A Strange and Difficult Week

Well, what a strange week that was. As I write this, the one suspect from the Boston Marathon bombing that was still alive has just been apprehended in Watertown, MA (aka "Wattuhtown", in the local dialect).

Marathon day is a festive occasion around here. The marathon route happens to pass through the city I live in. For the first couple of years we lived here, we lived a stone's throw from the bottom of "Heartbreak Hill", a two-mile uphill stretch starting at about mile 19 of the 26.2-mile course. The marathon always happens during the April vacation period when schools are out here, and My Favorite Wife and the kids often would go to cheer the runners on and generally enjoy the part-like atmosphere.

This past Monday seemed like a pretty typical Marathon day, dry and moderately warm (at least by local standards). The Marathon coincides with the first tentative days of spring around here. Growing up in Northern California, springtime meant that three or four solid months of heavy rain would finally cease. Living in central Germany, springtime meant that the perpetual cold drizzle would finally stop. But here in greater Boston it means that three months of biting cold, shoveling snow, and suffocating in multiple layers of clothing will finally end. I have never appreciated spring the way I do here. The Marathon is just one more piece of evidence that the suffering is finally over, which I guess helps to explain the festive atmosphere that surrounds it. For greater Boston, the Marathon is more than just a footrace, it's a major rite of spring.

I first heard that there was something strange going on when I stepped out of my basement office to take a little break and experience a few minutes of fresh air before resuming work. One of my neighbors was standing outside, talking to MFW, and mentioned something about having heard that there was some sort of explosion along the Marathon route. I started checking my usual news web sites periodically and watched as the story around the explosion of two separate bombs near the finish line took shape. Later I saw all the footage of the bombs going off. In the following couple of days, we learned about the victims; a little boy and two young women killed, scores of people with lower legs blown off and other life-changing injuries. I was angered and saddened, hoping that the perpetrator(s) would be brought to justice, but fearing that we might never find out who they were or what they intended to achieve by this.

Yes, I can see how this advances your cause.

Like everyone else, I had to ask myself: who would do such a thing? Given the endless parade of presumed experts on various news outlets who characterized the bombs as comparatively unsophisticated devices, my guess was that it was either right-wing extremist types, or maybe homegrown Al Qaeda sympathizers. Given the symbolism of this happening on both Patriots Day (when Massachusetts commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first shots of the American Revolution) and income tax filing day, I leaned strongly toward the first theory.

It was heartening yesterday when first pictures of the perpetrators were published. It was also somehow kind of shocking to see that the suspects looked so… average. I wondered if maybe they weren't just a couple of bored kids from somewhere around here who thought it would be cool to set off a couple of bombs and didn't really think too hard about the consequences. I had my own fascination with crude explosives as a teenager, although it would not ever have occurred to me to use one in a way that could potentially hurt anyone, so I could sort of imagine, though certainly not empathize with, that kind of mindset. But I did think that surely someone is going to see those pictures and say, hey, I know those guys.

I didn't expect it to come to a head so quickly, though. I was first alerted to this at about 2 AM this morning, when the cell phone lying next to my bed woke me with a Ding! to announce an incoming text message. Usually when this happens it's because one of my esteemed colleagues in India has forgotten that his mid-morning is the middle of my night. But in this case it was my daughter, who is away at college in Washington, DC, asking whether we were watching the news. Huh? Why would I be watching the news at 2 AM? I sent a message back asking whether this message was really meant for me (and what was she doing up at 2 AM?). She replied that the FBI is in Watertown (an adjoining city), and there was a shooting at MIT and a bomb threat in Watertown. I replied that it was 2 AM and I will now be going back to sleep, which I eventually did. I switched on the radio briefly; there was some discussion of the Marathon bombing, but that's pretty much all that's been on the radio for the last few days, so I figured that whatever was going on was, I would find out in the morning.

So when the radio came on at 6 AM, I was hearing about a wild car chase and shootout that had transpired overnight in Cambridge and Watertown. Moreover, residents of Watertown and all surrounding communities, including mine, were told to stay home and keep businesses closed. I called the office of my dentist, whom I was supposed to visit that morning, and got a recording saying all appointments were cancelled and would be rescheduled, which I suppose is not necessarily the worst news I could have gotten, since I'm not all that crazy about sitting in the chair while the nice lady scrapes my teeth with sharp instruments anyway. My urgently needed haircut is also going to have to wait; I just hope that the client I have to visit in Denver next week will not mistake me for the Wild Man of Borneo.

So, tell me about your project.

The day itself today pretty much consisted of trying to do my job while periodically looking for updates as to what exactly was going on with the developing manhunt for the fugitive who was still alive. I periodically flipped on the TV to see pictures of essentially every federal, state and local law enforcement organization with a presence in the Boston area parading around in all the cool vehicles and tactical gear that they probably otherwise never actually get a chance to use—it all looked so shiny and new. I hoped for a couple of things; one, that this would end soon and things could get back to normal; and two, that they would take this guy alive so we could hear just what exactly he and his brother were thinking, and then lock him up for the rest of his life.

One of the things reported about the suspect was that he was a wrestler. An interesting side note was that a number of members of my son's high school wrestling team had been in matches with the guy (and beaten him, as The Young Master would want you to know). His Facebook page had some shocked-sounding posts from various former teammates with whom he is still in touch along the lines of, "I… I know that guy!"

Looking at the pictures, I can't help but wonder what could have motivated this guy. In the course of today we heard from plenty of current and former acquaintances about how he was such a nice guy, we can't imagine him doing this, etc. I'm going to guess that he personally  really had only the vaguest kind of ideological motivation for these outrageous acts; I will bet that he was mostly just being a stupid kid and following along in what the older brother he looked up told him was the just and heroic thing to do. Given the additional explosives that they carried with them and that were found in the brothers' apartment, and considering that that they seem to have had a plan to set off the bombs at the Marathon but no plan to disappear afterward, my guess is that the Marathon bombing was intended to be the first in a whole wave. I'm reminded very much of the Washington, DC sniper incidents a few years ago in which you also had a young kid following an older guy in spreading death and destruction just for the thrill of it.

This is the face of evil?

