The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Yesterday I had the great adventure of going to our local AMTRAK station, kind of a trip down memory lane to what life in the former Soviet Union must have been like.

First a few explanatory notes. The fact that my town, Saratoga Springs, NY, even has train service is amazing, considering the condition of America's passenger rail system. We are on the line that runs from New York City to Montreal. Now, one problem with this line is that the track-bed north of Albany is in wretched condition so the trains are always badly delayed (sometimes by hours) coming into Saratoga either southbound from Montreal or northbound from Albany. Consequently, we cannot use Saratoga as a point of departure. So, if I have to go to New York City or Washington, I depart from the Albany/Rennsselaer station. But I sometimes buy the tickets at the Saratoga Station, which was my mission yesterday.

Well, first of all there is the station itself, out in the boonies on the ragged western edge of our town (there was a magnificent station nearer the center of town until about 1965). The new station looks like the Former Soviet Museum of Prosthetic Limbs, a flat-roofed , one story, monstrosity clad in monkeyshit yellow brick with mingy little industrial windows. The bricks are starting to spall out now in places and the doors and windows have acquired such a patina of auto emissions that the glass is no longer transparent. Evidently, the station's exterior had not been cleaned since Nelson Rockefeller grabbed his last voter by the hair.

The waiting room is really something to behold, kind of hybrid between an industrial meat storage locker and a county penitentiary, all greenish tiles on the walls to head level (grimy sheetrock above) and fractured gray linoleum on the floor. There is one ancient wooden bench apparently salvaged from the old station, certainly once graceful, but now battered and carved up with graffiti. There is a rich palette of fugitive odors wafting through the place, ranging from (what else?) vomit to urine to Double-Bubble Bubble Gum, with overtones of ammonia and toilet mints.
Behind a battered ticket grill the sole employee puttered about, a man about forty wearing the kind of Kmart shirt and tie ensemble that look like they were designed to be worn by chimpanzees in variety acts -- you know, the collar too large and bunched up around the neck, the tie knot almost as big as an apple turnover. He had a very earnest manner though he was noticabley walleyed. I may have been his sole customer that day, maybe even the whole week.

I then set about ordering up two sets of tickets: one round trip from Albany to Washington, D.C., and another round-trip from Albany to New York City. Simon & Schuster was sending me out on a couple of publicity gigs over the next two weeks. These simple transactions took no less than a half hour to complete. It took the clerk fifteen minutes alone to get the schedule off what looked like an ancient 286-model computer. (Why he didn't have a printed timetable, I can't say.) Running the credit card took ten minutes, and then it took five minutes for him to determine that there was no utility on his computer for producing receipts (I wanted one so my publisher would reimburse me for the tickets.) Apparently, I was the only person who had ever asked for a receipt there. Anyway, based on this performance, we can estimate that an AMTRAK clerk could sell tickets to 16 passengers during the course of one 8-hour shift -- assuming he had no other duties, which I wouldn't assume since he was the only person in the station, so he probably had to wrangle whatever freight came in on the single northbound p.m. train, and perhaps mop the bathroom floor, too. Good thing there wasn't a rush on for tickets.

I felt for the guy, though. He was struggling in his own small way to keep the pathetic project of passenger rail alive in America. It must have been demoralizing to work in the vomity decrepitating station. I'd already finished a decent day's work, so I didn't feel agitated over the ridiculous procedure. But the little adventure did reinforce my notion that we are rapidly becoming the Bulgaria of the West.

One other little note on a completely different topic today. I happened to tune into a pop music station on the radio this morning. Am I the only person in America who has noticed that a lot of rap music sounds uncannily like nursery rhymes? What's up with that??