trip journal 2

8:28PM, Saturday
my head feels tight, my neck tense, slept for an hour or 2 after the beer. only 60 pgs through Erewhon.

12:35AM, Sunday
more sleep- wandered through the whole of the train- got starred at- the food car is a moving cafe- tired of Butler, on to Rorty- deciding that the Turkish educational system is run by Platonists.-

watched the cutest boy get smacked hard across the face by his baba- i just about to take a picture of him- 4 yrs old but he starred at his father- no hint of tears- the boy instead explained calmly to his father what he had been doing- he had a bottle of orange soda and was dancing with it, entertaining the travelers around him- slapped for insubordination and nothing else.

1:50AM
listening to Of Montreal, "he's just a slutty little flirt...," happy after some Philosophy and Social Hope and hot tea- want to dance in the comfortable aisles of this sleeping train.

4:15AM
Kaseri- we've been through the mountains, Erzincan and Sivas, to Ankara now. K got off here, and so did the Gendarme, the rural army, who rode with us for 2 hrs, pulling through bags, recording ID numbers with a microphone, machine guns slung over their shoulders. my first time for this, but i'm not surprised. i see a machine gun a day in Erzurum and slide through random checkpoints and metal detectors, often with pockets full of change, detectors detecting nothing, or beeping and the guard waving us through.

the irrelevant theatre of power. only slightly more clear in Turkey than in america. they checked none of my bags and these ID numbers, i know through the bureaucratic mess of getting my residence permit, will only be lost and forgotten with millions of others.

the purpose is not detection but the appearance of detection, like taking my shoes off in an american airport, or standing in that ridiculous air-puffer room- the purpose is not to find anything, like i would put something in the sole of my shoe i couldn't put in my pocket, but for me to bow to the theatre of power by inconveniencing myself, disrupting my travel, as if i'm admitting in my silence that yes, you should be doing this, you have every right to, sir, for my protection, i bow to you, happily look at my shoe, take my number, disrupt the order of my clothes, anything else? let's make sure we take every precaution.

halfway through my trip.

6:14AM
i wake up to a vivid, alien scenery, but can't turn the god-damned flash off my camera. i will disable it manually if forced to- i hate, passionately, hate flash- didn't Sony imagine a situation in which one wanted to capture a beautiful scene through a window? what the fuck.



9:08AM
the car is the quietest it has been- folks sprawled out, mouths agape, in all sorts of interesting forms- impossible for me to get more than 2 hrs sleep at a time-

7:50PM
sitting in the restaurant car, this moving, mostly empty cafe- sitting alone, reading, Raki, french fries. i think that is the Marmara sea outside my window, bridges lit up. 2 hrs from Istanbul.