Returning Home, But Not For A Night
This was supposed to be the first day of a two-night, three-day trip back home, but automobile trouble that I could have adequately addressed earlier prevented that. So, a victim of bad timing, I had to borrow an automobile to go to the dentist.
I awoke today, Wednesday 29 November 2023, at around 03:00. I was able to get some pictures today with my recently-cleaned Canon SLR camera, after the scare from last week.
Multiple False Starts
At 05:15-05:20, I had a conversation with that Lafayette Police dude on the street because he was backing out of driveway and wasn’t close to hitting me but still close enough that he should have slowed down as soon as he saw me, and he didn’t slow down or see me. He apologized for not slowing down, and I mentioned that that is why I back in, and he said that he couldn’t do that with the police automobile but does it with his personal vehicle.
It was the first time that he and I ever talk. He asked how our Thanksgiving was.
I should have mentioned about his wife with that solid black vehicle with no headlights on – but maybe now this conversation helps create the possibility for that conversation to go smoother if it ever happens.
I didn’t feel much like walking this morning; it was cold, I had stuff to do, and I need to go home in the van after I take my truck to the shop.
Maybe the opportunity to do that overnight trip next week without the inconvenience of it revolving around a dentist appointment is a blessing.
I am thinking obsessively, and it’s bad, about someone, and I want to see Bill and and an old family friend today.
So, the trip began at 08:20, after I handled everything with the truck and getting the loaner automobile.
I got three text messages from an 844 number from the mechanic.
I should discuss with Jenny that I am flaky.
I am wearing this bluish Polo shirt that I bought at Walmart for like $5.
Tattoos, I do not understand them. I don’t understand anything, really.
It Was So Close
Wow!! At 09:09, just before I crossed the Charenton Canal, I got a text message saying that the truck is ready! If I had known that it would be that quick, I’d have waited. It would be too soon now to go back and get it to make my overnight trip, because I told my host that I was not spending the night, and I don’t have my overnight stuff anyway.
It was a spark plug. Maybe I could have changed that myself.
I could have had November 30 pictures in New Orleans.
I could have taken the truck in on Monday and had them work on Tuesday and had it done for today.
Anyway, There Are Trains Out Here
There was an eastbound train parked in the Bayou Sale siding and a headlight off to the east, and I exited at the Centerville exit to see if I can beat the westbound train to the crossing. I wasn’t able to beat the train, and the light was terrible anyway, as the train was coming out of the sun.
It had four locomotives – the first and third were in Heritage 3 paint, the second locomotive was an H1 GE, I guess a Dash 9, about the only wide-nose model that was painted in that scheme, and the fourth was a Ferromex locomotive, which is interesting given that I’ve recently read that they are not PTC capable.
After that, the eastbound train showed no signs of moving, no headlights on. So, I decided to leave after taking a leak on the side of Alice C Road.
I briefly considered trying to do something with the #1 in Patterson or somewhere west of Schriever, because there ain’t much good in Schriever of a westbound on a cloud-free day early in a late-autumn morning, but I didn’t want to put myself late into Schriever.
I had Taco Bell breakfast in Morgan City. Workers there were nice and gave me a free Pepsi that was for someone else who didn’t take it.
There were 14 hopper cars and 15 tank cars, some or all of them LPG cars, too, parked in the Morgan City track; I don’t know what this is about.
It’s all for stuff that we shouldn’t be doing anymore. I surely would love to do something sustainable with the railroads in this area. It makes me think of David Levy.
There were 13 hopper cars in the port track, and an ATSF crane car, 199464, on what remains of the loop track.
The Homeland
I went to Schriever, but, before I went to the depot, I decided to do a going-away shot of the Sunset Limited at the borrow pit at the western part of the yard.
The water level in this pit or pond has really decreased.
This was a neat place at one time.
Here is our train.
I guess that that is neither bad nor good.
It was lit properly, for whatever that might be worth, though.
You can’t get to the depot this way anymore unless you have prior authorization, like are an employee, or something.
We used to be a proper country!
That is a sad excuse for a bus stop.
This place is both alien and special.
So, then, I proceeded to the depot.
I wonder what happened to the rest of the old pilings.
There are two loaded centerbeam cars on what remains of the Houma Branch. The first, closest to the mainline, is TR 874223, and it was loaded with some mostly uncovered lumber. The next one is BNSF 561248 with a bunch of wrapped Sierra Pacific stuff.
