The City of New Orleans

I was thinking this morning while I was waiting for the train to get on by just how much my life has improved since I stopped embracing negativity Friday before last. Not only am I so much more centered and at peace, but I also feel now that I have a satisfactory understanding of that song “Love Potion No. 9,” which has been bothering me off and on for years. Then all of a sudden—it was like this big flashbulb had gone off in my head—I realized that the train was not a train at all, but was really my Spirit Guide, and just looked like a train. Man, I couldn’t believe what a dummy I had been not to have realized that sooner, because once you do it’s so perfectly obvious, like one of those pictures that just look like a bunch of little dots until you stare at it a while and then whatever it’s a picture of comes out, and from then on you can see it right away. Or most people can. For some reason, I can’t do it and have to sit and stare at the dots again, even if I already know what it’s supposed to be.

I was pretty excited, as you can imagine, but then when I calmed down a little I got to thinking of practical stuff, like what my Spirit Guide’s name was, because Spirit Guide isn’t a name but only a generic term that covers a lot of different Spirit Guides. What I needed was my own Spirit Guide’s given name, so I wouldn’t keep calling him or her “the train,” which is not only much too impersonal, but not even strictly accurate. And maybe I need to know the sex, too, so I won’t have to keep saying him or her, which sounds dumb and doesn’t inspire much confidence in other people that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Before that I guess I need to know if Spirit Guides have any sex, or not.

First off, I looked to see if the name was printed on the side of the Spirit Guide like it sometimes is on a regular train, like the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, cause wouldn’t I feel stupid if I put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out, and then it turned out it was written there all the time. Unfortunately there were a lot of different things written on it, and they were so inconsistent from day to day that I figured they couldn’t be the name, but were most likely some kind of hidden messages that I should try to figure out what they meant some day when I had the time, after I had worked out what the name was, and the sex. Then I thought about the song “City of New Orleans” which was written by Steve Goodman, not Arlo Guthrie like a lot of people think. It just popped into my head, which I attribute to the mystical influence of the Spirit Guide, who could see that I wasn’t making a lot of headway figuring it out for myself.

I’m pretty pleased that the train’s Spirit Guide name turned out to be City of New Orleans, because henceforth whenever I hear that song it will remind me of my Spirit Guide, and of the efficacy of thinking good thoughts, rather than what it reminds me of now, which is the time I went to New Orleans with this girl Lydia I was madly in love with, and things didn’t go quite as I had hoped, nor as she had hoped. In fact, she was even more disappointed in the whole affair than I was, so much so that she felt compelled to make a great big etching, or a lithograph I guess it was, about four feet square, unfavorably contrasting the actual trip with her idea of how it ought to have gone. And both of those things differed from how I thought it should have been, and told my buddies that it had been. So there were three different versions going, altogether.

What I hadn’t counted on was that there would be a student art show, and that Lydia would put that big lithograph in the show, where the guys would see it, and that they would accept her account of the trip over mine. Well, that last part makes sense, but all the rest was just pure bad luck.

So then they thought it would be funny, which it really wasn’t so much, to make up new lyrics to sing to the tune of “City of New Orleans” pointing out that I was not only a loser but something of a liar as well, as though anyone needed reminding at this point, least of all me. I was a little hurt in addition that they didn’t put any more effort than they did into the new lyrics, which weren’t all that good, and mostly didn’t even rhyme.

The general consensus that emerged seemed to be that Lydia had been way too good for me to start with, and that it was an excess of self-esteem that had led me to try and fly too close to the sun, which had melted the wax off of my wings so they wouldn’t work properly, and that in turn’s what caused me to fall right into the bowl of punch at this student art show, with the attendant embarrassment. I didn’t really fall in the punch, you understand, and I don’t have any wings—it’s a metaphor, something we writers use from time to time to spice things up. The art show is the only part that’s real, other than the embarrassment.

If only I had had a Spirit Guide back then, when I was screwing up big time every single day, and most days more than once.

You know what? It just occurred to me that maybe I had that same Spirit Guide all along and just didn’t have sense enough to recognize it, cause we lived only half a block or so from the railroad track there on Mitchell St., and there were trains going by at 12 midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m., and other times during the day that I didn’t find as memorable. What if one of those trains was the City of New Orleans, and I was just too blind to hear what she was trying to tell me, due in no way to any lack of effort on the part of the City of New Orleans, who kicked up such a racket that she made the dishes rattle, and occasionally even knocked a picture off the wall. It’d be different pictures different times, but the only one that never fell off was my print—number 17 of 24—of the ill-fated New Orleans trip, which I now see as a sign or an omen, unless it was just because I used a bigger nail for that one than for the others.

Some people think it’s odd that I would even hang up a picture on my own wall that deals frankly with the sensitive subject matter of my being a loser—an alleged loser—but you know what I say “Keep your successes close, and your failures closer.” After the New Orleans debacle, I hoped to keep my self-esteem tamped down enough that I wouldn’t dare think about flying up close to that stupid sun again, or even going out in the sun. All things sun-related were off the agenda. In this way, I hoped to avoid making the same mistake again. In my youthful ignorance I didn’t realize at the time what I do now with my more mature form of ignorance, which is that there are so many mistakes out there waiting to be made—for all practical purposes an infinite number—that you might as well make the same ones over again as not, because if you don’t you’ll just be making some of the new ones instead, and odds are they’re even worse than the ones you’ve already tried. At least the old ones didn’t kill you outright, or you wouldn’t even be considering the matter now, but who knows what’s liable to happen with the new ones.

I can’t even believe now how I used to say “I hate that train”! It seems so long ago, but actually it was just a couple weeks. I was an altogether different person then, though I looked mostly the same and come to think of it I was wearing this same shirt, I’m pretty sure. And then it turns out that the train was really my Spirit Guide, the City of New Orleans. Wow! And that I just now realized it, after all these years that the CoNO has been patiently dogging me around the country trying to get me to come to my senses, often not even carrying any freight, which must have driven the train company crazy. Think how much better things would have gone if I had just embraced life right off instead of saying “I hate that train” and generally exuding negativity out of every pore. I think lots of people probably make that kind of mistake—though not commonly that exact one—and then later on realize how wrong they were, often after it’s too late, but sometimes before it’s too late, but after what would have been ideal.

For example, over the years I have encountered a number of women whose poor choices have kept them from experiencing the full richness of all that life has to offer, and kept me from it too, through no fault of my own, and gave me the chickflop disorder to boot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of them now realize what a terrible mistake they made by exuding all that negativity, and deeply regret the lost years of joy and inner peace they might have had if they had only been a bit more receptive to the gentle spiritual energy of the universe. I hope they do. It serves them right.