I should also mention that there was another thought that repeatedly occurred to me throughout this week. On the day of the Marathon bombing, that morning I was reading a story about a series of bombings and shootings in Iraq that killed 75 and injured hundreds. The day after that there were two bombings in Karachi that killed 21 people. The day after that, seven women and children were killed in Afghanistan when their vehicle drove over a bomb. Yesterday, as the first major break in the case came, a bomb had already exploded in a Baghdad cafe, killing at least 27 people and wounding scores more. For us, a bombing like the one at the Marathon is a singular outrage, and we throw massive resources into identifying, finding and killing or capturing the perpetrators. But there are other places in the world where such events are a common occurrence, with little expectation that the perpetrators will ever answer for their actions, or even be so much as identified. All this goes largely unnoticed by us. I don't know what to do about that, but I think about it nonetheless.

We're thinking about you too. Well, not really.

Anyway, that was my week. I hope yours was a little less exciting.

The Skies Are Not So Friendly

Not long ago, I told you a story about my peeves related to riding on Amtrak. Foolish me! The project I've been working on for the past year, which had me making regular trips on Amtrak from the Boston area down to NYC, has ended, and I now find myself having to fly to my new assignments with clients located in Denver and Dallas. I had forgotten what a dream of convenience the train is when compared to air travel.

I love to fly, and I hate to fly. I've been flying since I was a small child, back in the days when all passenger jets still had propellers rather than jet engines; thinking about it makes me feel old. Every summer we'd go to visit my parents' respective sides of the family in (of all places) Denver and Dallas, and I'd sit at my window seat waiting for the ritual of the engines starting up one by one, signalling that we'd be in the air shortly. Today I still try to get a window seat on every flight because I just enjoy looking down at the landscape, even if I end up trapped, just me and my bladder, contemplating how long I'm going to wait before shaking the passengers in the middle and aisle seats awake and entreating them to stand up so that I can make my way to the restroom.

Those Were The Days

When I'd go on those family trips as a small child, a big fuss was always made about my brother and sister and I being appropriately dressed up, because that's just what you did in those days, before deregulation came in and made flying affordable for the unwashed masses. I remember when I was old enough to fly by myself how odd it felt to just turn up at the airport in my standard uniform of jeans and sneakers and flannel shirt.

Traveling In Style

But then came the eighties and deregulation and the beginning of the slow downward spiral in comfort and convenience, accelerated by acts of terrorism and culminating in the 9/11 events that have made just getting to the gate a miserable and tedious process. The pleasure of the flying itself remains; it's the whole process around it that leaves me in a state of dread at the thought of having to fly somewhere. Now that it looks like I'm entering another phase of regular air travel, I'm going to have to get used to it.

My flight home from Dallas last night brought this all into stark relief. I had a reservation on US Airways to fly to Boston via Philadelphia. The security procedure at DFW wasn't too bad, and I got to my gate with time to spare for my 5:45 PM flight. Normally you board about a half hour before departure time, but when we reached that point I saw no moves on the part of the gate agent to start the long and convoluted process in which they board different categories of passengers, starting with the ones who have achieved Double Platinum Sapphire Exalted Emperor status and finishing with me, the one guy who has been relegated to the dreaded Zone 5. 

The gate agent did announce that the flight was oversold, and anyone who would voluntarily give up his seat could get a voucher worth $600 to be booked onto a flight the following morning. I always contemplate whether I should take the airline up on one of these offers, although it would have to include arrangements to feed, house and transport me at their expense. But invariably it's more important to me to just get home, plus I'm not sure if the travel voucher would come with all kinds of restrictions and end up being more of a hassle than anything else.

Eventually the gate agent opened the door, which usually signals that we will now start boarding, but instead of propping it open he disappeared down the jetway, closing the door behind him. Five minutes ticked by, then ten, then fifteen and then eventually, about five minutes after our scheduled departure time, he reappeared. He stepped to the podium and announced that there was some mechanical issue that necessitated waiting until some part arrived and was installed, and it was uncertain how long that would take. Regardless of what the airline might tell us officially, his opinion was that people going to Philadelphia would almost certainly get there that night, but anyone with a connection was going to miss it and those of us in that category should line up at the podium to try to make alternative arrangements.

I dread these kinds of situations, having found myself in them a number of times. The airline plays a little game with you in which they periodically feed you a new revised boarding time and then as you just about reach that time, they give you another new (and later) boarding time. They never actually come out and say look, folks, it's just not gonna happen tonight; instead they string you along endlessly until it's way too late to make any kind of alternate arrangement. Indeed, shortly after the gate agent made his announcement, I got an automated call on my cell phone telling me that the flight was delayed by a half hour due to "congestion at the destination", which was of course entirely different from what the gate agent had just told us.

I dutifully got in line, but I also took out my phone and called US Airways customer service. I had looked up the number before I headed for the airport to have it just in case, seasoned traveler that I am. I got through to an agent who repeated the line about congestion at my destination; I told her that we got a completely different story from the gate agent. I expected her to tell me sorry, this is what's in the system (they always refer to "the system" like it's the source of ultimate truth), so just wait another half hour and then you'll be on your way. To my surprise she instead said she'll look for an alternate arrangement, but I'll have to wait on hold. So I stood there, phone in hand, wondering what I should do if I was still on hold when I got to the head of the line. As I got closer to the head of the line she came on a couple of times to tell me that arrangements were being made, please just be patient. Eventually I got to the head of the line and started letting people go past me.

Finally the phone agent told me I was now booked on a direct flight to Boston on American. There was some additional step that needed to be completed that was taking longer than expected (what exactly that step was I didn't really understand, since I speak English and not airline-ese), but I was booked on the American flight that was leaving in a little over an hour, so I should head over to the gate and see the agent there with the confirmation number I had just been given; whatever that final step was, it should be completed by the time I was at the American gate.

…And of course, it was not. The gate agent at American did that thing where they type a bunch of stuff into their computer terminal, then frown a lot, then tell you some totally arcane piece of information, and then type some more. Finally she told me I was indeed booked but not ticketed, as if the difference is common knowledge that any schoolboy would possess. She typed a lot more, then asked the other gate agents some questions involving more exotic airline terminology that meant nothing to me, then made a phone call. Finally she told me she was waiting for a call back; my problem was being taken care of so I should step into the waiting area until she called me back. Right… we've heard this one before.

