Archive for the ‘AMTRAK’ Category
unsatisfying uluations
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scuttling, always scuttling, that’s me. Filthy black raincoat fluttering in the wind, camera in hand, shoes scraping along the sidewalk. It’s horrible to behold, my countenance, I’ve been told. I dread passing before a piece of silvered glass.
The good news is that a humble narrator was recently engaging in a bit of calisthenic stretching and one of the tendons in my trick left foot shifted and made a sound not unlike a cello’s base string being struck with a hammer. Ever since, the pain and tenderness in the left foot and ankle has ameliorated a bit, which has just been awesome. Of course, I’m in my 50’s, so my right hip immediately began to hurt instead.
I like to refer to this phenomena as my pain squirrel, which finds a different branch of the body’s tree to sit upon every day. My physical form is like a meaty Yggdrasil, with the Pain Squirrel Ratatoskr found above, and the Death Serpent Níðhöggr chewing his way up through my roots from below.
I have an entirely pedantic inner life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, I was out for a short walk, which these days sees this shattered husk walking the equivalent of four to five subway stops in one direction and then looping back towards HQ. It’s malevolent, winter weather, and my particular “kryptonite” revolves around cold.
Partially, this is due to the medications prescribed by the team of doctors who labor to maintain my homeostasis. The ichor flowing though my circulatory system tends to run away from cold, rendering the extremities cold and pale. If I’m out for a long walk on a very cold night, it looks a great deal like this when I return home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nearing HQ, this scene greeted me nearby a construction site. Obviously, somebody does not grasp the concept nor practice of municipal recycling, on a fundamental level.
More tomorrow.
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fantastic figment
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in NYC, just as the Omicron variant Covid surge began, one put all thoughts about holiday merrymaking and socializing out of his head. You can’t argue with a logarithmic curve, so the logic of the entire Covid period – at this particular moment, it’s been 1,057 days, if my math is correct – was followed. Go out at night, by myself, and wander around the industrial zones where I’m going to encounter few if any other people. As the old Christmas cartoon would offer: put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking out the door.
Good golly, Miss Molly, are we ever going to escape from this looping form of existence? Everyday is like the last day, same old, same old. When this is all over, I’m going to start wearing different colored clothes or something.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This particular evening in early December was quite a cold one. My simple desire was to get some exercise, but I was engaging in a “short walk.” For me, that meant heading out from Astoria, crossing the Sunnyside Yards to Skillman Avenue and following that to Queens Plaza and then back down Northern Blvd. towards HQ. Just under three miles, round trip, I guess?
Was wondering, while shooting these, if I had recently been riding on any of those trains down there. Sigh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunnyside Yards is a railroad coach yard. What that means is that you can’t catch a train here, despite it being an 180 and change square acres Federal and State railroad facility. The purpose of the Sunnyside Yards is to provide holding areas and turn around trackage for commuter rail that’ve already been to Manhattan. You see New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad, and Amtrak units down there regularly. Every now and then you’ll see some train set branded with Pennsylvania colors. I always figure they must’ve gotten lost when I see them. “Queens, what do you mean Queens? We must’ve taken a wrong turn at Lancaster… Crap.”
The yards are divvied up between the various entities housed here. The official owner is Amtrak, but MTA has sway over significant acreages of the place. They’ve recently finished building out an enormous new holding yard on the north side of the facility, which is a part of the East Side Access project.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator famously maintains a catalog of the holes in Amtrak’s fences which are large enough to fit a camera lens into. The best of the Federal holes were cut for surveyor usage. They’re generally the size of a deck of cards, these holes, but are far and few between. There’s also tears in the chain link fencing, which is also fairly easy to work with. Then, there’s the set of holes formed by weathering and material failure. Those are irregular and difficult to use, but I manage.
The shot above comes from one of the latter kind, where – I think – what must have been a vehicle accident caused a steel plate to bend away from the rest of the fence structure. Holes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back onto Skillman Avenue nearby Queens Plaza, where I spent a few minutes pondering whether or not I wanted to head down to Dutch Kills for a lookie loo. One decided not to. It was, after all, freezing out.
One pointed his toes north and east, and started shlepping back to the rolling hillocks of almond eyed Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Along the way, a discarded Book of Psalms and pile of Cheerios caught my attention. Fascinating, the way that these manufactured items end up where they do once somebody is done with them.
