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The Great American Adventures of Modern Big City Railroading
The Great American Adventures of Modern Big City Railroading
Category:
Travel
Publisher: Outskirts Press, Inc.
ISBN-10: 1478726539
Type: Fiction
Pages: 66
Copyright: Jan 31, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781478726531
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
This is more than a train ride through the big city. Welcome to a theatrical thrill ride of a lifetime!
Recently unemployed and down on his luck, a despondent journalist unexpectedly finds himself invited to an eccentric big city transit exhibit, where he is taken on a theatrical thrill ride that changes his life forever. Joined by his best friend and the new object of his affections, the journalist narrator gains a new perspective of life on the big city railroad via carnival hucksters, railcars that ride on the road, whimsical theatrical characters and performances and, of course, the wily and kooky ringleader himself: Circus Larry! This is not just a story about public transportation, but an adventure through the big city. Apprising the good and bad of the public transit riding experience, The Great American Adventures of Modern Big City Railroading is a rousing, riveting tale full of fun, thrill and inspiration spun with such vigor and animation that readers will find themselves captivated, knowing they can enjoy the adventure of a lifetime, only a short walk away from home!
Excerpt
It all began at the end of a shitty day.
Earlier this particular day, I became another casualty of this shitbag
economy. Oh yes, I received my daily ritual firing at about 3:00 p.m., just as I was gathering my notes on the downtown parking attendant
story.
Now I could take you through the whole spiel about how much my editor hated me or how passionately he thought my stories sucked. But the truth is that my boss and I simply had a doomed
relationship from the start. You know how those go. Kinda like when a guy and girl get together, and you know they are a match made in hell because he’s an Aries and she’s a Pisces, he likes liver fish and she likes spiced tuna, he prefers vanilla sex and she’s into chocolate sex.
Anyway, the last straw was when I had succeeded in digging up way too much dirt on that local politician who was a hero to all except the few of us who knew about his extracurricular activities. I’m going to spare you all the grimy details about his link to child pornography and money laundering, and the kickbacks he was receiving
from mobbed-up concessions fronting as legitimate franchises. But hey, he was hailed by the masses as a man for the little guy...the VERY little guy.
Now I know what you’re thinking: surely a news editor would be salivating and even masturbating over spicy, sensational news like this, right? Wrong! This and several other news editors were getting a sizable amount of “under the table” money to keep dirt on this greasy politician out of the headlines. So, of course, when I caught... some shit that stunk on camera one fine evening and published it
online without my editor’s permission, it wasn’t too long afterward
that my boss was summarily chewed out and threatened by the livid ranting ravings of the ass-shrouding morally bankrupt.
Not that he actually shared this fact with me as security was showing me the door. Valuable lesson here: the truth can set your ass on fire!
Anyway, it’s not like I could actually prove these editors were being bribed. Too many secondary resources, too much second-hand information.
I decided to ride the city rail home, which I don’t usually do. All I wanted to do was sit alone and flip through some notes I took for stories I might have submitted. So much for a tranquil ride home. First there was some idiot singing tunes from his iPhone loud enough for everyone in the railcar to hear. Then after he got off the train,
some lady started having a loud annoying cell phone conversation about a guy friend of hers that was cheating on his girlfriend and sleeping around with the whole neighborhood. For the life of me, I will never understand why people want to share all their personal business with anyone and everyone within hearing distance!
I spent the evening at home trying to pick up the pieces from this absolutely fucked- up day I was having. It turned out that getting fired from that rag was the best thing that ever happened to me. At first I thought perhaps the reason was that I was never really meant to be a journalist. But I retorted straightaway, realizing I came to
such a conclusion too hastily.
Let me explain. You see, every journalist – and I do mean EVERY
journalist – has the one big story that is his, and his alone, to cover.
To collect, to cover, to release to the public. The one story that is the
defining moment of his career. The one story that epitomizes every reason he became a journalist in the first place. Every journalist feels that story in his blood and bones. It starts building up inside of him the very first moment he realizes a journalist is who he truly is. Don’t ask a journalism professor to describe it. Don’t ask a journalist to
explain it. I’m talking about an unadulterated epiphanic revelation
here, not the theories of objectivity and balance in a news story.
I once heard a wise person say that there is a diamond hidden in every trash pile. Well, the story of my lifetime first appeared to me as a message in my junk mail box. I have this habit of giving my junk mail one quick browse before I delete it. You know, just in case my filters are doing their job a little too well.
The reason this particular message caught my attention was because
the name “Circus Larry” was mentioned on the Subject line. This was not the first time I had run across that name. At the time, I had no idea who he was. I did know what I thought: this guy was
either the mascot for some silly advertising campaign or the ringleader
of a demented freak show.
But we journalists are blessed – or cursed, depending on the situation – with the impulse to dig whenever our curiosity gets the best of us. Well, that and I had nothing better to do.
So click I did. The electronic postcard message read “Circus Larry presents: Life on the RAILRoad!” The e-postcard featured an animated red, white, and blue clown holding a wand, riding atop a
jolly train. The clown was wearing a shirt that read “Great American
Railroad.”
"Okay," I thought, "exactly what in the hell is this supposed to be? A clown’s presentation of a city railroad exhibit?" I don’t know why, but something inside filled me with avidity to attend this event. I’m not sure what was pulling at me with greater force -- the desire to discover once and for all who Circus Larry was, or the fact that the address of this event was a mansion thirty miles from this city. Not an assembly hall. Not a hotel. Or convention center. Or corporate
office. Or even a community center.
But something inside sure told me I had to attend. I had no idea this five-hour soiree was going to be the beginning of the rest of my
life!
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