I hate that stupid train!

I still haven’t felt like doing anything about that fly shoe, but now it’s gotten covered up with some newspapers anyway, so I think I’m just going to forget about it and go ahead and throw the other one away, cause one shoe’s not much good to me.

Well, this morning I woke up and it’s 8:58! Seems that the electricity went out during the night and ruined the alarm clock, so now I’m really late for work. But I took the time to eat my cereal anyway, because breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it’s a good thing I did, because it turns out that I was not destined to arrive at work any time soon.

The problem is that stupid train that always seems to be able to get right between me and work—or even worse, between me and home—no matter what time of day it is. So this morning it’s there and it’s just creeping along, not even as fast as I could walk, and it’s pulling like a hundred cars. I’m not kidding you—and there’re all just those flat ones with no sides, and there’s nothing on them. Completely empty, every one. Maybe that’s why it’s going so slow, they figure what the hell, we’re not pulling any real stuff anyway. I think if I were driving a train that didn't have anything on it, I'd be in a hurry to get somewhere where I could put something on it, but apparently these train guys don't share my sentiments. Then finally it comes to the last car and we’re all getting ready to drive and then the damn thing stops like three feet past the crossing, so of course the bars won’t come up and we’re all still stuck there in the hundred degree heat! And it sat there for 9 minutes—I timed it!

I hate that train! And you know what, I think they can tell when you don’t like them, and it’s because this train can sense my negative thoughts that it’s always getting in my way and making me late for work. It’s like cats, you know how they can always find the one person in the room who doesn’t like cats, and get in their lap and do that thing they do like they’re kneading bread, which is really just an excuse to claw somebody’s leg. Maybe that sounds crazy, but I really believe it’s true. And it’s just trains, not planes or cars or boats. I know some people think that cars are like that too, but they’re not. It’s only trains.

However, I think that the people in the cars could tell, some of them at least, the ones who are attuned to this sort of spiritual energy, because a couple of them kept looking at me kinda weird—the guy in the white pickup next to me in the middle lane, and the woman who was right in front of me. She kept fiddling with the mirror, like she was checking her makeup, but I could see her eye in the mirror, and she was looking right at me. I think they could tell it was my fault that we were stuck there in the heat, and it was starting to piss them off, especially after the thing just completely stopped dead on the tracks.

So I decided to try thinking positive thoughts, to see if that would help, but it wasn’t easy because I really hate that train. First I cleared my mind, which is always easier first thing in the morning, because not so much has gotten in it yet, and then I imagined that the train was made of dark chocolate, and that all of the flat cars, instead of being empty, had cheerleaders on them, waving pompoms. It was working pretty good, I was feeling a lot more positive toward the train, and I decided to imagine that we were on a beautiful beach in the Caribbean, with that clear turquoise water like I like, and there were a bunch of girls there on the beach too, wearing bikinis. And sure enough, it wasn’t thirty seconds before the train moved on and let us by. To tell you the truth, I kinda hated to leave, because of the bikini girls, but I knew I needed to get to work, and besides the people behind me were getting impatient now, and starting to honk.

I was so impressed with the results I had obtained that I decided I’d try it when I got to the office too, but that didn’t work as well. I was about an hour and a half late, and my boss was pretty annoyed, and even though I imagined that she was wearing a bikini most of the day, her disposition did not improve noticeably.