Jimbaux wants to be - and wants you to be - something you love and understand.
Today is Monday 22 February 2021, and everything makes sense now. I survived the big freeze last week that killed dozens of Texans, Rush Limbaugh does not survive, his hateful ideology is thriving, a bigoted person whom I have spent years ignoring decided that me ignoring her wasn’t enough, and I have realized how much a thorn in my side her clan has always been and how much I tried, to my own detriment, to gain their approval.
Everything makes sense now.
Not So Simple Man
Ten years ago today, I took the pictures of snow-covered grounds for my “Snowy Bowie” post, an interesting coincidence considering all of the snow and ice that we experienced last week, with the record cold here, and I got some train pictures today.
I wish better for humanity.
I got old envelopes opened, the first time since I moved out of home.
Today’s song is my favorite song, it has been my favorite song for many years, but I am just now figuring out the depth of why it means so much to me.
So, this morning, I went foaming, only to decide, a few hours into it, that foaming is a huge waste of my time. Because I’m likely to be forced to leave the Lafayette area soon for the Lake Charles area, and because I have few pictures of trains in Lafayette, I decided today to target the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s BR Job, just as I did on January 15 and on did February 2.
The thing that I most wanted to do was get a shot of a train on the Breaux Bridge Branch itself, and I guess that I did that, but, once again, I did so near the beginning of the branch, in the middle of Lafayette, as this train returned to Lafayette from the salt mine. Apparently, the train crew started the day at the salt mine.
I like the LDRR 1717. I love the old boxcars. I hate the graffiti.
You knew that already, though, right?
The LDRR 1703 is the trailing locomotive, meaning that it will be the lead locomotive when the train returns to Elks.
I found this neat brick structure right by the track in a curve near the beginning of the Breaux Bridge Branch, but I did not photograph it.
Next, we are on the mainline.
It could be as little as that car at the end that is coming from the salt mine. It could be as many as all of the other cars that are coming from the International Paper place and were along for the ride down and up the branch to and from the salt mine before going to the BNSF Railway yard for interchange.
Here, the train is entering the BNSF yard, and you can see a hint of a BNSF locomotive in the background.
Figuring that there would be plenty of time before he returned east, I went and perched myself at the corner of Bienville Street and Morgan Street, where, scrolling on my tablet, I saw this, after reading the first chapter of Tcherneva’s book on the Job Guarantee.
It got me to thinking that if a job is a ‘thing,’ a ‘thing’ that you have to ‘get,’ a thing for which you must compete with other people, then we don’t think of jobs in a communal sense. We think of them in an individual sense. We don’t think of them as being things that help the community.
This past weekend, this past week, and this month, have been emotionally tumultuous. I feel like my entire life now makes sense, and I now understand what role family bigots have played in it. I was thinking of this plenty today, and then I realized that I needed to get out of here and get back to the homestead and resume working on everything else.
So, more than an hour later after the last picture, here is the train returning eastward, this time, with the LDRR 1703 in the lead.
So, it looks like those two boxcars came from the salt mine, and the rest of this train is interchange from BNSF.
This, too, is a new shot for me.
This is cool, okay, really, it’s not that cool, but I have to get out of here.
That’s all. Maybe I really shouldn’t spend time doing this. As I hinted above, I decided not to chase this thing to Elks to get more shots of it in action.
I Figured It Out
The death of the horrible, bigoted Rush Limbaugh followed by praises sung of him by someone whom I wanted to please for all of my life followed by the revelation of a Facebook unfriending of someone in her orbit from whom I’ve deliberately tried to hide for the last four years helped me figure out much of my life.
I have realized that what I actually wanted from the “I’m A Cajun” song that I have never released is what I have wanted from my bigoted relatives: acceptance and reconciliation.
I canceled the project – by just constantly postponing it – because it is clear that that will never happen, that I would be only picking at a scab. I first conceived of the project and recorded the song and the video scenes before the Trump Era, when their dark hearts were revealed in ways that I hadn’t before seen.
But that I am so hurt by the rejection of someone whom I rejected long ago shows how painfully powerful that inner longing remains.
And, as for the younger person who is now in this older person’s orbit, I now know that my impression of her was right the first time; my sharing to her of my initial thoughts about her was representative of my longing to connect, and her repeated harping about my initial perception of her, along with her nonsequitur invoking of her professional success when she felt criticized, is representative of her own pliability, a word used to describe Rush Limbaugh, who just died and whose death seems to have sparked this.
If you’re lamenting the death of and celebrating the life of Rush Limbaugh right now, or if you are nothing but critical of the people who are talking about how much of an awful monster Limbaugh was, then you are an awful, evil person.
I just made the connection between them and my apparently-unconscious reasons for doing that Cajun song project, because I seem to have just figured out why, on a most subconscious level, I was trying to do that project.
And I had aspirations, visions, of doing a version of “Simple Man” – with me singing and on the guitar, and maybe Waylon on the fiddle – in either the Mother Church or the Pirate Gym, as a tribute to my paternal grandmother, of whom that song makes me think, as a way of pleasing these hateful bigots.
And, now that I know why I was trying to do that, I can let go of it, because I am clearly not doing it anyway, but now I know the real reason that I haven’t been really trying to do it anymore ever since the Trump Era started.
I still so very strongly want them to not be that horrible way, but I am now letting go of trying to ever change them for the better, not because it’s not the right thing to do and a very important thing to do, but because it’s just not possible.
So, while this Limbaugh-death-induced revelation fills me with sadness, it is also helping to free me a bit, and maybe I can return to being the pre-Facebook “Westcreek” and let go of my need to assert my Cajunness.
I have work to do, I have a new direction to view and to go, and I imagine that I won’t be taking pictures much for a while now.
With gratitude,
Jim