I was kind of losing hope at this point; experience has taught me that where the airlines are concerned, even the simplest problem ends up being massively complicated to resolve and usually ends with an apology but no real solution. So I was deeply relieved when the phone rang, the agent answered it and then shortly afterward called me over and handed me a boarding pass a couple of minutes before we were to start boarding. 

I was thankful to be holding a boarding pass in my hands now. I wasn't so happy to see I'd be boarding at the very end, meaning there was a good chance that there'd be no room for my small suitcase, and I might have to check it and then wait another half hour to collect it from the notoriously slow baggage claim in Boston, but beggars can't be choosers. But to my great surprise, the gate agent called me over while the priority passengers were just starting to board and said, "this other guy thinks he has your seat, so I want you to board right now." I was more than happy to oblige her.

I took my seat but had to wonder whether they would shortly come to get me, saying sorry, but this is actually the other guy's seat, you'll have to get back off. As I sat there I noticed that there were a couple of other cases of two or even three people being booked in the same seat, which the flight attendants (When did we actually start calling them that? When did they stop being stewardesses?) were trying to sort out. I could not have been happier when they finally closed the doors and told everyone to take their seats.

What Exactly Do You Mean By "Flight Attendant"?

So all in all, my flight home was a stressful experience, as so often in the past, but it could have been far worse; I could have found myself stuck overnight in Dallas or Philadelphia, for example. All of the people I dealt with were surprisingly helpful; I'm used to just getting the company line from some customer service agent who is tired of having dealt with other people's problems all day and is now having a hard time finding the enthusiasm to deal with mine. I wonder if all of the bad press the airlines have gotten over the past decade or so for their terrible customer service is finally having an effect. I guess I'll have another chance to find out when I go to see my Denver client next week.

The Road to Damascus

I was reading about Republican senator Rob Portman's about-face on the gay marriage issue tonight. The gist of it is that he was strongly against gay marriage, then he found out his own son was gay, now he decided it's a good idea after all. DOMA is wrong, says the suddenly enlightened senator.

I'm reminded of the story of the conversion of Paul the Apostle. According to the New Testament, Paul, who began his life as Saul of Tarsus, was an ardent persecutor of early Christians. Traveling to Damascus, he had a vision of the resurrected Jesus and subsequently became an equally ardent Christian. In Portman's case there was no vision of supernatural beings, just a vision of his own son revealing to him who he really is. 

Funny how it's easy to rail against something when it's just an abstract concept that has no direct connection to your own life, but one fine day when it unexpectedly affects you or someone close to you, the world suddenly looks a lot different. Said Portman: "It allowed me to think about this issue from a new perspective and that’s as a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister have."

I'll give the good Senator credit for seeing the error of his ways and admitting that publicly, but there's still a kind of bitter aftertaste of hypocrisy that I can't quite get out of my mouth. Portman has called for the repeal of "Obamacare"; would he rethink that position if his son couldn't get health insurance because of some pre-existing condition? Portman has voted against a number of measures related to gun control; would he feel differently if his son had been among the victims in Aurora or Newtown when some unbalanced guy with a military-grade weapon showed up and began blasting away?

It's easy to think that all illegal immigrants are here to live off welfare and food stamps when you've never actually met one. It's easy to think that the minimum wage is a bunch of liberal nonsense when you've never spent time with somebody who is trying to scrape by on $7.25 an hour. It's easy to think that 47% of Americans are lazy do-nothings whose only purpose in life is to live off other people's taxes when you are most at home among people who can afford to attend your $50,000-a-plate fundraiser. I wonder what the Republican party would look like if its members would just get out a little more.

Aw, c'mon guys! You didn't think I really meant it when I voted for DOMA, did you?

Creative Writing Exercise

One of my favorite childhood memories is of how my father used to take the family to the Balloon Park once in a while. We would all pile into the old donkey cart and off we'd go.

The Balloon Park was the place you went in those days if you really liked balloons. If you had a balloon of your own you would take it along to show off, especially if it was a really nice one. If you didn't have a balloon of your own to take along, it was still really fun to go and admire the balloons that other people had brought.

Better Times

You could also rent a balloon if you wanted to. There was a guy named Old Jake who ran a balloon rental stand, where you could rent a balloon by the hour. Old Jake wasn't really old, and his name wasn't even Jake, it was Herman Joseph; he just liked everyone to call him "Old Jake". He was kind of short and skinny, but we all had respect for Old Jake, because it was common knowledge that he had done hard time, once for impersonating a fire hydrant and another time for multiple counts of hair fraud. He had a tattoo from prison too, one of those homemade jobs that looked from one angle like a steam locomotive and from a different angle like a straw basket full of fluffy kittens.

Old Jake didn't charge that much for his rental balloons, but he did expect you to treat them as if they were your own—keep them away from sharp objects and never insult or humiliate them. To make sure that you took proper care of them, you had to leave a deposit, or "hostage", as he called it, which was usually my little brother Sam. I always sort of wondered what would happen to Sam if I brought the balloon back damaged in some way, or went over the mileage limit, but I didn't really care that much, because I liked balloons more than Sam anyway. But since Mom and Dad brought us up to respect and honor balloons whatever the circumstances, it was pretty unlikely that we ever would have even had a chance to find out.

The Balloon Park didn't actually start out as a balloon park. It was originally just another city park, with the usual trees and benches and porcelain and meat. Then some guys started hanging out there with their balloons, and  more and more balloon enthusiasts started showing up, and then the next thing you know there's a big fancy sign put up by the city and the mayor showing up in an antique fire engine to show everyone what a regular guy he is, and one day you wake up to find out that the Balloon Park is now an officially sanctioned, taxpayer-supported city recreation facility.

In its heyday the Balloon Park attracted balloon lovers from all over the country and even overseas. It was one of the nicest facilities in America dedicated to the enjoyment of balloons and balloon culture. Occasionally you might even run into a celebrity, like that guy who was in that commercial for some stuff. It made me proud to know that this was all happening in my own hometown.

