Trains and automobiles (but no planes, sadly)

I'm back! Sort of. My computer is now even deader than it was before, so I'm writing this from my grandfather's computer in sunny (actually not so much right now) Morristown, NJ. I took the lovely 12 hour train ride from Montreal yesterday. Twelve hours is a long time to spend in any one place, let alone a rather cramped train seat. Given that my last trip was nearly unbearable even given the presence of several good friends of mine to help pass the time, I was dreading it.

I ended up, however, having a better time of it than I expected, due to a) my having gotten three hours of sleep the previous night and b) my making a new friend.

"a" can be explained by the fact that I had a show with my band Tuesday night, and that our bassist is leaving town for a month. We had to give him a good send-off, of course, and even though I knew I had to wake up at 7:30 a.m. (at the latest) Wednesday morning, at a certain point it became so late I knew I would be getting nothing close to a decent night's sleep--so might as well stay up, right? I was originally planning to stay up with the bass player and some other band folks until 5:30 a.m., when he needed to catch his flight, but I only lasted until about 4:30, leaving me with a whopping three hours of sleep. This meant, of course, I was blissfully passed out for at least three out of those twelve hours. The nyquil I dosed myself with halfway through the trip probably didn't hurt with that either.

As for "b", I happened to sit across the aisle from a very friendly 30-year-old Quebecoise lady named Pascale, who was visiting some friends in NYC she had met in Denmark ten years ago and hadn't seen since. We discussed languages, restaurant work (she's a pastry chef at Stromboli, an Italian place in the Plateau), Quebec culture, and music. The latter became a rather applied conversation after she convinced me to pull out my guitar, and we went to the less populated end of the train car and had a Beatles/Simon and Garfunkel/Johnny Cash/Supertramp singalong. I also managed to sneak in First You Get the Sugar's greatest hits, which impressed her enough that she promised she would bring all of her friends to our next show. She's a huge fan of Django-esque gypsy jazz, and I think she was impressed by the "circus rock" aspect of our sound.

It's amazing how having someone to have conversation with can make what would be a hellish nightmare trapped in a 300-foot tube for 12 hours into a happy time of friendship, fun, and music.

Ouch. That last sentence made my head hurt to write. Time to sign off.