The presence of the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s hi-rail truck made me wonder.
Anyway, there is nothing particularly remarkable here, and that’s fine.
So, then, I went and parked just west of the depot in the first parking spot, the same old place for 25 years.
Well, actually, the other place where I just-as-often parked until about a decade ago was on the other side of the depot, but that became impossible after the old, sunk house track was replaced.
I would have gotten closer to the loaded centerbeam cars to try to get a picture, but there were BNSF M-of-W people around here.
I noticed the move lift for wheelchairs for Amtrak.
At 10:58, a westbound train snuck up on me. I thought at first that it might be the L&D job, partly because I saw the L&D maintenance crew here earlier, but that would be early for the L&D crew to get off.
No, here is a westbound BNSF Railway train with a Warbonnet leader!
We’re nearly three decades after the merger, and one of those things can still lead a train!
I thought that these shots would have a bad bokeh, because I was accidentally shooting in aperture priority mode at, I think, f2.8, because I had just turned the camera on and had no time to get the setting rights. I never shoot in priority mode; so, the fact that the camera was in priority mode was some accident.
I got a Warbonnet leading a train past the Schriever station sign in 2023! The train had two blocks of what appeared to be freshly-coated pipeline pipe. All of the boxcars in the train were the high-cube kind, most were graffitied, one ATW, the rest TBOX and FBOX. There were no railroad-owned cars except for an ATW boxcar and the last car of the train, an empty TR centerbeam car. The train had some LPG tank cars.
It is the second westbound manifest train this morning.
Before I left the depot area, Bill and I had arranged to meet. I need to get gasoline. I got gasoline at Go Bears, but, before that, I got one more shot of the pilings.
I noticed something strange about the Old Schriever Highway, the rendezvous numbers.
Downtown
So, it was time to go and walk downtown.
I have some history here.
I took a walk down and back up St Philip Street.
Had my life gone differently, I might have spent much more time here.
Had I not been betrayed and, then, traumatized by people who should have protected me, I might have spent much more time here.
This isn’t to say that I wanted to have spent more time here.
It’s just so difficult to stay positive given the humiliation that they did to me.
So, I had lunch with my friend.
It was good! I got the plate lunch special, which was shrimp stew plus fried fish plus potato salad.
We had a good conversation.
Teeth
Next, I was on my way to dentist. I drove past what was ETMS and before that ETJH and what was the old THS, or what was left of it, and it was being demolished
I wished that I had not seen that.
I am thinking about EDW football and Metallica and the “Welcome Home” sanitarium song.
There is a new structure on the field at the southern end of the university campus. I do not like it.
Flanagan’s is still Flanagan’s, Wendy’s is still here, the old Rouse’s structure is still there but doesn’t have an apparent use.
Bill and I talked about the traffic problem in this town.
I do miss the Wellness Center.
I saw the T Baker Smith place. Yeah, I remember when I came applied for a job here, and it was not long before I learned that I am autistic. Everything makes sense now.
Why is the road into Acadia Woods closed? This is strange. Thankfully, I don’t need it.
There is the very neoliberal looking park at the dentist office.
I got to the office at 13:22.
So, I need to floss plenty more.
Campus!
I walked on the sacred campus for the first time in nearly five years.
There is that new structure that I dislike.
I have some history here, but not all of it is good.
Still, I am fond of this place, for good reason.
Earlier today, I had another epiphany observation, putting two and two together.
It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve seen some posts on social media about and from Autism-ADHD people that express a feeling of having been robbed of a real childhood, and I have long felt that! That explains why I am always ruminating or even fantasizing about wanting to do things that I am too old to do, simply because I didn’t get to do them. So, it makes perfect sense, and I am realizing just now as I am saying this that this understanding is replacing the sense of regret that previously occupied this space.
One of the many wonderful things about all of the revelations that I have had in recent years is that regret is something that I don’t really feel much anymore, because I am realizing that I either couldn’t have done whatever I regret having not done at all or could have done it only if neurotypical society wasn’t so limiting of us.
Wow! There is now a roundabout right here, west of the Betsy Cheramie Ayo Hall.
