You Lost The Game!

You Lost The Game!

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Various Train Based Rants.

Once again caught amongst the hassled, the harassed, the homeward bound. 
The air fraught with tension, thick with aggression, and testosterone. Too small a train stuffed to the gunnels with too many people. The more often I travel this way, the more palatable the taste of the stress around me. I feel the stress around me, building in myself incrementally, almost by osmosis. Irregularly see people around me shouting at each other, gesticulating, or just marked deeply, dreadfully, in their faces. The down turned mouths, the deep-set eyes. What gets to me, both on the train and on the tube, is the silence. An almost brooding, loathing, pre-going postal, aggression. An incredible morgue like vow of silence broken only by the occasional conversation carried onto the train, the tube, from outside. Or the incidental loony who insists on expounding their latest theory on where the country has gone wrong this time. Insistent that some one listen to their diatribe, in this case usually me.Just for my friends the spirit of the “Portsmouth Lift Riders” still burns strong in my heart. I find it a terrible trial to NOT engage everyone in conversation. Or to leap from the tube screaming "Banzai!" at the top of my voice. 

Perspective.

It occurs to me that no matter how rich, how famous, or how powerful, in the ultimate reckoning you are in fact completely unimportant. The human race itself can entirely wipe itself out. Destroy the planet, the solar system. It is all eventually unimportant. Environmentalists for ever argue we are causing global warming, total toxicity syndrome, and many other global catastrophes. They omit the fact that the world from it's beginning has passed through many differing climates, changed evolved and survived. The case in fact is the dinosaurs. They “ruled” the earth for far longer than we have been in existence. In radically different (globally warmer) climates. In all likelihood the human race will destroy itself. The earth may be damaged but will re-adjust, re-balance and some other species will quiet happily rise to dominance. In the ultimate reckoning we do not matter. As individuals we fight to attempt to control our little corner of existence. We fight by conforming, or not. We fight by reproducing, or not. We fight by annihilating, or not. Murder, genocide, violence, pacifism, love, hate, everything is insignificant, we just don't matter. From the great Roman leaders through despots, to dictators, humanitarians, and even pacifist like Ghandi, we don't matter. All we are, all we were, all we are destined to be, will wither and fade to dust, everything we represented will cease to be. 
Nothing really matters. 
Your opinion, does not matter. 
Your work, does not matter. 
Your family, your wealth, your status, does not matter. 
You scrimp and save, you graft and toil, and nothing of it matters. You build castles and empires and dynasties, and nothing of it matters. 
So remember that next time your rushing around thinking only about yourself, your own self important little bubble, I must get to work because I am important.  
Remember that as your pushing into me on the tube. Knocking me out of your way. Huffing, tutting, and sighing, because I don't want to walk as fast as you do. Don’t want to crush into the tube just so you can get to your oh so important job or engagement because I am in your way. 
Because I am not as important as you think you are. 
Well I'm not. 
But the news is, neither are you. 
Nothing really matters, all will be reduced to dust eventually. Then what will have been the point of all this? 
So next you’re on the tube, driving your car, on the train, just calm down and be grateful for what little or great measure you've got. Because you don't matter, it doesn't matter, nothing really matters. 

Thursdays Tube.

05/06/2008 

“This is a district line train to Ealing Broadway”, 
Crowded morning tube, 
Smell of suntan cream, 
Wafts with it, 
Memories of lovers lost and past, 
Reverie only broken by the incessant rustle of the free papers, 
In the tomb like quiet, 
Self conscious laughter, 
As unfamiliar proximity, 
Causes momentary embarrassment. 
“Mind the doors please this train is about to depart!”

Technorati Tag: Commuting, Trains, Whimsy, Life, Too Much Thinking, Journey, Tube, Who do You Think You Are, meekon5.

Life As A Backwards Train Journey.

"Life is understood backwards but it must be lived forwards" - Soren Kierkegaard

If you sit on the train with your back to the engine you get an entirely different perspective on the journey. You see things only as places you've been as they move away from you into the past. Of course you can see the parallel that I'm thinking of here. Much like experiences in life.

We are only able to see what we have done or where we have been as though it were the train journey, a brief instance parallel, in the moment, then it slips away into the past. Objects near to us seem more immediate, objects further away more distant. The station we pass through like a fleeting acquaintance, the station we stop at a slightly more well know friend. A town we know from the nearness of some buildings and the continuation of the suburbs, someone known well but become familiar and almost viewed with the contempt of over familiarity.

Even the people we travel with are much in parallel to life. Someone can sit right beside you for the entire journey and you don't even talk to them, or a complete stranger can strike up a conversation and for brief moments you have some connection. You can cause discomfort to each other through your disregard of personal space or be as adjusting, making as much allowance for their comfort, and they will still look upon you with scorn as they leave.

Much of the time I find it difficult not to fall in love on the train (all too frequently), but these (much like my life) are only fleeting crushes that never reach any level of requitement. I often wonder how many other lonely people there are travelling back and forth only millimetres from someone who could be their very soul mate.

Even here the better off exclude themselves from the “riff-raff”, cosseting themselves in their elitist first class carriages, economic circumstance standing between us and them. Less people in more space with slightly better furnishings. The rest of us left to be cramped and fight for the poor crumbs and little space that our meagre money buys us to travel with. 

Even the activities we undertake separate us further. The intellectuals reading books (even differentiating amongst themselves by what they read). The workaholic salary men catching up on e-mail, memos, reports they just didn't have the time to cover during the working day (may the gods forbid they “drop out of the loop” by not being up to date). Mothers organise children over the phone. Fathers admonish sons for the weekend misconducts. People like myself with laptops demarking hierarchies again based on size and power. Even I myself tag my position in society by using a cut down laptop running Linux (yes techno-geek as ever). Children text each other with the urgency of people that haven't talked for seconds, therefore could be missing out on the minutiae of each others existence. Or more importantly who “fancies” who this week, and what dreadfully uncool thing their parents insisted they did this weekend.

Every day, every morning and evening these parallel microcosms spew out of the suburbs and co-mingle in any number of London stations. Only to do the same that evening in reverse, exploding from London to seed the suburbs with commuters. Being born from our station of departure to end your brief commuter life at the station of your destination, only to be re-born the next morning to run a similar route through a similar life.

Though I do feel somewhat like Methuselah. Joining the journey at it's beginning and not leaving until almost the end, I see many people begin the trip but very few of us last to the end of the journey.

Technorati Tag: Commuting, Trains, Whimsy, Life, Too Much Thinking, Journey, meekon5.