Most of the power is out here.

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The 360.

I am in Union Station in downtown LA waiting to get my seat assignment and I'm noticing the bizarre plethora of humanity arrayed around me in the waiting area and I'm struck by the fact that not a single average seeming person will be taking the train with me out across the desert night. These are some of my travel companions:

Guy in camo overall shorts

Fat version of a rockabilly friend of mine

Samuel L. Jackson's soft spoken younger brother

Infant with an iPhone

Germans

Amish teenagers

Very old woman with arm cast

Obese rednecks talking about their trip to Paris

Dirty hippie with no shoes but two guitars

An aggressively large number of people wearing Hawaiian print clothing.

Man with a gambling problem who claims to live in a condemned lighthouse near 3rd street in Laguna Beach.

Guy who I swear to god is Powers Boothe

Asian Jennifer Lawrence

Man with apparently one tooth

Dude in khaki-colored jeans and straw hat and beard who can only possibly be a paleontologist.

Emma Stone if she dyed her hair that great shade of dark red and wore Hello Kitty sweats and, you know, rode on trains

More Germans

Dude who ... I don't even know how to describe. Looks kind of like a wolf wearing a black Panama hat with a red feather in it, and suspenders, and a gray sweater that can't possibly fit him tied around his waist, and the combat boots his pants are ducked into.

Neck tattoo guy in mesh Dogers jersey.

A lone glossy black electric guitar, apparently left behind but sitting in a chair in the waiting area trying to be as dignified as it can be under the circumstances.

Woman with birthday balloons

Old leathery skinned couple with matching windbreakers

Duck Dynasty lookin' motherfucker

Black British hipster

Amtrak employee announcing that at any moment the power may go out ... that's odd, right?

(Here is the view from inside the waiting area.)

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Either Or.

So I am sitting at the bar in Union Station in downtown LA. I'm waiting for a train to show up and then take me to Tuscon. The drinks are WAY overpriced but the music is okay. The bartendress is very talkative but thankfully she is talking to the couple next to me who look shockingly like Rush Limbaugh and Oprah. If they can find love while looking at each other, then there may just be hope for the rest of us.

In the twenty minutes I've been here the bartendress has claimed that she sang backup on a Mariah Carey album and that she was accepted to Harvard Law School. I would be willing to believe either of those things, but not both.

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LA can be pretty sometimes. As long as you are extremely choosey about what you look at.

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I am on a train! I love trains! Because they go to places!

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Adventure fun train travel times start now!

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No Z.

Below is an embarrassingly ridiculous “story” I had to write for one of my classes. This was the product of a writing exercise “constraint” called a "lipogram" that requires the omission of a letter of the alphabet. Rather than omitting the letter I or E or anything like that, I omitted the letter Z and then sent the kids off to the zoo to see some zebra. That just seemed like more fun to me. The result - as you can see below - is actually surprisingly lame.

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