The observation that I had today prior to the one that I had during this recording is that this dynamic that I am describing explains another sensation from more than a decade ago of which I had not until recently begun to understand. I remember as I was burning out of being a schoolteacher feeling a sense of jealousy of students going off to college or whatever and also even having families, and it’s like “why can’t I just be happy continuing to be a teacher, especially if I am a good teacher?” Well, I wanted to do other things, and part of that is that it’s a super difficult job for someone who “lives in his head”, but, also, in the subject of what I am discussing, maybe part of it is that I just wanted to experience normal-people things that I had never experienced.
Like, why would I be jealous of those kids? but it makes sense now. It is related to that trauma feeling of being robbed of a childhood, to just want what normal people have. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can get quite unhealthy. So, self awareness helps.
Do other young teachers get jealous at kids doing that? I imagine that most of them don’t, or, if they do, they have a more specific reason for it.
I will walk by the Stud-Pub office, thinking that some folks I know might be there, and I realized that it’s no longer the Stud-Pub office.
Things change.
What you knew isn’t there anymore.
I keep going.
The campus looks different, including here, because those elevated spaces are gone, perhaps due to accessibility issues?
It’s very interesting that, now, that possibility is the first thing that comes to my mind, whereas it wouldn’t have occurred to me before.
I didn’t eat here today.
I have, however, eaten here many times before!
I went to the bookstore.
I thought about buying a hat, but I didn’t do that today. I may do that when I return next week. It’s not that important.
This is the greatest place on Earth.
I will suspend the narration until I get past the next several images.
This has been a great day! I visited with someone whom I had never met but who knew me from the internet, and I visited with some important people from my past who work on campus and who were very welcoming to me! One of them I had not seen in 20 years, and he recognized me right away.
A couple of my English professors are still here!
I was where I took my college art photography class today, in the same building, which would lead to some more thoughts when I was by the track a little bit later.
I then went visit the old family friend.
This has been a great day!
Back At Sacred Schriever
After that visit, I returned to Schriever before dusk, when I had a shadow a hundred feet long and where the LDRR 1847 was parked in the locomotive track.
A westbound BNSF Railway train with a strange power set was making a pickup from the eastern storage track.
It picked up maybe five tank cars, at least some from the Raceland sugar mill and maybe some from Monsanto.
By this time, the centerbeam flatcar closest to the mainline had been completely unloaded, with some of the contents on the ground next to the car, probably not all of them, as I’d imagine some had already been taken away by truck.
The other car was still completely loaded.
The weird power set then shoves what appears to be five tank cars back to the rest of its train.
More than 10 minutes later, a little bit after 17:00, the train finally departed. CSXT 9040, the lead locomotive, put out a hell of a lot of black smoke. NS 2687, an SD70M-2, was the second locomotive. BNSF 9786, a Grinstein Green SD70MAC, was the third. BNSF 8352, offline, an ES44 in an H3 scheme, was the fourth.
I counted 116 cars, the last 10 of which were these new VULX open-top hopper cars, one of them (I think the last one) being VULX 23274.
The act of counting the cars in the train combined with being where my college photography class was earlier today led both to an old unpleasant memory and realization about it as I was standing there by the track. In that college photography class, when I presented an image of a train that I had made, some girls recounted an experience from their childhood. They recounted a story of them living by some place with trains when they were children and counting the cars, and it was as if they made fun of themselves for having counted the cars, for being such children.
I was thinking to myself “uhh, I do that now,” and I was too ashamed to admit it. So, that’s some early autistic masking right there, and it helps to explain why when, three years later, coinciding with my graduation, I discovered the online local world of adult railroad enthusiasts, many of them seemingly well-adjusted people, I felt so validated. Later on, I learned how to turn that “childish” thing onto people who obsess over spectator sports and such things.
So, right there as the train was leaving Schriever this evening, as I was standing right by the track, I had the realization: “Holy crap! I had to make art out of trains to justify my obsession with them.”
What else have I done to justify my obsession with trains? Probably plenty.
At about 17:17, I left Schriever.
This was a great day. Henry Kissinger finally died, and I had the great pleasure of visiting with five persons I know, one of whom I hadn’t seen in two decades and one of whom I knew only on the internet prior to today. It was also emotional, because it was a reminder of what I have lost – what was taken from me by people who supposedly love me.
It was amazing that I could squeeze as many train pictures as I did into this day!
That is all for now.
Merci.
Jbx