One thing you notice, upon returning to NYC from nearly anywhere else, is how dirty it is. Piles of crap are everywhere.
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simpering inanities
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A brief stop over in Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg saw Amtrak change out the crew on my Pittsburgh to NYC journey. Pennsylvania’s Capitol, Harrisburg, offered a 15 minute or so “leg stretch” and “smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em” interval, and half the train staggered out into the daylight to do one thing or the other and sometimes both. We had collectively boarded the train at 7:15 in the morning, after all.
After the bells rang and we all filed back onboard, an announcement that the cafe car was reopened occurred, and a humble narrator purchased a range of comestibles for luncheon and settled back into the seat I had been assigned. After quaffing some coffee and eating an Amtrak Hot Dog, I got back to pondering my fate and staring out the window while watching America roll past. The camera was gathered out of its sack, and I got back to looking for interesting sights.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The landscape in Pennsylvania fascinates me. The Appalachian Mountain range and plateau is incredibly ancient, is a geologic feature which Pennsylvania is situated on the northern reaches of, and it dates back some 480 million years to the Ordovician Period – which is when ocean critters first started exploring dry land. Formed by the action of tectonic plate compression when the super continent Pangaea begin to split up, the Appalachia once rose as high as the Alps or Rockies do today. They’re referred to as “folded mountains” and the reason that all that coal is buried in them is due to their presence during the highly forested Carboniferous era (that’s when the giant dragonflies were around, and you had centipedes the size of school buses sliding around in the swamps). An absolutely staggering amount of effort and expenditure in the 19th and 20th century saw Americans burrowing and mining into, blasting rights of way through, and building upon and around the Appalachia Range.
Fascinating. Really. Mountains older than the dinosaurs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At 30th street Station in Philadelphia the now familiar dance of changing out the locomotive engine from the diesel powered model to the electrified “coGen” unit used for the Northeast Corridor was enacted by the Amtrak people. They did their thing, and waved lanterns at each other, and then it was time to get back onboard again and head back to “home sweet hell.” This was another “stretch your legs” break and a good number of people onboard took advantage of it.
A humble narrator settled back into the assigned seat, and picked up the camera. I affixed the foam collar to my lens and began passing the time by shooting through the windows again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s Philadelphia, America’s consolation prize, pictured above.
After spending an entire day on the train, and eating two Amtrak meals along the way, I was quite ready to return to the grinding existential nightmare of a dystopian shithole which I call “home.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Upon my return to Penn Station, I ducked outside onto 8th avenue to breathe a bit of what passes for fresh air in Midtown before heading back to Astoria on the subway. It was rush hour, and despite Covid, the subways were quite busy. Unlike the last time I exited from that door pictured above, this time I didn’t see anyone masturbating into a street grate. There was a guy who offered to sell me something, but I’m not sure what he was offering. Could have been a gold chain, or crack, or sex. Wasn’t interested, me.
A quick ride on the E line got me out of Dodge, and soon I was at Queens Plaza. As is usually the case with me, as soon as the train entered Queens, I felt a rush of energy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The final leg of my long journey arrived at Queens Plaza just as I did, a local R line which would carry me to Astoria.
Our Lady of the Pentacle had arrived home the night before, and had graciously obtained food stuffs which were waiting for me back at HQ. I tore into a bagel like it had done something to my mom, and began downloading all of the photos you’ve been looking at for the last two weeks onto the computer for processing.
I felt a need, and a desire, to listen to this song while setting myself up for the labor of developing them.
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Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
debased idiom
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Riding Amtrak gives you not just a series of interesting if brief windows into other people’s lives and communities, it also gives you a bit of time to let your mind wander. Pondering minutiae and considering the unconsidered, as it were. I spent part of my time planning for future arguments.
