheer repetition bores me awake.

The following essay, written 27 years ago during my college days, is about sleeping.  Back then I often wrote little essays much like my modern blog posts (but not, I hope, as good) and photocopied them, shrinking four pages to fit on one sheet of paper, to mail around to friends and family.  This essay is from a series called “How to Be a UCSB Student.”  (By the time I transferred to Berkeley, I’d become wiser—realizing I didn’t know anything—and stopped writing how-to guides.)

How to Sleep Away Your College Days - October 27, 1989

Part One:  Choosing a major

While this may not seem like a normal category to be listed under “sleep,” it actually makes perfect sense.  Just check the chart below, locate the number of hours of sleep you’d prefer, and choose your major accordingly.

Major	Expected Sleep
Anthropology	N/A – nobody really majors in this
Architecture	4-7 hours per night
Art Studio	12-18 hours per night
Electrical Engineering	12-18 hours per week
English	6-8 hours per night
Rhetoric	0 hours per night because you toss and turn debating yourself
Any other major	I don’t actually know ... go do your own research

Part Two:  When is bedtime?

While I have tried to study a variety of majors, my current data is limited to my college household:  English, Art Studio, and Electrical Engineering.

English major:  You can pretty much go to bed when you want to.  I wouldn’t bother trying to sleep before midnight, though.  Until then, the ambient noise in your bedroom will be in the “ear-splitting” range anyway, either due to a party outside or your art studio roommate trying to teach himself the clarinet.

Art Studio major:  There are few guidelines; the only hard-and-fast rule is that you must never retire before 2:00 a.m.  What you do until this time is up to you:  check out a show, paint, try to teach yourself the clarinet, or even nap.  TIP:  If you nap enough during the day, it’ll be easy to stay up late, so on those days you have morning studio you’ll be falling asleep at the easel.  This can only help your work.

Electrical Engineering major:  Bedtime?  Are you kidding?  Try to hit the sack sometime before you collapse from exhaustion — hopefully as close to this point as possible.  Also, try to turn in before your roommate wakes up so you don’t have to compete for the shower.

Part Three:  Snoring

The only advice I can give you about snoring is the same advice your roommates will give you:  roll over and shut the hell up!  But if you’re suffering from a snoring roommate, you have a more difficult task.

An occasional snorer can be silenced with a shove, a thump on the wall, or being awakened and told to roll over and shut the hell up.  But these techniques are useless on a hard-core snorer.  I have studied this case thoroughly, and I’ve found that there is a passive-aggressive motivation behind repeated snoring.  Usually, the snorer is the one who gets the least sleep, and who must get ready for bed in the dark while his roommates sleep peacefully.  Though he may not realize it, the snorer feels a deep-seated hostility for those who have more time to sleep, and subconsciously decides to ruin their slumber by impersonating a one-cylinder Briggs & Stratton 2-stroke.  The more tired he is, the worse his snoring will be.

Obviously, normal techniques are futile, even harmful, when you’re dealing with a hard-core snorer.  If you wake him up, his subconscious hostility will only increase.  Therefore, you have to startle him to a state of semi-consciousness without revealing yourself.  I have found marbles to work beautifully.  I keep a jar by my bed, and when T.T., my E.E. roommate, snores, I throw a marble at him.  The zinging noise it makes on its trajectory, the harmless sting it gives on impact, and the cracking noise it makes as it ricochets into the wall are all excellent snore-deterrents.  The real beauty of this technique is that after a few assaults, T.T. has learned to automatically associate the sound of marbles clinking against a glass jar with pain and noise.  Now, I only have to clink my marbles and the snoring instantly stops—so I can avoid the guilt of having assaulted my roommate.  Fortunately, this Pavlovian effect took hold before T.T. figured out why he kept waking up with marbles in his bed.

Part Four:  Talking in your sleep

I guess this is technically optional, but it sure is fun.  Having one roommate stay up all night to monitor nocturnal speech is sometimes difficult, but luckily T.T. is almost always awake, and C.S., my Art Studio roommate, was thoughtful enough to equip T.T. with a notebook titled “Secret Sayings from the Kingdom of Sleep.” 

