Rave On: postcards from Slow Trains
 

   
 


 
Rave on words on printed page... rave on fill the senses...


-Van Morrison
Rave On, John Donne

from The Inarticulate Speech of the Heart CD
 
 
Friday, February 22, 2002
 



My Small Wave

Sky hinged at horizon by fog, forcing me to recognize distinctions: my small wave of consciousness rolling, rolling slowly over dark, illuminated, depths of dream. A wailing in the distance. She says she has to go to answer it somewhere, like a phone. I stay put. A train in the station, ready; a plane on the tarmac, taxiing; a host waiting for company on the way with wine & flowers. Hello, welcome, I'm Robert, take a look around, make yourselves at home. She's just gone to change. A woman, a white dress there in the depths, the clarity of which puts this distant fog to shame.


Monday, February 11, 2002
 
from Denver to Salt Lake


My kids are avidly following the snowboarding at the Olympics, in spite of dismissing the idea in some ways, since "real" snowboarders do the same. Except for those ones winning medals, of course . . . I ask my sons, both expert snowboarders, if they can do any of those things in the halfpipe that I watched Kelly Clarke win her medal for yesterday. My oldest, who freely does back flips off of regular jumps and rides rails that are curved like snakes, says no, he can only do a 180 ( a basic go up, catch a little air, turn and come back down), and he says that what they're doing is the hardest thing there is to do in snowboarding. To get "big air," he says, is just hard, and is more than just speed, and he offered me a complex answer on just how one technically has to do it. I asked my youngest the same question later, and he is still of that wonderful honest age, with little machismo surrounding him. He says no, all he can do is go back and forth on the halfpipe, no "air," and when asked why, he explained that it scares the living daylights out of you to drop into the halfpipe just right, pick up speed, and then go straight up the wall, sure that you're going to flip backwards on your head.


Friday, February 08, 2002
 
Salt Lake City

Checking in from Salt Lake, when I'd much rather be on a slow train somewhere, or at least covering Mardi Gras -- this is like a bright, perky, all-white, super-clean, cold Disneyland, thank God for the state liquor store nearby. Security is over the top, the "patriotism" may get unbearable, and Nike had it right when they had that ad a few years back that got pulled for not being PC -- "You don't win the silver, you lose the gold." If I have to hang with super-competitive atheletes, I'd rather hang with the honest ones with the money and the lifestyle to go with. But in spite of the Feds and the dogs and metal detectors on every corner, everyone is just waiting for something to happen.

 

Read the earlier postcards in the archives.

 

 
   
     


   
     


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