Humor me and imagine this: You’ve just hauled your overpacked suitcase down a concrete flight of stairs, through a tiled hallway that vaguely smells of urine, up another set of the same concrete stairs because the elevator had a sign that said, “Good luck, disabled people!”, and finally onto the platform of the station nearest to your house. You wipe the sweat from your brow, take a seat on the plastic bench with the least stains on it, and fiddle with your phone until the train pulls up.
Finally! You enter the train and call upon the hulk deep inside all of us to bench press the suitcase into the luggage rack. You look around like a boss. Not that you’re feeling like one, but you’re not about to cry in front of the other passengers because you threw your back out doing that. You sit down and when nobody is looking you wipe the tears from your eyes. The worst is over. Now it’s time to relax for a while.
The train pulls out. Looking out the window, you smile because the optical illusion of the station moving always captivated you like a toddler looking at a bowl of M&Ms.
And that’s when your heart skips a beat. Instantly a fever sweat manifests itself on your back and an unseen force presses on your chest…
Where the fuck is this train going?
You thought you planned everything. You accounted for every situation you could think of. Your plan was foolproof!
But to paraphrase either Douglas Adams or Stephen Hawking: No plan is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
To add insult to injury, you realize you’re the fool in this equation. Everything would have gone swimmingly if you had just bothered to make sure this was the train you were supposed to be on. Now you can forget about relaxing, all you can do now is sit and stress until you reach the next station, an hour later.
There. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m a sufficiently talented fool working towards getting a book out. I was pretty sure I had the process figured out, and I know where it’s supposed to lead, but now that the train is moving I’m realizing that I don’t know nearly enough and all I can do is wait until the next station to see if I need to adjust the course.
Aw shit. Did I turn the stove off before I left?