Now, you might think we’d want to leave our unconscious utterances unrecorded, in case we say something incriminating.  But we’re all far too nerdy for that.  The classic incriminating utterance would be “Oh, Wendy” as overheard by your girlfriend, Julie.  But we don’t have girlfriends, and if we did, and they heard us say “Oh, Wendy,” they’d be like, “In your dreams!”  They’d never believe us suave enough to cheat, these hypothetical girlfriends.

Here are some actual utterances from our apartment.  I didn’t make these up—they’re taken right from the bedside journal.

9/26/89	“Ladle!  Ladle!  Ladle!”  (yelling)	C.S.
	“No!  I won’t!  Oh, I don’t care anyway.”	D.A.
9/27/89	“More stories... I don’t have the energy.”	D.A.
	“What number did you pick?”	C.S.
10/09/89	“Orange.  It will really shake the very foundation  of the earth.  Plus, uh, Geoff:  the shirt took sanction.”	D.A.
10/12/89	“Somewhere, someone, the wheels are rolling.”	D.A.
	“What a feeling.”	D.A.
10/13/89	(Hysterical laughter)	C.S.
	“Question:  I’m asking you...?  My phone’s all screwed up.”	D.A.
10/20/89	“Grey, brown, dark blue, gloomy... Walk around, saying things like Sartre.”	D.A.
10/25/89	“Check me out!”	T.T.

Part Five:  Dreams

Achieving the most interesting dream is linked closely to diet.  If you eat a lot of garlic right before bed, or a spicy burrito, that should help.  Of course, the real key to memorable dreams is to have a really twisted mind.  I wish I did because my stories would be better, and C.S. wishes he did because his art would be better.  Only T.T. has disturbing dreams, usually involving a midterm he forgot to study for (which of course would never happen in real life). 

Part Six:  Catching up on sleep

For some reason, night isn’t always the best time for sleeping.  The other day, C.S. and I both awoke at 3:00 am for no apparent reason.  After an hour of talking, laughing, and throwing marbles at our resident snorer, we decided sleep was futile.  I studied while C.S. zoned out.  Of course, this sleep must be made up at some point — usually as soon as possible.  For me, the hours between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm are best suited for catch-up sleep.  It just so happens, my classes fall within the same time interval! 

If you can time it right, you’ll only sleep during lectures.  Typically there are so many students, the professor won’t notice.  Sit pretty far back because most of the professors are nearsighted from a career spent staring at a book, equation, or painting.  But then, targeting lectures is not always possible; after all, sleep makes its own rules.  

I fell asleep in French class last week, my elbow on the desk and my head propped in my hand, and Molly, the cute blonde next to me, knocked my elbow out so I went sprawling, knocking my books to the floor.  Amazingly, the instructor didn’t chew me out or anything.  Either she’s a romantic, and took Molly’s treachery for flirting, or assumed I was up all night phoning my relatives in earthquake-ridden San Francisco.  Or maybe it’s because this instructor is young, and thinks back fondly on how, not so long ago, she herself slept through college. 

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Keep Calm & Read These Quotations

Introduction

In a souvenir shop in London some years back, my wife bought a cool mug bearing a likeness of the British “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” poster.

This poster was originally created during World War II and was one of “a number of morale boosting posters that would be displayed across the British Isles during the testing times that lay ahead” (Wikipedia).  While two other posters were widely circulated, “the plan in place for this poster was to issue it only upon the invasion of Britain by Germany. As this never happened, the poster was never officially seen by the public.”

For the last few years I’ve noticed this iconic poster popping up all over the place, along with endless variations on it (my favorite being “FREAK OUT AND RUN AMOK”).  Last Christmas, I received a KEEP CALM desk calendar, with a new motivational quotation for each day.

In this post I review the good, the bad, and the ugly among these, so as to alternately uplift, demoralize, and challenge you.  I close with some ruminations on whether words alone can really lift sunken spirits.