I don't recall exactly when it was, but the trouble started the time some people showed up with a kite. I can't possibly imagine what they were thinking, but there they were, all the same. They took that thing out, and one of them held it up facing the wind while another one held the string taught, and up it went. They really should have known better. People stood and stared in disbelief. I was still kind of young and naive back then, so at first I didn't really understand what was going on, but then I remembered how my father had once explained to me about how kites cause halitosis and divorce and despair, and I started to feel a little scandalized too. It wasn't long before the police came and put a stop to it, but the damage was done. We had lost our way, and there was no mistaking it. 

From there it was just a slow downward spiral. There was a brief craze for balloon animals, but it made a lot of people really uncomfortable. Some people thought it was the kind of innovation that promised to revive interest in the Balloon Park. But a lot of people thought it was just abuse. Dad said, "If they'd do that to a balloon, where does it stop? Are they going to start twisting up their own kids like that and call it art?" Most of us felt confused and weren't sure where we really stood on the question. It was all so perplexing.

Balloon Animal Cruelty

Later some guys started showing up with those new mylar balloons, and that's when people started feeling like they really had to choose sides. Most of us felt that if it's not natural latex, it's not a proper balloon (although I will confess that I too briefly felt the lure of the forbidden), but there was a pretty vocal minority that said this is the future of balloons, so get used to it. Fights broke out periodically and the cops were coming all the time, and Dad said it really wasn't safe to go down there anymore. When the guys with the puppets and the tubas started hanging out in one corner of the park, nobody even did anything about it. It was like people were beyond caring at that point. I think I was the only one in the family who was still even interested by then, since the rest of the family had discovered that they preferred spending their leisure time taking turns sitting on a damp washcloth.

A Crime Against Nature

Today all that stuff is gone. After the big balloon manufacturers pulled their sponsorships, the mayor said the city really couldn't afford to maintain it as a Balloon Park any more. Now that plot of land is just another ToadMart, like the ones you can see in practically any other town in America. It's too bad, but I guess that's progress. Still, I can't help but feel a little touch of teary-eyed nostalgia whenever I come across one of those old reruns of "Balloons, Ho!" while I'm aimlessly channel-surfing late on a Friday night.

On The Right Track

I'm sitting on a train home from New York City. To be more precise, I'm returning from Jersey City, NJ, via NYC. I have a client whose offices are in Jersey City, the part that is directly on the Hudson and is really just sort of an extension of Manhattan. I go down to spend a few days there every 2–3 weeks.

When I go to NYC I do my traveling on Amtrak. I could fly, but it's a gigantic hassle, costs more, and, measured by elapsed time door to door, doesn't actually get me there any faster. I instead take an Amtrak Acela train from the Boston area down to New York Penn Station, walk a block or so and then take the PATH train across (or I guess under) the Hudson to Jersey City.

I was sort of dreading this trip based on the experiences of the last trip I took a few weeks ago. I catch the Acela at the Route 128 station, which is the last station in the Boston area and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It's a miserable place to get the train. In the winter the platform is cold and windy and wet; from spring to fall it's warm, but because they seem to have built the station in the middle of one of the swamps that are pretty common in my part of New England (oh, wait, I think we're supposed to call them "wetlands" nowadays) I spend most of my time on the platform swatting mosquitoes.

I leave my house around 40–45 minutes before my train is scheduled to go and drive to the station. I take an early morning train, so traffic isn't a problem, and there's usually plenty of parking, and I am in the station usually about ten to fifteen minutes before my train goes. Last time everything went as usual as far as getting to the station, but when I stepped into the station a little after 6 AM, around twice the usual number of people were crowded into the little suburban station's waiting room—not a good sign. Looking at the video display that lists all of the trains I saw that the train that was supposed to go an hour before mine was delayed, so these were obviously the passengers waiting for my train plus all the ones who were still waiting for the previous one. 

My train was listed as on time, though. Mulling this over, I decided there were two possibilities. Possibility one was that the delayed earlier train was going to show up after all, and my train would end up delayed by around an hour as well. Possibility two was that the earlier train would be cancelled, and everyone from that train would be trying to get on my train; not just at that station, but at the two preceding ones as well, so it was going to be really crowded. I decided that I should probably head out to the platform and hope my train would at least be on time.

As I was heading out the door, it was announced that the earlier train was cancelled, so we were now into possibility two territory. The whole mob followed me out to the platform. It was the first week of January; the thermometer showed 24º F as I left home, and as I stepped onto the platform it was probably no warmer. I had on my slacks and blazer, and my reasonably professional-looking overcoat, adequate clothing if I can keep moving over short distances in that kind of weather, but not really the recommended attire for just standing around waiting for a train that may or may not eventually be coming. Around fifteen minutes after the scheduled departure time of my train they announced that the earlier train, which was disabled, was offloading passengers at another stop onto my train. They of course said nothing about when my train would actually be arriving. Hooray for Amtrak!

This posed a bit of a dilemma. I could have gone into the station and waited there in warmth and comfort until they announced that my train was about to arrive. But I expected that whenever it did arrive, it was going to be pretty full, since it would contain all of the passengers from the disabled train as well as the ones who were booked on my train. That spot right at the front of the platform in the place where the door to the first car usually opens up (something I know from having taken that train literally a hundred or more times previously) was going to be valuable real estate that I would live to regret having relinquished; I would get on the train, but I might end up standing or sitting on the floor in an aisle for the three-and-a-half-hour trip to NYC. I stayed on the platform and hoped for the best.

Eventually my train did arrive—45 minutes late. I could no longer feel my feet by then, and I could feel the effects of hypothermia setting in; not the worst way to die, or so I have heard. But against all odds I survived long enough to board the Acela, and not a minute too soon, since I am kind of fond of those feet. It was crowded, but as one of the first passengers to board, I got a seat. I was thankful not to be one of the lost souls left wandering the aisles, hoping against all hope to eventually find a place to rest, the Flying Dutchmen of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Acela service.

