Sippican Cottage
Donate

Beelzebub’s Dodge Caravan and Other Discontents

March 25, 2026 2 Comments

Men need a god. Otherwise they get confused and start worshiping themselves. They climb into a booster seat in the back of Beelzebub’s Dodge Caravan and think they’re driving.

When I was young they taught us history. The nuns patiently trooped through the ages while we followed along closely by staring out the window half the time, and doodling Big Daddy Ed Roth Rat Fink cartoons in our marble notebooks the rest of the hours. Some of it must have seeped into my adolescent corpse somehow. They always started with Mesopotamia, mentioned their balcony gardening skills, hopped the Nile to explain that the pyramids were more than a pile of rocks built by shirtless dudes with two left hands, then dogpaddled the Hellespont to belabor the Greeks for a bit longer than the others. Greece was the first thing they could point to that really looked like our kinda civilization, so they pointed hard. The Parthenon wouldn’t look weird if it was a post office in Poughkeepsie. Abu Simbel would.

We’d hop skip and jump through the ages after that. Romans roaming around Europe, guys who wore HVAC ducts into battle, the Britishers showing up everywhere brandishing the awesome firepower of a swagger stick and Greek and Latin lessons. We’d get about as far as the battle of Yorktown into America’s trail of broken pottery, and then run out of school year before we ran out of history book pages. No matter. You could watch Gunsmoke and The Untouchables reruns to fill in everything from the Civil War to Prohibition, and our uncles would fill us in on dropping bombs on Japanese, or Germans, to taste. As you know, the Fifties never happened, and if it did, which it didn’t, it was all bad, so we didn’t need to look into that any deeper than Fonzie. From then on, we could look out the car window while dad drove and see what was going on for ourselves.

Lingering on the Greeks meant learning their Pantheon of Gods. Babylon wasn’t interesting, really, in that department, so the nuns skipped it. I mean, have you read The Gilgamesh? He dives to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve a head of cabbage or something, if I recall correctly, which I don’t. Then he swims back up and gives it to Gumby, or Pokey, or Spreitel or Chim Chim, I really can’t remember who now, and they live happily ever after, or everyone dies. It’s usually one way or the other with these people. Moving on, the Egyptians were plain weird.

Mount Olympus was more our speed. A toga party in the clouds with recognizable human forms. Wings on your heels are less confusing than a bird’s head on your shoulders. The Olympians were just superhuman humans. They might be the god of water, or thunder, or love, or table tennis or whatever, but they were usually depicted in human form. They weren’t simply abstractions, or concepts. They had agency in our world.

You could go shopping for your own personal deity at the Greek Pantheon Stripmall. One for this, one for that, some covering a bunch of Olympian bases. Officially, there were only twelve of them that had membership cards in the Champagne Room at Olympus. That number is interesting. Keeps popping up all over the place, from Norsemen to apostles. We didn’t need as many Marvel comics as the generations that came after us because we still had Greek and Roman legends to amuse ourselves.

Of course, nuns were involved, so we had the tale of the Christ as a standalone subject. The saints stood in for the various gods they replaced when you needed a leg up with something. Praying to a unitary god for everything can seem futile. He’s got a lot on his plate, and is usually busy elsewhere. If you were drilling holes in west Texas, I imagine there’s a patron saint of oil refineries or something that might have more time to take your call than the head honcho.

I’m on perfectly good terms with the Big Guy. I don’t need a refresher on the catechism or anything, although it sounds like the pope could use one. I’m not talking about needing THE God now. But I do need A god in my life. Gods didn’t used to be all powerful and remote. They drifted in and out of humanity, and meddled. This led to amusing Golden Fleece All-Inclusive Travel brochures and so forth. That’s the type of god I’m currently looking for. A dread god that I can stand up to.

This was perfectly normal back in the mists of time when Demosthenes was still annoying his neighbors in the agora, and Nancy Pelosi was still in grammar school. You might worship gods, but you were allowed do more than thank them or shake your tiny fist at them. You could measure yourself against them. You’re not a passive worshipper. You’re an active participant in a system where the gods set limits, and the meaning of your life is how well you confront those limits. If you beat the gods at their own game, sometimes they sorta adopted you, and give you a day pass to Olympus, or a peek at Hera’s ankle or something. Other times, they chain you to a rock, and you get your liver plucked out daily. It’s all in good fun, either way.