Keep calm and mull these over

“It will never rain roses:  when we want to have more roses, we must plant more trees.” —George Eliot

I liked this so much I read it to my wife and older daughter.  They looked at me quizzically and asked, “Since when do roses grow on trees?”  Only then did I think about it.  Of course they don’t.  They grow on bushes.  We even have a word for that:  rosebush.  Didn’t George Eliot have an editor?  What a distraction that “trees” bit is, especially for people better versed in botany than I.

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“Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by traffic from both sides.” –Margaret Thatcher

This one is pretty silly.  Getting knocked down by traffic from one side is bad enough and should be avoided.  Moreover, the main problem here is standing in the road. Roads are for moving. Nobody should be standing in the road.  The whole metaphor buckles under its own weight.

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“Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.”  —Yoda

This one is great and probably the best line of dialogue from all those Star Wars movies.  I often recite this one for my kids, but this backfires because they beg me to say it in the Yoda voice.  So I do, and then they beg me to say more things in the Yoda voice, and before I know it I’m doing my “Yoda sommelier” routine and my throat gets all sore.

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“In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.” —Montesquieu (French political philosopher)

This is a great point and I have firsthand experience with it.  I almost quit bike racing at the end of 1984, but for some reason stuck with it and the next season finally had my first (albeit small-scale) success.  On the flip side, it’s important to be able to recognize when you’ve tried hard enough and it’s time to quit.  Just look at gambling addicts or rabid Bernie acolytes who stage protests even after the candidate himself has moved on.  Depressing.

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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why?  Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?  Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that shit.” —George Carlin

This strikes me as very true.  If everybody sat around dreaming and asking “what if” all the time, nothing would get done. On the other hand, if everybody is too busy with repetitive tasks to sit back and wonder, innovation will never happen. Surely this double message was Carlin’s intention; once the initial belly-laugh is over we say, “Wait a second….”

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“No matter how tall the mountain, it cannot block out the sun.” —Chinese proverb 

The problem with this notion is that it’s demonstrably false. Even a low ridge of mountains can block out the sun well ahead of when you’d expect the sunset to  occur.  Last spring I was doing an evening mountain bike ride with my daughter, and I’d looked up the sunset and civil twilight times in advance.  But sure enough, the Berkeley hills, though reaching a peak elevation of less than 2,000 feet, blocked out the sun and we had to descend in the near-dark.  For me the metaphorical idea here has been forever sullied.

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“Think nothing done while aught remains to do.” —Samuel Rogers, English poet.

This is probably the most demoralizing thing I’ve ever read, because of course something always remains to do.  I have a hard enough time reflecting on my life without this bit of advice.  Imagine thinking of this when you’re on your death bed.  “I guess since I never finished that Master’s degree, it doesn’t matter that I was a good family man.  Damn it fuck it all.”  Thanks a lot, Samuel.

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“There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great.” —Woodrow Wilson

This is not very inspiring to anybody who aspires to be a writer, or makes his living writing. Those poor journalists ... haven’t they suffered enough, without “advice” like this?  Frankly, I think Wilson was speaking mainly for himself.  He was never very good with words, like when he justified America’s refusal to join the war effort by saying, “There’s a such thing as being too proud to fight.”  What the hell does that mean?  You know what?  Just shove it, Wilson.

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“Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.” —Chief Seattle, Duwamish chief

I like this quote, as it can help us to realign our perspective and not overestimate our importance in the cosmos.  My only problem with this quote is that, every time I glimpsed it on my desk calendar, I misread it as “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely stranded in it.”  That misreading has eclipsed the real quote in memory.  Lately, the idea of being stranded in the web of life has been flashing across my mind a lot.  I can just picture the spider approaching….