Amtrak's Acela service is kind of a curious thing. It was introduced with much fanfare in 2002. High-speed train service from Boston to Washington DC! Just like in Japan, or Europe! But the reality is different. In theory Acela can travel at speeds in excess of 150 mph. In practice, there are only two short stretches of track between Boston and Providence, RI where it actually does travel at that kind of speed. The rest of the way it just kind of putts along at the same slow speed as the regular Amtrak regional train, because the tracks aren't laid out for carrying anything moving faster than that. The convenience factor makes it the only profitable route in all of Amtrak, if I'm not mistaken (which I might be; believe anything you read here at your own peril), but it's not a real high-speed train. For my money it's not even as comfortable as the Amtrak regional trains, which I also ride occasionally.

An elaborate practical joke?

I have ridden real high-speed trains, so I know what we're missing here. Most recently, which was three or four years ago, I took the German Intercity Express (ICE) to Paris. For most of the trip it traveled at around 175 mph. I wish we could have something like that here, so I could be in NYC in two hours or so, but that would require infrastructure investment and a thing called "planning ahead", which we're unfortunately not so good at, and which I am told just leads to socialism anyway.

The impending arrival of the train in NY Penn Station is signaled by its entry into the Queens Tunnel, which, as the name implies, takes you from the borough of Queens under the East River directly into the heart of midtown Manhattan. You step off the train onto the narrow underground platform and then try to figure out where you are and where you need to go. As you walk along the platform you pass various stairways and escalators. If you've been there as many times as I have, you know where to go; if you haven't, you may be in for a longer journey than you were expecting. Between the crowd of people exiting the train and the various support columns, stairways, escalators and freight elevators the length of the platform, it's hard to see down the platform and there isn't much in the way of signage telling you which way you should go. You pick an exit and hope it's the one that will get you reasonably near to where you need to go. Eventually you end up in the main area of the station, one level below the street. If you're me, which I am, you exit via the escalator that disgorges you onto the corner of 7th Avenue and 32nd Street.

If you've never been there before, or even if you have, it's sort of jarring when you step off the escalator onto the street. You're right there in the middle of the concrete canyons of midtown, with throngs of people charging up and down the sidewalk with a look of determination in their eyes and the traffic, which seems to consist mainly of those iconic yellow taxis, featured in one of my earlier posts, whizzing down 7th Ave. If you arrive during the morning commute, as I normally do, you will enjoy the added treat of those guys who distribute the free commuter newspapers shouting and thrusting them at you as you walk by.

To get to my ultimate destination, I walk a block down 32nd St. to the 33rd St. PATH station (which may sound odd, but the station has entrances on 32nd St. as well), trundling my little black suitcase behind me, dodging the crowds of pedestrians and navigating as best I can around the panhandlers, street vendors and trucks offloading their morning deliveries. The PATH train takes me across the Hudson (or under it, actually) to Jersey City and the office in which my client is located. The whole trip generally takes about four and a half hours door to door.

Going home means reversing the aforementioned process, but leaving from NY Penn Station introduces another element of excitement and suspense. As I was alluding to earlier, NY Penn station contains multiple subterranean levels. The sheer size of the place is pretty amazing, although in the summertime parts of it can feel a lot like the bowels of hell; the platforms in particular get stiflingly hot then. Incidentally, in case you're wondering why I keep referring to it a NY Penn and not just Penn, it's because there is also a Penn Station in several other eastern seaboard cities in which the Pennsylvania Railroad originally operated.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Anyway, from the street level you descend about one story down to the main area of Penn Station. Coming down the stairs or the escalator from 7th Ave., you pass by the ticket and waiting area of the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) and various shops selling food and magazines and various (mostly) travel-related items to the main waiting area and the ticketing windows of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. In this area there's another set of stairs and escalators leading down to a second subterranean level. Here there are yet more shops, ticket vending machines and stairways leading down to the third level, which is where the tracks and boarding platforms actually are. There are 21 tracks in all, distributed in overlapping fashion among LIRR, Amtrak and NJ transit. In addition, from this second underground level you can get directly access the A, C and E subway lines at one end and the 1, 2 and 3 lines at the other. My description here doesn't really convey the size of the overall structure, but for my money it's pretty massive.

The suspense factor is, or so I am guessing, a function of the relatively limited amount of space down on the platforms. It's chaotic and crowded enough when I get off the train and try to get off the platform; if there were also dozens or hundreds of people also waiting on the platform trying to get on at the same time, it would be complete pandemonium. As a result, which track a given train is going to be leaving from is a closely-guarded secret that is only revealed around fifteen minutes before the train actually leaves. Now, normally NJ Transit uses tracks 1–16, Amtrak has 5–16 and LIRR is on 13–21. But to find out which track from within that range your train will be on, you need to wait until it's announced over the PA and posted on the video monitors in the second level and the big board on the first. There is usually a big throng of people gathered around the video monitors on the second level, which is where I also wait. As soon as a train is announced, there's a mad dash by a large part of the crowd to whichever track has just been communicated as the departure track for that train.

Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances

Apparently most Amtrak passengers board from the first underground level, where the Amtrak waiting areas and ticket windows are located. As soon as the track for their train is announced, they queue up in a long line at the head of a down escalator that descends at a maddeningly slow speed directly down to the third level where the platforms are, and the struggle to find a decent seat begins. It's bearable if you're traveling alone, but if there are two of you, unless you're the first ones down the escalator your chances of finding a seat together are not great.

I did this exactly once. The next time I traveled home from NY Penn I discovered the aforementioned second level and the stairs that lead down to the platforms, which gave me a jump on the bulk of the passengers who were still putt-putting down the escalator as I stepped onto the train. With time I came to know that they announce the track about five minutes after the train actually arrives, presumably to let passengers disembark before they let anyone else onto the track. I also observed that my train will usually arrive on one of the tracks from 7 to 12, mostly on 7 or 8, and only rarely on 5–6 or 13–14.