I polished the current logical fallacy which is offered to several of the unvaccinated people that I’m friends with. Said argument revolves around their usage of illegal street drugs, and how they’d never ask the guy they’re buying weed or coke from what the circumstances of the stuff’s origin were. I can tell you with some authority that Marijuana in particular is absolutely doused with pesticide by most growers, in order to maximize yield and to make the risk of discovery by law enforcement one worth taking. Cocaine is manufactured, literally, using gasoline. It’s “stepped on” and diluted with other powdery substances several times before that dude with the braids shows up at the bar to deliver the end product gram to you. Beyond illegal or illicit substances, do you actually know what’s in that shot of whiskey that nice fellow behind the bar just poured for you? How about the contents of a bottle of soda, or a fast food burger? You do know it was Dr. Fauci who recommended that condoms be used to avoid getting AIDS, right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Man, oh man, do I ever want to do a multi day car trip around central Pennsylvania just for the pursuit of some pure landscape photography. These woods seem endless, but they’re punctuated regularly by bridges and other 19th and 20th century infrastructure. So many rivers… waterfalls… mountains…
Who was the first cave guy that found a puddle of melt water, with hops and grain rotting and fermenting within, and decided to drink it, and then soon got drunk? More importantly, who’s the friend he had that decided to try it too, after the first guy described his experience with that proto beer? I know it was a group of guys. Had to be. Wine is something I’ll hand discovery of over to the cave ladies, but beer? Definitely cave guys.
Also, there were cave bears, cave lions, and cave men. All were bigger and stronger than their modern descendants. Recently, I learned that there were cave ducks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in prior posts, one was shooting out of the window of a sometimes speeding Amtrak train while enjoying an eight hour long trip from Pittsburgh back to NYC.
I always say that the most valuable thing about a railroad’s right of way isn’t the train or the tracks. It’s the real estate directly surrounding it. I’ve asked several rail people and a Congressman or two about the land surrounding these rights of way. Federally administered but mostly privately owned, there’s a mandated amount of clear space surrounding the actual tracks. This clear space’s purpose is obvious – you don’t want trees or other vegetation to grow too close to the travel path. My big idea, however, is to attach a mechanism to the back of the train which spews seed balls of native pollinator plants, as the train travels, and at predesignated spots. It wouldn’t be anything other than an engineering problem to make sure the seed balls land outside of the designated clear area, and even if only 10% of the seed balls “take,” you’d be creating thousands of miles of pollinator plant strips all over the country. All in all, another brick in the environmental wall.
Gordian Knot, lords and ladies, Gordian Knot.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Most of the humans on the train were sleeping, which is something that one such as myself cannot do in public unless I’m absolutely exhausted. I fell asleep on my last trip to Pittsburgh back in the fall, but I’d more or less been awake and very active for nearly 28 hours by then.
I’m legendarily paranoid and cautious. Drives people around me crazy, actually. Before I go to bed at night, every door lock is tested to ensure it’s locked tight. That AirBNB I was staying in back in Pittsburgh had a chair sitting in front of the door when I went to sleep. When I’m out walking around, my habit – at least once every block – is to stop and turn to see if some malign jackhole might be following me. I look three times when crossing a street, not twice. Having grown up in NYC in the 1970’s and 80’s – this sort of behavior is something that became a part of my DNA early on. People walk around like they’re safe or something. You’re not. Sleeping in public? When you don’t absolutely have to? Are you nuts? I was tempted to steal some guys shoes just to teach him a lesson.
I’m similarly tempted towards grand larceny when I see some idiot pull their car over into a bus stop, so as to pick something up at a bodega, while going inside and leaving their car running. It’s really all I can do not to jump in the thing and drive away. Brooklyn!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Amtrak trip from Pittsburgh to NYC is governed by two “layover” stops wherein the cafe car closes and you’ll see different crew members take over the various duty assignments. Saying that, you’ve got about 4 hours to wait after leaving Pittsburgh before you arrive at the first of those stops in Pennsylvania’s Capitol – Harrisburg. The second long stop is in Philadelphia, about two hours later.
I began building a mental list of Anglo Saxon versus Norman French food names. Mutton and Lamb are the exemplars on this list. Same meat, coming from the same critter. One is what the conquered called the stuff, and the other is what the conquerors called it. To this day, mutton is cheaper than lamb. There’s a lot of hidden history buried in the English Language, which is usually a leave behind from some long ago war. Is it Fowl or Poultry for lunch, or is it boar or pork for dinner? When you go to sleep will you be wearing pajamas? Going on vacation to the country, will you stay in a bungalow or a cabin, an inn or a hotel?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In accordance with my newly adopted ideology of sociopathy, I made it a point of not initiating conversation with any of my fellow travelers. They might have said something that caused me to care about something, so I avoided the possibility entirely. This “nothing matters, nobody cares” thing is great. You’re never disappointed by your fellow man this way, since you start the day by acknowledging that everything is shit. It’s quite European, this. I’m nearly a Frenchman at this stage.