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 “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” —Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet 

I think this is really good advice.  Frankly, I get annoyed when this or that movement gets all excited and says “We’re gonna change the world!”  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to fix the world, but isn’t it more realistic to do what you can, with limited fanfare, and hope your albeit modest efforts make a noticeable difference?  (It’s not cheating to point out your results, by the way.  I like to tell my kids, “Watch, I’m going to singlehandedly save the planet by composting this teabag.”  They stare back blankly, perhaps thinking something like, “No dad is so dorky that he can block out the sun.”) 

My only issue with this quote is that it brings to mind the Michael Jackson song “Man in the Mirror,” which, though a great song, is just too catchy and gets stuck in my head so before long I’m tweaking the lyrics out of sheer boredom and singing, “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then bag your face!” and my kids are giving me that look again.

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“Know how sublime a thing it is/ To suffer and be strong.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 19th-century American poet

I absolutely love this quote.  It reminds us that suffering can improve us.  (No, I’m not going to trot out that famous Nietzsche quote because I think it’s too often completely untrue.  I prefer my inversion of it, “That which does not make you stronger may eventually kill you.”)

Longfellow’s quote here is one of the rare ones that I kind of wish could have come from an athlete, such as the (alas, departed) Mohammed Ali.  As sublime images go, picturing Ali in the ring does a better job than picturing a poet at his desk.   But that isn’t to say poets don’t suffer.  Writing certainly involves suffering (and remember that next time you’re halfway through one of my blog posts and feeling sorry for yourself).

What does Longfellow in particular know of suffering?  Actually, quite a lot.  He was severely burned trying to save Fanny, his second wife, from burning to death, using his own body to smother the flames. Does this action inform the quote above?  Well, not exactly.  He wrote these lines years before trying to rescue Fanny, when he’d just begun his 7-year courtship of her.  The suffering he mentions here may just have been blue balls. ]

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“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.” —Mark Twain

I like this quote.  It’s less stuffy than “in the kingdom of the blind…” and gives us the smug satisfaction of looking down on fools.  But it’s not very inspirational, is it?  It reminds us that our success is really just a matter of failing less than the next guy, and though we should be reminded of this, I don’t find the thought very comforting.

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“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Another albeit great quote that doesn’t, alas, buck me up very much.  Yes, humans are resilient and adaptable, but I can’t celebrate this idea without thinking of even more adaptable creatures like pigeons and roaches … not the most inspiring role models.

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“Where there is doubt, faith;/ Where there is despair, hope;/ Where there is darkness, light;/ Where there is sadness, joy.” —St. Francis of Assisi.

Look, I’ll be the first to grant that St. Francis of Assisi was a great guy.  But this utterance isn’t inspirational or profound. It’s a simple set of contrasts that together mean nothing.  What’s next?  “Where there is less filling; tastes great; / Where there is Dark Side, Force;/ Where there is gremlin, smurf’”?

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“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” —Colin Powell

Holy shit, this is a frightening notion coming from any military leader.  I won’t comment on Powell’s track record—politics bores me and I have no insight or opinion here—but remember the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, from history class?  This was a textbook case of Groupthink—the tendency of well-meaning team players to appear optimistic despite inner qualms, so that a group will tend to behave far more boldly than it ought to.

I’m reminded of a Kung Fu episode when the old sage hands Grasshopper a pencil and says, “Break this in half,” which he does.  Then he hands him a cluster of 50 pencils and says, “Try now,” and of course Grasshopper can’t do it.  Nice idea, but you ever try to write with 50 pencils at once?  Some forces shouldn’t be multiplied and personally I find nothing inspirational about an idea that scares the shit out of me.

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“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

This is very wise, I think.  When I first read this, I thought about my wife and how she loves pancakes enough to risk getting undercooked ones.  During our cross-country bike tour, whenever we breakfasted at a diner she’d order pancakes, and 90% of the time they were undercooked and gluey.  Fortunately, I always ordered eggs so I could trade with her.  Ever since that tour, eating undercooked pancakes makes me feel oddly happy.

Of course this is a nice idea when you’re just talking about fricking pancakes, but it’s a lot harder when you’re actually sad.  Foer’s quote doesn’t boost my morale, exactly … I’m reminded to confront my sadness, though I know this won’t necessarily lead to happiness.  To assume that it will is to commit the logical fallacy of converse error, which bright people like you and Foer know better than to do.  So we embrace sadness, but with no guarantee of relief.