A while back, I moved my family to the edge of the map in To-Hell-And-Gone Maine, to shake my tiny fist at Boreas, and test myself against him. Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind. He brought winter, arctic air, and sixteen inches of partly cloudy you had to shovel every couple of days. When we first lived in Maine, the thermometer touched 22-below zero. We didn’t have central heat. Around midnight that night, I went out the front door and stood in the middle of the street, with moonlight my only companion. I looked at the desultory column of smoke rising from my chimney, and dared Boreas to kick me again, harder. Then I realized I was standing in the middle of the street at midnight in the winter and this might cause comment down at the local grange hall, if there had been someone there to witness it, even though there wasn’t, because no one does anything like that in Maine very often and lives to procreate. Boreas was a worthy adversary, but we beat him. We found an abandoned house without a heating system, and left it with air conditioning and a pile of wampum in our pocket. Take that, Boreas.

So I was in the market for a new god so I could murmur, “You’re not so tough” under my breath after he kicked sand in my face and walked away. I thought, why not go the other way? Who’s the sun god?

Oh, right. Apollo. We got all bollixed up when we learned the Roman Pantheon after the Greek. Honestly, can you remember which was which between Ares and Mars? They mostly had the same portfolios, so it didn’t matter much. The only name shared by both pantheons was Apollo, the god of the sun, among a lot of other things. Apparently he fit the bill for Mediterranean vibe, no matter whether you were a hoplite or a legionary.

There’s a problem. Apollo is a bit, er, flouncy.

I’m getting on in years and can’t be seen using my old man strength to beat up stringy teenaged looking dudes like Apollo. Naked in sandals is a good look for Playboy models, but it doesn’t fill out the divine male wardrobe very well. I knew I needed to go shopping for a harder dude than Apollo. After all, I just finished off Boreas, and look at him:

See, that’s what I’m talking about. A worthy opponent. He’s got wings, and unlike Apollo, he can grow a righteous beard. He’s kidnapping chicks and taking them north, just like I did. Apollo is minor league stuff. I need a worthier opponent.

We’ll have to shop around more. Hey, how about the Aztec Sun God Tonatiuh:

This is more like it. The Simpsons style drawings are kinda hard to decipher, but he looks fairly formidable compared to Apollo. What’s his story?

The Aztec sun god Tonatiuh was seen as the active force that drives the sun across the sky, and in the Aztec view, he required constant nourishment through human sacrifice to maintain his strength and ensure that the sun would continue to rise each day. As the ruler of the Fifth Sun, Tonatiuh embodied the idea that the universe depended on a reciprocal relationship between gods and humans, where people had to offer their blood in return for the gods’ self-sacrifice that created the world. Without these offerings, Tonatiuh would weaken, threatening the movement of the sun and the survival of the cosmos itself.

Hmm. Might have bitten off more than I can chew, there. Let’s try the Mayan version of a sun god, Kinich Ahau:

Not exactly Cary Grant, but he’s doesn’t have one of those heads with an extra set of teeth that pop out when they’re menacing Sigourney Weaver or anything. What’s his story?

Kinich Ahau was the Maya sun god associated with daylight, warmth, and the life-giving power of the sun, often depicted as a youthful figure with large, sometimes squinting or crossed eyes, jaguar-like features, and solar symbols marking his divine nature. He was closely linked to kingship, as Maya rulers were believed to embody or channel his power, and his role was tied to maintaining cosmic balance, agricultural fertility, and the orderly passage of time. Rituals in his honor did not center on large-scale human sacrifice but instead focused on symbolic offerings and bloodletting ceremonies, in which nobles and rulers would draw their own blood—often from the tongue or ears—to communicate with the gods and sustain the cosmos, reinforcing the idea that divine and human realms were interconnected.

So the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh wants your heart torn out and shown to you to keep the temples humming. The Yucatecan Mayan god only demands Curad cuts to guarantee the orderly passage of time. Mexico it is, but it looks like the Yucatan peninsula is more our speed.  Tonatiuh is the equivalent of a daily IRS audit. Kinich Ahau sounds more like an occasional bad currency exchange rate. We can handle that. Shine on!

Have Nothing To Do With Such People

March 8, 2026 5 Comments

1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

Oh, that Timmy. He was such a Debbie Downer. To paraphrase the Dude, “He’s not wrong, he’s just a saint.” It’s in his job description to talk that way. Far be it from me to advise against having nothing to do with such people. I only want to point out that if you’re gonna try it, good luck. You’re going to need it out there in the wilderness.

