The 12:15 Out Of Mordor

Eerie. Not exactly the word. Close enough.

First just a dim howl, growing in the distance, soon loud enough to wake me from my self-medicated sleep; induced by one and a half times the safe dosage of someone else’s pain prescription along with illicit drugs that are not recreational tonight. It’s the third night of this regimen and last night was the first success. I was able to sleep a few hours, then. This night I was asleep until the eerie howl woke me. I got up and walked out into the grass.

I’m two hundred yards from the main train tracks for the Pacific Coast north-south line over the mountains. The eerie howl increases in decibels as I identify it. Some malfunctioned brake locked on a freight car, just now at its hottest point after the long descent down the grade from the Cascades. Or a disintegrating bearing in a labored diesel engine the size of a small house. Plaintive, incessant, whining. It’s the 12:15 freight run. Tonight it’s the 12:15 out of Mordor.

I am not angry. You’d expect me to be, me who lives on anger nurtured for such a long time that it’s always part of who I try to hide that I am. Sadness, only. Only sadness. The howl gets loud enough to mirror the sound in my heart, … the sound my heart wants me to make. Perfect resonance of what the heart wants to express for three nights now. The 12:15 out of Mordor has awakened me so that I can finally hear it. I would smile my grim anger smile out into the darkness toward the tracks if I was angry, wasn’t so sad. If I was just my normal angry self.

I’m a little dizzy and a little uncoordinated, but I rambled back onto the porch and let the howl take what sadness away from me that it could. There’s a tennis ball out there in the grass.

Darwin would have awakened only momentarily, lifted his head off the foot of the bed enough to hear that the sound came from the train tracks and was just another infernal human thing ranting in the distance. Nothing to worry about. I want to smile at the memory-thought; but the eerie sad howl still echoes. His head would have nestled back down and he’d immediately return to sleep.

Maybe if I quit typing and put my head down, the Vicoden cocktail will let me do that too.

Darwinyarwin. Such a good boy.