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“Hope against hope, and ask till ye receive.” —James Montgomery, British educator and poet

I don’t like this one.  Logically, “hope against hope” is a quagmire.  Hope is a feeling, and if we don’t feel it, we can’t simulate it through intellectual gymnastics.  And “ask till ye receive” is so weak and supplicating.  It’s also annoying to the person (and perhaps even the deity) fielding the entreaties.  I rue the day I told my kids “It never hurts to ask.”  I was imagining them asking for a job, or some kind of retail discount.  I wasn’t thinking of them haranguing me for lemonade or something when I’m already shelling out for burgers.  Now I find myself repeating a far more useful saying of my own:  “Volume and repetition are not sound rhetorical techniques.”

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“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.” —Booker T. Washington, American writer and educator

This is good, but sounds kind of stuffy.  “One” is so formal, and there just seem to be too many words here.  I read this to my teenaged daughter and I’m pretty sure she fell asleep halfway through.  Sensing a teachable moment I discussed the quote with her, and we came up with what I think is a much improved version:  “Success isn’t just where you got in life, but how much gnar you shredded along the way.”

That’s better, I think, but is it inspirational?  The problem is, success doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness.  So many of the most (conventionally) successful people are successful because they’re unhappy.   Their insatiable thirst for success is perhaps rooted in the mistaken belief that happiness will follow success.  To them, this quote might be depressing; they might lash out at Fate for not giving them better obstacles to overcome.  And those of us who acknowledge the disconnect between success and happiness won’t be inspired at all.  Say, for example, we’re feeling sad about death.  How could the idea of success even figure in?

The problem with aphorisms

Where morale is concerned, the problem with quotations is that mere words, delivered on a page (or a screen) to a solitary reader, tend to fall flat.  They’re just advice, given in a disembodied voice and usually lent some cred by an authority figure you’ve never met.  My desk calendar is fine food for thought, but doesn’t achieve the goal of the poster on which it is based.

The idea of the poster campaign, on the other hand, is excellent.  The Brits are a famously stoic people, and stoicism—to a point (cf. Foer)—can be useful, especially when it’s shared.  In that sense, the collective stoicism engendered by the poster campaign is a “force multiplier.”  (There’s no pitfall of Groupthink here because feeling, not strategy, is influenced.)

Just to be clear:  sharing mere words is not the point.  Social media is not a functional conduit for a morale-building campaign because it does not involve actual human contact—it’s just another disembodied delivery mechanism for words.  The British poster campaign works more like this:  you’re a Londoner, and your city is being bombed, and you’re hunkering in a fallout shelter with scores of your countrymen.  It’s terrifying, but you have the solidarity of your mates and the stoicism is infectious.  Before you know it, you’re all singing—yes, actually singing!—and then you catch a glimpse of one of these morale-building posters.  No, the words are not ingenious (indeed, “keep calm and carry on” is less profound than most of the above quotations), but the shared experience imbues the poster with more meaning than it had before—so that the next day, when you’re walking through rubble in your war-torn city, you see one of those posters and are reminded of the camaraderie of the bomb shelter, and maybe this helps just a bit.

Of course you and I are not overcoming this particular obstacle, and most of us aren’t British.  But suppose you’re grieving … I still think there’s special value in, say, sitting with an identically aggrieved friend, sipping good beer, talking a bit but not incessantly, gazing passively across the room at the faintly luminous dial on his 1970s-era stereo tuner, not knowing anything profound but at least knowing you’re not alone.

Postscript

My KEEP CALM desk calendar obviously lasted another five months after this post was written. Here is the sequel: Keep Calm II - The Spawning.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Mourning and the Digital Age

Introduction

This will necessarily be the soberest thing I’ve ever posted.