We went out on an errand yesterday. We were driving on Western Ave. It’s Augusta’s Champs Elysees of gutbucket commerce, as they say. Tire shops and Wendy’s monkey-meat emporiums and sketchy Chinese places placed suspiciously adjacent to animal rescue processing centers. There’s an AHOP (the Augusta House of Pancakes), trying to avoid good cooking and a giant lawsuit simultaneously. There’s a Planet Fatness, pawn shops, Dollar Generals and Colonels and Buck Sargents, competing, both literally and figuratively, for your last dollar. There’s beaucoup Applebees and similar squat masonry laminated menu abattoirs competing for coveted Firestone stars, if there is such a thing, as the Michelin critic isn’t interested in dining out anymore and is having his bowel resected. He should have read more Timothy, the patron saint of stomach and intestinal disorders. There’s also a very large UHaul outpost patiently waiting for you to wise up and have nothing to do with such people, or at least the local versions.

So Western Ave. has a bit of everything the modern Huxley-bot craves. But above and beyond that, what it has in spades is dope stores. I think it’s the signal, solitary achievement of the soon to be ex-governor. Maine legalized doobies, and if the number and size of the spliff arcades is any indication, Maine is actively helping them build more around the clock. I’m not interested in marijuana, one way or the other, mostly because I’m an adult now and giggling is overrated, but as I’ll explain marijuana sure is interested in me. If I was a more conscientious writer, I’d find out some statistics to back up this observation. But I’m lazy, and stone cold sober most of the time, so monomanias like collecting statistics or eating the whole can of Pringles while hotboxing outside the dope store don’t appeal to me. I’ve got better things to do.

We only drove across town, and I noticed about at least a dozen or two of them. They’re across the street from each other. They’re next to each other in some cases. Some try the we’re medicine dodge, but that’s falling out of favor now that the stuff is legalized. They’ve taken to calling themselves The High Class Joint and Schwaggle Farms and other names suitable for sponsoring a Grateful Dead show. My wife complains about their lack of imagination, proven by the fact that they’ve overlooked the greatest moniker they could have taken, Fine Young Cannabis.

Our destination was the Verizon store. I needed a new phone. The clerk, who has been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard since the nurse scraped the vernix off him, snickered at the phone I brought in to swap. It was a typical android slab, but to him, it was a cuneiform tablet. He’s never met a person that didn’t trade their phones in every time a new model comes out. He mentioned that I’d been on Verizon for two years, because his screen told him that. I mentioned that was just the last time I changed my billing address or something similar. I’d been on Verizon for longer than there was a Verizon. Hell, I’d been on what he called Verizon since Alexander Graham Bell’s name was still on the bills. But history only reaches back to the 1990s now, so there’s no point in mentioning anything that happened before that. I dropped the topic.

Our backs were towards the door. We felt a blast of air, signalling the arrival of another victim. My wife and I looked at each other and silently transmitted our thoughts to one another as married couples do. There’s a skunk in here!

Of course there wasn’t. Skunks usually got to TMobile, I think. But the bow wave of doobie stink on the fellow that entered made us pray for a skunk to come to trade in their phone and at least compete with the guy. When did dope smoke start smelling so bad? It used to just smell slightly better than cigarettes, and way better than cigars. Now it’s like Satan’s armpits.

The stoner just stood there, reeking, while examining the giant poster for ruggedized first responder phones that featured both kinds of firemen: a scrawny white female fireman, and a black female fireman, both lost inside the smallest fireman outfits they could find for the photo shoot. He found it endlessly interesting, perhaps wondering if either of these stalwart ladies would someday put him out when he dropped his joint in his lap, or maybe give him his Narcan refresher if things went really south.

We left, because the technicians in the store had no idea how to transfer my contact list from my old phone to the new one. They made an appointment for us to go back when someone would be in who was willing to at least take a stab at it. I made an appointment with myself to go home and accomplish it on my own, because they can snicker at me all they want, but I know how to do it. It’s that kind of world now.

We drove home, back the way we came, and encountered what I thought was an impossibility. As we neared the two dope superstores, literally right next to each other, my wife and I looked at each other and said the same line from The Big Lebowski we once reserved for driving past the reeking, belching paper mill in the town we used to live in.