So now my way of gaming the system is to arrive 20 minutes before my train is scheduled to depart. I peer down the steps onto each of tracks 7–12 and make a mental note of which ones are empty and which have trains sitting on them. Then I listen for the ding, ding, ding of the warning bell of a train pulling up to a platform and check the tracks I noted as empty, looking for an Acela coming in, pointed in the direction that indicates it will be heading to Boston (because the train from NY Penn to Washington, DC also leaves and departs at the same time). Then I just bop on down the stairs and as soon as the exiting passengers are off, I'm on with a wide choice of seats. Occasionally I don't guess right as far as the likely track, or don't hear the train coming in, but at least I still have a bit of a head start on most of the other passengers.

Occasionally my family has come down during a school break to run around NYC and do touristy things while I'm down there on business, and then we've traveled back together. I am sure they think that Dear Father is a bit of an obsessive nut as I run back and forth between tracks, trying to anticipate where our train will come in, but as mentioned before, two or more people don't have great chances of finding a seat together, and as the group grows larger, the probability of sitting together decreases exponentially. I have watched too many families searching desperately for seats that are at least in the same car to want to do that with my own family, especially when my kids were smaller.

Of course, Amtrak will still occasionally find ways to mess up my perfect system. On my last trip home, I was sitting smugly in my seat as one of a half-dozen or so passengers in my car who were already on the train before the main crowd arrived. While I was getting comfortable a guy in an Amtrak uniform knocked kind of urgently on my window and motioned toward the other track. I couldn't figure out what he wanted; I guessed that he was trying to tell me that I shouldn't be on the train yet, but I ignored him. They can take my seat when they pry it from my cold, dead butt. But then there was an announcement that this train would not be traveling beyond NYC; everyone should get off and board the regional train that was waiting on the track on the other side of the platform. Arrgh. That other train was already crowded, but I got one of the few remaining seats. Because it was a regional train that makes a lot more stops than the Acela, it also took me an additional 45 minutes to get home.

Sitting in my own safe seat as one of the first passengers on, I get to observe the same peculiar behavior repeated over and over. The trains I travel home on are evening trains and they are always crowded. And yet I observe plenty of people who will wander up and down the car, passing one empty seat after another, even as the car is filling up, as if they think that the longer they look, the more likely they are to find the perfect seat.

I have my own peculiar habits as far as seat choice goes, honed over what is probably well over a hundred NYC–Boston trips at this point. I always sit in the rear half of the car in front of the dining car, since the door at that end will usually open up right in front of the escalator that I need to ride when I reach my destination. I sit on the left side, because I like to look at the view of Manhattan that is visible for around five or ten minutes after exiting the Queens Tunnel, heading north. I sit in an aisle seat, because there is a vent next to the window seat that is always blasting a steady stream of freezing cold air, seemingly regardless of the season.

And finally, I avoid sitting in or even near any of the sets of two side-by-side seats seats that face each other, with a table in between. I don't sit in those seats because I end up with a choice of either taking turns stepping on each other's feet with the person seated across from me, or keeping my feet uncomfortably tucked under my own seat. I don't like to sit near them because they tend to attract the occasional lucky group of travelers who will spend the ride unwinding by drinking one expensive beer after another from the dining car, getting louder and more obnoxious as the trip wears on.

One of the side advantages of sitting in an aisle seat is that there is a better chance that the other seat of the pair on that side of the aisle will remain empty. Apparently people are more inhibited about asking someone in the occupied aisle seat to grant them access to the empty window seat than they are about plonking themselves down in an empty aisle seat next to an occupied window seat. It's nice to be able to stretch out a little more with an empty seat next to me. An empty seat also means having potentially missed the opportunity to have been stuck next to some enormous guy who offends me in an olfactory manner (as, I regret to report, on this present trip), or possibly even next to a Republican.

Occasionally I find myself seated next to a sweet-smelling, fashionable young lady. You might think that I would prefer that to an empty seat. But based on experience I have concluded that I would almost prefer to sit next to the big stinky guy, for such fellow passengers often come equipped with cell phones, the kind that are covered with little hearts and rhinestones and such and are apparently also equipped with unlimited battery capacity. I will not attempt to recount some of the inane three-and-a-half-hour-long conversations that I have been treated to exactly one half of, but they are far more than I care to consider.

This whole system of boarding the train at Penn Station, or on Amtrak in general, really kind of baffles me. I have ridden trains all over Europe, and I can't recall ever being in a station of any size in which it was not known until the actual arrival of the train what track it's going to be coming in on. Trains run on a schedule, even here in the land of individualism; it's not exactly a mystery when they are going to arrive and when they are supposed to leave again. Surely it must be possible to make arrangements for a given train to arrive and depart on the same track every time, as is done in any other modern, industrialized country. What lunatic sociopath came up with this crazy system of train roulette?

The other thing that sort of mystifies me is why they can't just offer reserved seating on Amtrak. If I could reserve my seat, I wouldn't be in such a panic about getting on the train as one of the first passengers; even if I were the last guy on, my seat would still be there, patiently awaiting my bottom. In Germany, where I have my most extensive train riding experience, not only do trains miraculously arrive on the same track every time they come, they also give you the option of reserving a seat on any long-distance train. Your ticket tells you which numbered car, and which numbered seat within that car is yours; on the track, there is a kind of visual directory (the Wagenstandanzeiger—one of my favorite compound nouns) that tells you in which section of the track your car will be stopping. Why can't we have that here?

Ordnung muß sein

But I guess I'm going to have to leave you to ponder that on your own. My train is about to arrive at my stop, so it's time to close up shop. Happy trails to you.

Cold Dead Hands

I got an unexpected piece of mail today. It was one of those envelopes that pretty obviously contains advertising while at the same time attempting to convey the message, "Treat me with respect, for behold: I contain something official and important." In large type above the address window was printed "Registered Documents Enclosed". In the upper left-hand corner there was the admonition, "ATTENTION: Carbon copies enclosed—Handle with care". Somehow the picture of a pocket knife with the legend "Free Knife!" seemed out of step with the otherwise serious-looking envelope. Looking carefully at the picture of the pocketknife, I noticed that it bore the logo of the National Rifle Association.

Yow, free stuff!

