Corrosion
Word started spreading on social media early and by this afternoon the confirming news reports hit: Amtrak is pulling all of a certain line of railcars from service due to corrosion issues, impacting the Amtrak Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest seemingly more than any other region. Train trips here are reduced to just two lines a day, with everything else being served by buses.
There’s no indication whether this disruption is meant to last weeks or months or indefinitely or even forever—which means my followup to last year’s trip to Seattle to watch the Red Sox play the Mariners, scheduled and booked for mid-June, is in jeopardy.
On that trip last March, the outbound leg in fact was served by replacement buses due to a landslide that had blocked the tracks. It was pretty much a nightmare, even with my having managed to convince them that I needed to be seated in the frontmost seat as a disability accommodation. I’d known with absolutely no doubt that I was incapable of starting off in the early morning on a long, exhausting day trip by suffering the anxiety and claustrophobia of being hemmed in on all sides. There’s a reason I chose to go by train rather than bus in the first place.
I can’t see how I could ever do that to myself again, certainly not for both outbound and inbound legs of the journey. If sufficient service is not restored by mid-June, the trip is off. It was the only “thing” I had to look forward to year.
This problem they’ve identified here—corrosion—perhaps is a little on the nose. It frankly describes what seems to be happening literally to every other single thing right now.
The planet is corroding due to anthropocentric climate change and global heating. The entire government is being corroded from the inside out by Mine Furor, Phony Stark, Couch Fucker and all the fascist hangers-on of the Republican Party. The idea of political opposition to this takeover has been corroded by the almost completely feckless and entirely unimaginative Democratic Party which seems uninterested in anything other than business as usual. Public health is in danger of corrosion as first bird flu, and now also measles (again), threaten just as Wormwood pivots the CDC to research the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism, because it’s better for people to die than to be autistic.
Corrosion, honestly, is exactly what I’ve felt like is happening to me these days, and the thing that (I guess?) is what blogging is desperately trying to stave off. They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it, but when that half-life is being worn down and worn away how much fight am I supposed to have exactly?
Recently I finished Model Home by Rivers Solomon, and while I’m typically loathe to pull from the end of a book I’ve got to do so here because there are two sentences in the final chapter that I knew I’d have to note.
Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.
I’ve a flutter of recognition here but it’s purely an intellectual exercise in understanding. I can’t feel it. I haven’t been able to feel it for awhile now. I note it here, amidst the corrosion, not because I can feel it but because I’m still trying to write myself into believing in our continued existence.
There’s a Yeahs Yeahs Yeahs lyric these two sentences immediately echoed for me.
With every breath I breathe
I’m making history
I don’t know what we can save. I don’t know what we can salvage. I’m just trying to breathe. I’m just trying to breathe.