A good friend of mine died last Saturday, trying to rescue his six-year-old daughter after she’d been swept off the beach by a rogue wave.  Both father and daughter drowned.  This indescribably sad accident is not an appropriate topic for this blog, and yet I cannot fathom writing about anything else.  Nothing else seems to matter right now, and to write on a lighter topic would be to ignore my sadness.  It’s the elephant in the room I feel I should confront, so that maybe, eventually, I can go back to more quotidian topics.

So, I’ve decided to come at this thing sideways and examine the more general notion of how the digital age affects the grieving process.  I find I have a lot to say about that.

Getting the news

There’s no good way to receive such horrible news, but some ways are more awful than others.  I learned over the phone from a friend on my bike club, who’d been contacted by a journalist looking for background on our late friend.  At least when a friend breaks it to you, there’s a moment to brace yourself as he gasps or sobs, and he’s bound to treat the news with the delicacy it demands.  Contrast that to finding out via the Internet.  I ended up googling the story because I simply could not understand what I was hearing.  The words were probably strung together adequately, but what they communicated didn’t seem possible.

It’s really jarring, and tacky, to see clickbait alongside such a tragic news story.  “Suri Cruise Looks So Grown Up on Set of Katie Holmes’ TV Show,” and “[Shocking] Remove Your Eye Bags & Wrinkles In 1 Minute!” accompanied the online news of this drowning.  As a friend of the bereaved family, I’m struggling to hang on to my belief that life is still good and meaningful, and yet there’s all this added evidence to the contrary.  These news websites are complete strangers to tact and decorum.

Then there are the typical Internet trolls, like the self-righteous shit-for-brains who commented (inaccurately), “there had been warnings of adverse surf conditions ... these were no ‘rogue’ waves.”  There was no advisory that day, and this jerk wasn’t there, and why does he do this?  What kind of sad sack makes sport of casting judgment on victims of a terrible accident?  And right below this, another comment:  “my neighbor’s step-sister makes $75 an hour on the computer.  Visit the website [...].”

Social media

I went to a website designed to collect tributes to the victims, which is fine, but everywhere I looked were rows or columns of buttons to share these tributes (and photos, etc.) via Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc.  As somebody who avoids social media, I don’t like the idea that if I died, I might suddenly have representations of myself scattered across all of these platforms and I wouldn’t be around to protest.  This site also featured a “Donate” button to give money (presumably to the family).  Not all sorrow can be assuaged by money and I doubt this family did anything to set that up.  In the absence of a closely managed strategy—which I doubt any grieving family has the time or energy for—I could see a platform like this taking on a life of its own.

I did get some comfort from the tributes and shows of support on the website, but then I came to a post from someone who, by her own admission, didn’t even know the family but was nevertheless offering emotional support to my friend’s widow.  I found this jarring and a little chilling.  Perhaps I’m not the only one who did.  For whatever reason, the page has now been reconfigured to block anonymous readers, by requiring users to create a login.  I’m not quite ready to do that; after all, sites like this tend to overwhelm me pretty quickly.  The last thing I need is perpetual spam stemming from a glancing engagement with a web portal.

My point is, digital technology like clickbait, social media, likes, and links can creep up on us—or seem to fall suddenly out of the sky—without waiting for us to decide whether it’s good for us.  How many parents had the luxury of contemplating the influence of Facebook and Instagram on their teenagers, before those teens immersed themselves in this virtual world?  Who foretold this worldwide phenomenon?  (Answer:  nobody.  It wasn’t a phenomenon at first; it was just a technology.)  When it comes to grieving, how does the digital world fit in?  Would the healthiest thing be to close the laptop, power off the phone, and mourn in peace?

Who knows.  I do consider whether my personal inclination to opt out of social media is appropriate in this case.  After all, there are instances when it becomes antisocial to extend one’s neo-Luddite principles too far.  For example, for an adult in the corporate world not to have a cell phone is no longer tenable; we’re expected to be reachable.  And to not have e-mail in any industrialized society is nowadays absurd.  And so, when my bike club decided a tribute to our late teammate would be appropriate for our club’s Facebook page, and asked me to write it, I immediately stepped up.  It would be callous not to acknowledge the tragic death of our friend/teammate and his daughter, and I welcomed the chance to give this statement the thoughtfulness and delicacy it deserves.