Windows rolled up. The opposite side of a four lane boulevard. The smell lasted for a quarter of a mile. It’s not possible, but they’ve done it. The dope stores smell worse than a paper mill. If you’re interested in having nothing to do with such people, you’re going to have to move more than a quarter of a mile away, and they’re spaced every half mile anyway.

Good luck out there.

It Is Never Too Much. It Is Only Not Enough

February 28, 2026 10 Comments

I had this friend when I was a kid. Let’s call him Fish. Lost track of him many years past. He was a hoot. Fish might be an example for us all. I’ll explain.

His family was a huge Irish affair. There were something like eight of them packed into this little split-level ranch. Eventually, the older siblings got married, and their spouses moved in, too. I swear you could see the walls of the house breathing in and out with their respiration. Their septic system spawned an Okefenokee in the side yard.

Fish was a rough and tumble kid. His parents would send him outside in the spring wearing nothing but a pair of jean shorts, cut off raggedly from some pair he burst through at the knee on their first day in harness. He’d stay like that until the first frost. He was barefoot, wild, and free. I was never any of those things. He was the neighborhood Huckleberry Finn. I guess that makes me Tom Sawyer. If there was a Becky Thatcher, she kept indoors.

But not Huck, really. Huckleberry Finn was uneducated, if not dull, and simply had some version of moral genius to carry him along. If my friend, Huckleberry Fish, had any morality in him, it wasn’t visible underneath the carapace of dirt he was coated with. He’d never do anything bad, mind you. He was simply a wildman. Two different things. Morality doesn’t enter into it.

My friend was smarter than the other kids, too, not just a knockabout waif. His family would play cards to amuse themselves, just like ours did. Whist was the game then. It was our lower middle class version of playing Bridge. Bridge was strictly for dentists or Presbyterians or something. Whist requires a non-Vegas-level, but high requirement to count cards, and remember what’s already been played, and who played it. It’s fast and fun, with an element of audacity in bidding based on mental arithmetic. There’s a single round of bidding after the deal, to determine who calls “trumps” (the suit that “trumps” the others), and who gets to swap the four hidden cards in the kitty for their worst cards. If you’re bold, you can leave your opponents holding a handful of cards they could beat you with if they won the bid, but were too timid to bid high enough.

I was very, very good at Whist. It appealed to the analytical part of my mind. Fish was a wizard at it. He’d sit there, dressed like a coolie, dirty, teeth spaced like headstones, a hayrick of hair hanging in his eyes, and beat the pants off all comers. It was all I could do to keep up with him. Likewise, he looked out the window all day at school, but passed all the tests anyway. I know intelligence when I see it. I’d recognize a Bigfoot, too, on sight, because it’s about as rare.

I could tell many stories about Fish. People like him spawn many wild tales as they swim up the stream of life. But there’s one that comes to mind that explains him to a T, and is perhaps a lesson for us all:

We rode bicycles all the damn time. All over, everywhere. We delivered newspapers. Rode to the little convenient store and bought bread and milk for our moms and enough candy bars for ourselves to make Bridge-playing dentists rich.  Whenever there was nothing to do we’d ride bicycles to get to the place to not do it.

There were dogs all over the place back then. Maybe even more than now, if that’s possible. People used to treat their dogs like pets, though, not like hemophiliac children that need to be carried everywhere and get their food catered. They’d tie them up in the yard, play with them from time to time, or just let them roam around some. When we rode our bikes, getting chased by dogs, snapping at your heels, was pretty common. We’d just smirk and ride on by when the little yipyip dogs took a run at us. We learned pretty quickly where the biggest beasts that could do some damage were prowling, and avoided riding past their houses.  Eventually, I got a ten-speed bike, and it had one of those hand air pumps that fit between two pins on the bike’s frame. It made a pretty handy billy club, if a little light. Swinging it wildly was enough to keep most Cujos at arm’s length.

One day, Fish and me were riding far afield, and encountered a substantial canine on the loose. German Shepherd. He came tearing after us, snarling and slavering, all business, if your business was the perimeter fence in a prison camp, anyway. I was a timid soul, and my mind shifted back and forth between pedaling faster and reaching for my pneumatic billy club. Fish wasn’t having any of it. He stopped dead, threw his bike on the tarmac, and started snarling and barking right back at the dog, which had closed to maybe ten yards. His canine brain (the dog’s, not Fish’s) couldn’t process this turn of events. Surprise is an unusual expression on a dog’s face, but he had it. But Fish was just warming up. He started chasing the dog.