Now let me tell you something about me. I like shooting guns. I had a BB/pellet gun from the time I was around ten years old. I never missed out on the chance to go to the rifle range at Scout camp (yes, I was also a member of that organization). I spent my high school years in a rural area in Northern California, where guns, mainly rifles and shotguns for hunting, were pretty common. Some of my friends hunted with their fathers and owned firearms of their own. A couple had .22 rifles; one had a .22 magnum pistol that was a lot of fun to shoot; a couple had 12- or 20-gauge shotguns. A favorite pastime was to have a parent—yes, a parent—buy us a few boxes of shotgun shells and a box of clay pigeons, which we would take out to a flat, largely deserted area outside of town for some trap shooting using the shotguns that various friends owned.

Since my high school years I have rarely had the opportunity to do any shooting. The last time was probably a good 7–8 years ago when I was visiting my mother in a rural part of Texas and my stepfather brought out a .22 rifle and we went out and shot at a crude target we set up. I had forgotten how much fun that could be, but after we put the rifle away I didn't feel like I needed to go back out the next day and do it some more.

I've never owned a gun of my own, though I considered buying a shotgun of my own at one point in high school, so I wouldn't have to borrow someone else's gun to go trap shooting. But somehow I just found other ways to spend my somewhat limited money. I also never felt entirely comfortable with having a gun in the house, especially after an incident during my high school years in which a friend of mine accidentally discharged a rifle while unloading it and lightly injured a family member. This was a guy who had grown up around guns, and he was exercising due care, and yet this one time circumstances nonetheless conspired to remind us that these were dangerous weapons we were handling. Once I had kids of my own, the thought of having a gun in the house was entirely out of the question.

So why is the NRA looking to make me a member? Maybe it has something to do with the current push to tighten gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (and the Aurora theater massacre, and the Sikh temple shooting, and the Gabby Giffords Arizona shooting, and…). I'm sure they feel a need to mobilize and expand their forces. That's apparently why I "have been selected to represent gun owners in [my] area through this special survey". Said "survey" is one of those ridiculous pretend surveys that seem to be favored by right-wing organizations as part of their campaigns for donations and new members, in which you have a bunch of questions that are worded in such a way that it's pretty obvious how you are supposed to answer if you are not some kind of UN-loving commie scumbag. And, conveniently, there's a section at the bottom to fill out in order to become a member and claim that cool free pocketknife.

Remember your credit card number,
that's the part that matters.

I have no idea why the NRA is looking to me to join their ranks. Maybe everyone on the street got one, or maybe they got my name from the same mailing list that used to cause me to inexplicably receive invitations to $10,000-per-plate fundraising dinners for George W. Bush. (Fun fact: I have actually been to NRA headquarters. It's in an innocuous-looking building in an office park in Fairfax, VA. Were it not for the gun museum on the ground floor, you would not know that you were standing on hallowed, Second Amendment-guaranteed ground. I wasn't there for the NRA; I was visiting a consulting client who, it turned out, also happened to be in the same building.) 

I'm really not the right guy to recruit for the NRA, though. I did say I like guns. I don't worship them, though, and I don't understand people who do. After the horrific mass murder of twenty small children, after all the mass shootings that preceded it, and in view of the general background of gun violence in this country, I don't see how any sane person can say that there should be no limits on gun ownership rights. And yes, I am familiar with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. It states, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." We get to have guns, but we get to have them in the context of "a well regulated militia". Ooh, there it is—that "R" word that gets NRA types so riled up.

Having read up a little (and I emphasize a little) on the history of the Second Amendment, I accept that at least some members of the Congress that produced it, as part of a process of debate and ultimate compromise, did think that those arms in the hands of the people were there as a check on the power of some hypothetical future tyrant. And I disagree with those who say that the prevalent weapon of the times was the muzzle-loading black-powder musket, so that's what the Second Amendment allows us to have today; we regularly interpret the US Constitution to apply the probable intent of its authors to technologies such as modern telecommunications that they could never have imagined. 

But let's be real. The US military has assault rifles, just like the "patriots" running around Montana in their camouflage fatigues. It also has a fair number of machine guns, mortars, grenades, rockets, artillery, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, attack helicopters and all manner of other assorted hardware that the camo crowd doesn't. Its members, insofar as they are not currently engaged in actual combat duty, train day after day after day in the use of all that stuff. The notion that some rag-tag guerrilla army of citizens armed with their Bushmaster rifles is going to somehow take to the hills and overthrow some future rogue government is just a childish Hollywood fantasy that is happily instrumentalized by the arms industry and their mouthpiece, the NRA. The NRA, whose letter that accompanies all of the aforementioned material begins like this:

Dear Mr. --------------

With the re-election of President Barack Obama, we must face the fact that we are at the beginning of a four-year nightmare.

You know as well as I do that our freedoms are in far greater danger of being dismantled and destroyed than they were four years ago—not just our Second Amendment rights but all the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.

The full weight of freedom's future is now on our shoulders…

And so on in the same vein. The letter goes on enumerate all the ways the NRA will fight for me. They will fight in Congress, they will fight Supreme Court nominees who don't share our interpretation of the Second Amendment, they will "fight to ban the U.N. from using even one thin dime of [my] tax dollars for their global gun-ban crusade." They will fight a bunch of other stuff as well, and all I have to do is send them twenty-five bucks. Such a deal! That's a lot of fighting for a paltry $25.

Actually, there's a bunch of other stuff I'd like them to fight for me. I'd like them to start with the Tiahrt Amendments, which prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms from releasing data about the use of firearms in crimes and hinder law enforcement in various other ways. Oh wait, the NRA supports that, so never mind. Or how about if the NRA were to fight its own highly effective lobbying in Congress to prevent the Centers for Disease Control from studying the effects of guns and gun policies on firearms-related injuries and deaths? Not going to happen, I guess. The NRA wants to protect me by making sure that practically everyone has a gun, but they don't want to protect me from the downside of making sure that practically everyone has a gun, and they want to make it really hard for me to research what that downside might even be. Maybe that's partly why gun violence is listed as one of the factors that helps to keep my life expectancy among the lowest in any industrialized country.

I don't need to cite all the statistics about how severe gun violence is in the US compared to any other modern industrialized country. You've seen those before. You know there's a huge problem, even if you don't want to admit it. You may not agree with me on the solution. But I hope you agree that to shrug and move on is not the solution.