I did spend a short interval poking at my phone, and I looked into a cottage industry which allows you to enact mean spirited but not illegal vengeance on those you dislike. You can anonymously send somebody a bag of gummy dicks, for instance. There’s also a service which sends a glitter bomb anonymously. A spring board mechanism within, holding a substantial amount of glitter upon it, is actuated by opening the shipping carton’s lid. This causes a cloud of glitter to explode into your interior space, and that’s awesome. There’s another one – a personal favorite – which uses a similar mechanism to distribute 5,000 live crickets about your crib when the box is opened. Good times.
More tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
absurdly slight
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One awoke at the appointed time, bathed, drank a coffee and headed over in the pre dawn hours to Pittsburgh’s Amtrak Station. The train was scheduled to depart at 7:30 a.m. and as is my habit – I was there an hour early. About 7:15, boarding began and the Amtrak conductor indicated which car they wanted me in.
It seems that the way they handle things on Amtrak is that they group passengers together according to where they’re going. Given that I was heading all the way to Moynihan/Penn Station in NYC, that meant I was in the last car on the train. One settled into a seat and got comfortable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wasn’t terribly well prepared – creature comforts wise – for the 8 hour trip, which meant that I was going to be getting my sustenance from Amtrak’s cafe car. They have pretty decent coffee, and a variety of high fat and sugar content offerings. Cakes and candies, juice and soda, even booze. Truth be told, the offerings reminded me a lot of the crap that I’d jam into my face hole back when I used to work overnight shifts in midtown Manhattan. I stuck with the coffee, mostly, but this time around instead of the Amtrak hamburger, I had the Amtrak hot dog. My advice? Go for the burger. It’s gross, but less so than the hot dog.
I spent my journey staring out the window again. This time, however, I used a piece of my homemade camera gear – a foam collar for my lens – to shoot random images out the window as the train ran along the tracks.
All of the shots gathered using this method have been given a different crop ratio than I normally use. It’s to distinguish them from properly composed photos, as these are basically “run and guns.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I sat in a weird posture with my torso twisted towards the window, the camera supported by the left arm while the right one worked the shutter. My head was turned in opposition to the torso, looking ahead in the direction the train was traveling. The camera had the foam collar on the lens, and the collar was pressed directly against the glass while avoiding having the actual lens make contact. When it looked like something interesting was coming up, I’d just start shooting. The exposures were something like 1/5,000th of a second, so as to freeze the scene at a fairly high ISO. Amtrak’s windows are generally pretty dirty, and colored with a reddish brown tint. This makes for a challenging environment when you’re developing them, back in the photoshop application at home.
Saying all that, I really enjoy the randomness, and getting the sort of views that you normally can’t reach.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wish I could tell you about that power plant in the second shot, the canalized waterway in the third, or the bridge pictured above. Doing so would negate the point of the exercise, however, and add a meaningless layer of trivia into the effort.
These are shots, by the way, not photographs. The latter definition – at least by my way of thinking – indicates “photographs” as being something consciously composed and offered in a manner that makes a statement of some kind, whereas shots are entirely random and are more of a technical exercise than anything else.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Somewhere down the road, this particular technique will come in handy when I’m in a position where I have to get the shot or the photograph despite the situational challenges – which is why I engage in the exercise. All of my low light/night time shooting over the last few years has allowed me to develop a set of skills which allow me to leave the flash gun at home, even when I’m shooting indoors. Rail shots like these have taught me how to capture detail while shooting through a dirty rust brown colored window from a vehicle moving at 50 mph. That’ll come in handy, someday, somehow.
That’s the Altoona Horseshoe curve pictured above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We rolled through several rail yards on our course eastwards. Pictured above are Norfolk and Southern locomotives. I saw lots of rail, lots of dams and bridges, and lots of people who have festooned their homes with Trump flags. I saw one building, which seemed to be the offices of a trailer park, which had affixed a two story tall banner with Trump’s face silk screened on it facing the railway with the screed “miss me yet?”.
Nothing matters, nobody cares.
More next week, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 