Mad Transit

Having finally established myself with a physical address, ADSL line, and bookshelves (these being the basic necessities), I've got around to redesigning the blog as I promised in a bunch of posts that are now gone, and am finally going to be actually updating it.  Starting now.

I have a complicated relationship with mass transit systems.  On the one hand, I don't like to drive and indeed do not have a license or vehicle, and I think the effects of the personal automobile on North American life and city planning are hardly salutary.  On the other hand, I have no sense of time and little sense of direction, and a long history of getting on a bus to go to a friend's house and finding myself at the airport, or in a Montreal hotel, or...  Any place I didn't intend to go, and will have a hard time getting back from.

Currently I have to take three buses to get to work.  This is tolerable because, first, I am a grown man and can deal with day-to-day life without obsessing, and second because I have obsessively memorized every landmark along the way and where other frequent riders get on and off relative to my own stops.  This, of course, requires remembering them, which requires paying some attention to them, and a kind of weird one-sided intimacy develops.  I have to remind myself that I can't tell that one skinny blonde that "craby" isn't a word, and 42 Across should be "cross".  I feel sad when Veronica (my nickname obviously, not her real one) disappears and Betty is left riding to school alone, and then a bit worried soon after Betty stops turning up too.  I feel kind of inexplicably fond of Bird Lady and Sadness Claus.  This isn't just a means of navigation, it's also a coping mechanism, because getting into a large vehicle over which I have no control terrifies me.

The relevance of this to writing, apart from the basic relevance of any of my bizarre phobias and neuroses, is that mass transit has foiled me in that realm too.  In the short story I'm currently really, honestly close to finishing, I am stuck in a train station.  I have some information I need to establish, and some other information I want to smuggle in, and the train station is where it must all go down.

Unfortunately, the train station scene is a slow, largely pointless mess, and much too long, and it keeps getting longer as I try to fix it instead of shorter, but at the same time harder and harder to cut as more of that information being established becomes integrated into later scenes.

I should have written a scene with the characters just walking somewhere.  I rarely get lost on foot...