The NRA and its adherents insist that the solution to the problem of guns in the hands of bad people is to put more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Put guns in schools, guns in churches, guns in offices, guns in homes, guns everywhere, the theory being that if I have a chance to fight back I have a better chance of escaping with my life when some crazed gunman, or just a garden-variety criminal, points his weapon at me. In principle that sounds logical. In practice I'm not so sure. If I'm carrying a gun, it's probably going to be a handgun; I'm not likely to go everywhere with my trusty rifle slung over my shoulder; that's just a little too cumbersome. I will have to keep that handgun on me and easily accessible at all times, though. And have you ever fired a handgun? I have. Not many, but a few. And I can tell you that it's harder than it looks to hit what you're aiming at. So I guess I'll have to spend a lot of my limited leisure time practicing at the shooting range.

Now, add the adrenalin of an actual life-or-death situation; even with practice, I'm not a trained marksman, and I'm certainly not accustomed to armed combat. What's going to happen when the you-know-what actually does hit the fan? As I contemplate that I think about the recent incident in which a guy took out a gun outside the Empire State Building, fatally shot a co-worker and then carried out a gunfight with two police officers. The police killed the guy; in the process they also wounded nine bystanders who had the bad luck to have been there at the time, and I assume those policemen train regularly with their weapons. But what if instead of two policemen it had been two random citizens blasting away at the gunman—the NRA scenario? I suspect that the collateral damage might have been a lot more than nine bystanders wounded. To spin it a little further, what if other bystanders had been armed, and in the sudden confusion didn't know why those two guys were firing in their direction and decided to return fire? This kind of scenario is why I'm not so convinced that all of us running around like it's Dodge City in 1875 is such a brilliant idea.

Consider also what happens to guns that are kept in homes for "protection". I absolutely understand the impulse to want to protect oneself, one's loved ones, one's property from evildoers. That's not how it works out a lot of the time. I already mentioned the NRA's attempt to squelch research into gun violence; apparently that's partly the result of a study by Art Kellermann of Emory University that found that guns were 43 times more likely to kill a member of the gun owner's household than to kill an intruder.

So what's the solution? Maybe first we should agree what the problem is. The general problem is a country awash in guns, in which gun violence is far more prevalent than in any of the other modern nations we would view as our peers (okay, I know that we are better than every other country and therefore have no peers as such, but humor me). The more acute problem is that of mass killings perpetrated by deranged individuals wielding weapons that give them massive firepower. Where do we start?

Maybe we could start by taking some of those guns off the street, and making sure that way fewer of them even make it to the street. Institute a real ban on high-powered weapons and high-capacity magazines, and not one like the earlier so-called "assault weapons ban" that was so full of loopholes that it still enabled guns like the one used at Sandy Hook to be bought and sold perfectly legally. Make it illegal for anyone but a licensed gun dealer to sell a gun, the one exception being that a private citizen may sell a gun to a licensed gun dealer (but not to another private citizen), and register every sale; have ATF audit the books of the dealers to identify any possible funny business, and let the dealers pay for that through their license fees. Prohibit gun dealers from selling any weapon or magazine that falls under the new ban; have the federal government purchase those items at the dealer's cost and destroy them. To pay for that, tax gun and ammunition sales, and by more than just a token amount—gun-related violence creates huge costs to us as a society, so let people who want to own guns bear some of that cost. Make all of the restrictions on gun sales apply to gun shows just as to gun stores. Prohibit all sales of firearms, accessories and ammunition over the Internet or through the mail. Require all gun owners to carry liability insurance, just like we require car owners to do; hold them civilly and criminally liable if a gun they purchased is used in a crime.

At the same time we need to better manage who gets to buy guns. Above all, we need to eliminate the many holes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that is the basis for those background checks. Even John McCain, no bleeding-heart liberal he, was for that once upon a time. We also need to better ensure that people whose mental state should prevent them from ever owning a gun end up in NICS as quickly as possible. Currently, if I tell my therapist that I'm angry at the world and I'm going to get a gun and shoot as many people as I can, the shrink has no obligation to tell law enforcement about that—that should change. I know the argument is that breaching doctor-patient confidentiality in this way will make some people less likely to seek help for mental problems, but if you can make a professional judgment that someone is a danger to himself and others and should not have easy access to weapons, shouldn't the obligation to tell someone about that trump the confidentiality argument? According to the widow of a victim of the Aurora theater shooting, that answer would be "yes"—I will be interested to see where her wrongful death lawsuit against a psychiatrist who treated James Holmes goes. Maybe instead of trying to keep that important information from finding its way into NICS, we should be working to destigmatize mental health issues.

Finally, we need to do something about the culture of violence that permeates our society. I will confess up front that I have no idea how to do that. Maybe it's simply not possible to remove the archetype of the crusader who takes the law into his own hands, visiting righteous violence upon the bad guys, from our national psyche. That's been there for generations, but somehow something has changed; I know that back in the mid- to late seventies, when my friends and I were running around with guns as an instrument of leisure entertainment, the thought of taking them to school to seek vengeance for real or imagined slights would have been utterly inconceivable to us. Nowadays when I sit in front of my TV and a promo for the new Schwarzenegger film comes on,  much of it seems to be about the arsenal of weapons that he will employ over the course of ninety minutes or so, and I am mindful of the fact that these films, these TV shows, these video games in which the guns themselves are practically supporting characters… they generally come with "Made in USA" stamped on them. If I watch a detective show from, say, Belgium, or Australia, or Japan, at the end the hero will outwit the villain; in the American show the hero will as likely as not outshoot the villain. I'm not saying there's causality between violent media products and violent acts, but it's hard for me not to conclude that there's at least some correlation there.

Vice President Biden this week presented the findings of his gun violence task force to the President, who will be announcing some sort of policy initiative based on that. I hope that there will be some real effort to do something meaningful as part of that, and not just a lot of watered-down symbolism. And I hope that responsible gun enthusiasts will find something in there that they can also support. I am hoping that the nuts who spout that nonsense about giving up their gun "when they pry it from my cold dead hands" will get shouted down for a change. There have been plenty of cold dead hands already.