The beast shied, and flinched, and then scampered away with that skulking, circuitous motion dogs get when they get a rap on the nose. Fish never wavered. Just went after it like a missile. The dog switched from confusion to plain terror, and finally tried to bolt in a dead run. Fish tackled it, grabbed two fistfuls of the fur on its back, and bit it, hard, on the ass.

What a howl that dog let out. Real terror, the kind brought on by a combination of pain and fear and confusion. The dog lit out like it was on fire, and Fish calmly walked back to his bicycle, and we rode off. He didn’t say a word about it. It was just business, as the mobsters used to say. We rode our bikes many times past that same house, untroubled from then on.

Sometimes, as Pascal in Big Night so colorfully expressed, you have to sink your teeth into the ass of life, and drag it to you. It is never too much. It is only not enough. Lately it’s occurring to me that everything good in my life has happened when I channeled my inner Fish, and sank my teeth into the ass of life, and dragged it to me. I’m thinking of doing it again. The dog’s going to bite you anyway. Might as well go for it.

Sippican Abides

February 23, 2026 6 Comments

star lebowski

The world is moving at warp speed lately. The picture pretty much encapsulates how I’ve been dealing with it for my whole life.

I’m not that old. I don’t fart dust or have God’s unlisted phone number or anything. But a lot of earthshaking shifts have taken place in my lifetime. Chatbots/LLMs/Ai/whateveryouwanttocallthem are just the latest shake of the technological snowglobe we live in.  Off the top of my head:

  • Phones went from a single black thing on the kitchen wall that rang like a four-alarm fire, to Dick Tracy communicators, with multiple steps between
  • Photography went from B&W to Polaroids to 35mm Kodachrome, to potato cams to megapixel cameras in everything. Been to a Fotomat recently?
  • Television went from 3 channels to cable to streaming to coming out of gas pump screens
  • Movies went from giant screen, destination viewing to VHS tapes to DVDs to digital files people watch on their phones in the subway
  • Attention spans went from 8 hours to 8 swipes on TikTok
  • Social media went from bulletin boards (actual cork ones) to chat rooms to MySpace to Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to Discord to heaven knows what now
  • Cars went from 2 tons of sheet metal, a bench seat, and an AM radio, to rollerskate/spaceship/iPhone cradles
  • Finding out stuff on the internet went from (blog)lists to directories (Yahoo) to Google to Chad
  • Making images, including moving images, went from pen and ink or cameras the size of a refrigerator, to pixels via an LLM, with mucho layoffs in between

When I say Chad, I mean Chat GPT. Or Claude. Perplexity. Gemini. Any of a number of large language models that elicit scorn or paranoia to taste. Both scorn and paranoia are understandable, but I fear the scornful have forgotten the saying, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And while armies of terminators aren’t currently roaming the countryside, relying on their chatbot overlords to send them to hunt the next Sarah Conner on the list, there are bound to be lots of casualties from the integration of leviathan computational machines into everyday life. It might not be you directly, but there’s bound to be a lot of collateral damage.

If you’re like me, you’re mostly like The Dude in the picture above. You’re hurtling at warp speed to god knows where, but you’re just along for the ride. I have mostly avoided relying on, or even participating in every step in the technological chain I listed above. But that didn’t mean I scoffed, exactly. I just stood athwart the world and yelled whatever. I didn’t bother yelling stop, because I knew you wouldn’t. I didn’t willingly cooperate in any degringolade, but I didn’t stick my fingers in my ears and chant la la la, either. The world beamed me down to some pretty unpleasant digital planets along the way, though, and I’ve had to change my job description more often than my wardrobe.

So there’s hysteria and there’s scorn about Chad’s effect on damn near everything, depending on who you’re listening to. But someone is at least starting to ask the right questions about the LLM phenomenon. Who’s going to be Crewman Expendable when beaming down to the planet’s surface wearing a red pullover instead of a bathrobe?