Digital storage

Where the conveniences of digital life can become really wrenching is in the realm of digital caches and other storage.   On my smartphone right now, when I open Contacts, my dead friend’s name is right at the top on the “Frequently contacted” tab.  He’s also on the first page of my chat history (not deep correspondence, but just the most perfunctory logistical stuff like “Yo, I’m at Fieldwork”).  In the main phone app, there he is on the Recents tab.  In the Voicemail app, I still have a years-old message from him, when he called to see if I’d really been hauled away from Grizzly Peak Boulevard in an ambulance.  I originally kept the message as a handy way to remember exactly when that happened, but now I don’t want to delete the voicemail because it’s the only one from him that I have.  He’s all over my phone, like a ghost.

Of course most of these relics will be gradually pushed down the stack until they slip out of Recents altogether ... but that’s actually kind of disturbing too, like a bad omen.  Will my friend will be similarly pushed out of my memory by all the new stuff coming in?  (Of course not, but grieving isn’t a rational process.)  And what of my friend’s programmed entries in my contact list and phone book?  What about his presence in my archived message history, and that saved voice-mail?  I cannot bring myself to delete these.  How could I?   Sometimes humanity trumps efficiency—and perhaps it ought to.

My e-mail archive is another quandary.  I’ve got almost 700 messages from him I could sift through, looking for ways to jog my memory ... but is that healthy?  And that’s not even the entire trove; it’s only what’s stored in my current e-mail software.  I have some other virtual file cabinet I could probably delve into if I bothered to try.  At what point does this kind of sentimental, digitally assisted reminiscing shade toward the obsessive?  Obviously it would be weird and nutty to build a shrine for a departed friend, but that’s kind of what a digital archive is.  The difference is, the artifacts are enshrined automatically so we have access to them whether we’re pack rats or not.  Is it healthy to take advantage of this, or is it the emotional equivalent of picking a scab?

Browsing through old photos is even more captivating.  I hunted through my archive as part of the bike club tribute project, and was plunged ever deeper into memory, which naturally intensified the sense of loss.  How young we both look in that early photo!  (Subtext:  we go back so far, and now—nothing!)  Perhaps most bittersweet of all, for reasons I can’t quite grasp, is the last photo I have of my late friend, which is on my phone as well as my PC.  I distinctly remember him chiding me for my recklessness in riding past this bull to get the shot.

Maybe this photo makes me sad because it’s so recent, I didn’t even get the chance to e-mail it to him.

One of the hallmarks of our digital age is how we keep hopscotching from one brief thought to the next, based on this or that alert, picture, or other stimulus.  Such digital saturation is notorious for precluding careful contemplation.  Perhaps this is why I keep catching myself being self-indulgent—too wrapped up in my own grief to look at the bigger picture.  This family lost a father, a husband, a daughter, a sister, a brother, and a son.  I only lost a friend.  My grief is entwined with a more complicated feeling, something like guilt.

This feeling hit me like a hammer when, sitting at my desk and staring into space, I noticed my slide-show screen-saver start up.  It picks photos at random from my hard drive and displays them for 5 seconds apiece. At first the photos of my wife and kids, going back so many years, started to cheer me up—oh, remember when the girls were small, and wore dresses, and held hands?—and then I had this horrifying thought:  what if I had lost a daughter and a spouse?  Suddenly this slide show would be a torment.  Instead of showcasing family—the best part of life—it would highlight what has been taken away.  The entire photo archive, along with the e-mail archive and all those artifacts littering the smartphone, and so many posts and photos scattered across all those social media platforms ... all of these would intensify the grief.  What a torment.

I suppose I should try to coalesce these thoughts into some kind of pithy conclusion, but nothing is coming to me but the sense that it’s time to save this file and power down. 

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.