Payrolls to Prompts: Firm-Level Evidence on the Substitution of Labor for AI (study found via Marginal Revolution)

It’s an economic treatise, so they’re using weird economist backwards nomenclature. They mean that AI is being substituted for human labor. The study tries to track whether firms are replacing human labor with generative AI in their spending patterns, and what it might cost them to do so. They measured the amount of money being spent on freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and then comparing it to the amount of money the same people spent on AI to do the work instead. Here’s a taste of what they came up with:

We see differential patterns of spending shifts by exposure quartile. In the highest exposure quartile, we find that for every $1 decrease in labor marketplace spend, there is a $0.03 increase in AI model provider spend in Q3 2025 relative to Q1–Q2 2022 baselines. In the middle exposure quartile, we find that for every $1 decrease in labor marketplace spend, there is a $0.30 increase in AI model provider spend in Q3 2025 relative to Q1–Q2 2022 baselines. The true magnitude most likely lies somewhere between these two quartiles. The middle exposure quartile is only significant in the last time period, whereas the highest exposure quartile is significant in all time periods. We note that we cannot observe all potential additional spending that comes from bringing AI in-house, such as infrastructure costs for serving models, as well as increases in engineering headcount to build and maintain AI capabilities. Even if this estimate is conservative, it is still a significant cost savings. For example, if a firm is spending $100,000 on labor marketplaces and $10,000 on AI model providers, the firm is saving $90,000 by substituting labor for AI. Understanding how these cost savings are distributed both across and within firms is important to understand the potential impact of AI on labor markets and the economy more generally.

Got that? It’s possible to save somewhere between 70 and 97 cents on the dollar by firing someone and hiring Chad to do your intellectual scut work.

I can assure you that the replacement of freelance webworkers with Ai chadworkers is happening, bigtime. Entire ecosystems of people gulled into thinking they could write SEO articles or product descriptions or fake reviews or whatever other phony dreck the internet mostly consists of are becoming dead as Scrooge’s doornails, almost overnight. Over the last fifteen years or so, these people have seen one after another internet toehold shift under their feet and leave them without a crummy internet income. They’ve adapted somewhat as webwork changed, but Chads are currently putting a fork in a lot of them permanently. So what are they going to do with themselves?

I have a theory. They’re not going to get real jobs. If they thought they could handle real jobs, they wouldn’t be trying to make their Etsy store pay for their rent, student loans, and medical marijuana in the first place. Even if they’re capable, they’re not willing. They think the world has dealt them some pretty shitty cards, and whatever they can get back from that crooked dealer, they deserve. This is what they’re going to do, in general, if not in particular:

Of course I’m the worst kind of prognosticator. I often predict things that have already happened, and this is no exception. The United States is already awash in criminality. It’s almost ubiquitous at this point, but boy howdy, it can get worse. Shoplifting, aggressive panhandling, porch pirates, vexatious litigants, learing center operators, disability fakirs, drug dealers, gift card scammers, phishers, hackers, and just plain old scofflaws riding around smoking a J with an expired registration and a suspended license.

Chad will be the dread god of such dinky criminality. It’s the rough beast that slouches toward a datacenter in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. What to do? I’m not full of advice on the topic. I’ll simply abide, I guess, as best I can, while everyone around me loses their mind over Chad, until the next thing to lose your mind over appears.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory (Shelley)

I’m So Amtrak I Could Cry

February 17, 2026 7 Comments

I’ve been traveling again. I have to steel myself against the process. I knew going in what it would be like. The transportation schedules would be byzantine. The cab drivers wouldn’t speak English, or any other Romance language I could take a stab at. I understood from the get-go that the public transport would be rundown and unreliable. I’d have to keep my head on a swivel in public places, because as the philosopher Fagen once opined, “Everybody on the street has murder in their eyes.” I anticipated that traffic would obey the same rules as piglets at the tit, and fender bender disputes would be adjudicated by throwing hands in the street, if not gunfire. The denizens would shuffle by, morose, staring at the dirty sidewalks three feet in front of them, afraid to look anyone in the eye, as crazy people, beggars, and vagrants patrol the sidewalk.

Am I going to Mexico? Moldova? Mogadishu? Nah, Boston.

I know Boston, of course. Well, knew Boston. Past tense, now. Born there. Lived there. Built some of it. Worked there. Met my wife there. We decided to stay at the Parker House, a venerable Boston landmark. The concierge asked us if we’d ever stayed there before. We said, “Yes, thirty years ago.” There was a short, stunned pause, and she said, “That doesn’t count.” Alrighty, then. The Parker House is famous for various things. They invented Boston Cream Pie. That’s like claiming you came up with Zyklon B, if you ask me, who wouldn’t eat it on a dare. They have Parker House Rolls, which are better than snowballs in a fight. They were also the first people to make up a term for off-brand codfish to be served to the Irish pols back in the day. “We went to the Parker House, and we got scrod,” is an old, almost joke.

There is an ominous OMNI in front of the words “Parker House” on the sign these days. The stately pile was swallowed up and made to look like every other thing you sleep in when you feel like paying convention tax and sales tax and accommodation tax and are in the mood to spend $70 for valet parking. It used to have a certain James Michael Curley vibe. Now it has squiggles on the wall.

The Parker House is on School Street. That’s old bastid Boston. The Old City Hall is across the street, more or less. It’s a magnificent Second Empire dustcatcher. It was replaced by the new city hall, which I formerly referred to as the ugliest building on earth, but I no longer do that. Frank Gehry entered the sweepstakes and upped the ante since then. I don’t think anyone was trying to make the new Boston city hall deliberately ugly. It was just deliberately Brutalist, which is bound to be ugly. The architects were simply imbecilic ideologues, not misanthropes. Two hunchbacks don’t try to make ugly kids. They just can’t help it if they turn out that way.  Slice Gehry anyway you like, he was an a-hole through and through. His mistakes weren’t mistakes.

We were doing basically the same thing that gestational Jesus, Mary and Joseph did back when crucifixion was the preferred method of torturing the locals to death, instead of just onerous taxation, which takes longer and hurts more, I think. We had to return to the city of my birth to be taxed. Our patience was taxed, mostly, and our wallet, boy howdy. But there are certain administrative functions that cities hoard for themselves, and we required, so we had to go there. I generally give all cities a wide berth otherwise.

We tried to make the best of it. Took the train. Amtrak Downeaster. The sign on the train was scratched, and it looked like Amtrak Downcaster, which I liked better. If the conductor had asked me if I’d ever taken the train to Boston before, I could have told the truth for once and said, “Yes, thirty years ago,” but he didn’t. His appearance suggested that he was more qualified to tie maidens to the tracks than punch our tickets. Come to think of it, the train might have been the same one I rode in last time. I would have looked for my gum under the seat, but figured it might have stiffened up overmuch in the interim to be useful, so I let it be.

The train station in Portland is a combo with a bus station, because you can never get downscale enough to suit public transit. There was an interesting mix of people in the waiting area. Kliban would have had a field day in there. There was Psychedelic Babushka, Snorting Businessman, Failed Student Athlete, Girl With Dorm Fridge Backpack and a Dent In Her Head. Amazing Mom and Mortified Teenage Son made an appearance. There was a quorum of furtive guys who looked like their backpacks couldn’t stand an olfactory inspection by even an untrained German Shepherd, never mind the police kind. Everyone was wearing workout clothes, evidently to do everything they do in this world except work out. I’m not sure when the shift occurred exactly, but all the men wear ladies’ eyeglasses now, and all the women wear Elton John’s glasses.

The train trip itself was exactly as I remembered it. An endless tour of downscale back yards, more tarpaulins than Harbor Freight, sorry trampolines sleeping under a meringue of snow, all the while the elderly railcars clanking and banging and chugging like an offensive linemen who picks up a fumble and tries to run with it. I knew we’d entered Massachusetts when the stations sported clear lexan trash barrels that were chained to metal posts, with clear plastic liners so you could see if there was a bomb or a baby in them. I did love the train whistle, though, as we passed through the center of towns:

♬ I hear the lonesome whistle blow — I’m so Amtrak I could cry ♬

Ah, Dirty Old Boston. I’d forgotten what it was like to hear car horns blown in anger, with every lane change a fight for primacy. Just like old times. The women in the city have changed, though. When I used to come here, they would get all dolled up for work. Now they’re uniformly unhappy, sourpussed, and dressed alike — all in black, like a giant Mennonite funeral with a crummy paycheck at the end.

We sat in the coffee shop across from the golden dome of the state house, downed our ration of coffee and buns, and enjoyed the hell out of the fender bender played out right in front of us, wild gesticulations and rubbing each other’s bumpers and screaming that it would buff right out. The dogs with better shoes than the people walking them. The whole ghastly wintertime scene.

But we mostly enjoyed it because we knew we’d never have to look on it again.

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags