#brakeman

Ah, this is the sweetest thing anyone could have asked! Okay, I'll go through all of them...

This is Fireman, my partner in crime up in the locomotive cab. She and I have a lot of funny conversations up there when we're on the rails. She's a meme and YTP encyclopedia and she'll quote the old classics for ages. But I really love listening to her talk about some of her favorite topics, like chemistry or world religions, or hearing her delightedly pull something out of nowhere from an old hyperfixation (mountaineering). Then her passion comes out and it's great.

Assistant Conductor is one of the coolest people I have ever met, and she's such a good writer. A lot of people expect her to be really serious because she's really tall and masks the best out of all of us, but she LOVES cute stuff and gets so excited over it. She likes coming up with aesthetic Pokemon teams for her friends and absolutely glows with joy when she shows you all the stuff she's done on her Animal Crossing island.

Brakeman is like a decade younger than the rest of us so we all indulge him like a little sibling. He's always going on excitedly about whatever action movie he most recently watched or the fighting games he's currently playing, and if you ask him to tell you about his dream to fight on top of a moving train he gets ecstatic. (You can also give him dessert. He loves dessert.)

Conductor is almost never not smiling, to be fair, and it's one of the things I love most about him. He's a big goofball. He's passionate about so many things - playing trombone, drawing rubberhose cartoons, cooking, playing video games, railroad history...he just loves life and loves the world and loves existing and learning more and I just think that's so goddamned wonderful. He is an absolute breath of fresh air, and he's so silly and joyful that he helps me be silly again too.

(The others have also said he smiles like that when he talks about me, but...y'know...)

SONG OF THE WEEK: “The Brakeman’s Dead”http://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/track/the-brakemans-dead-early-mix —It was during a live show with The Rover Boys that these chords and lyrics suddenly burst out of my head, each verse beginning with the line “Maybe about this time next year…” I sang whatever flew into my head, with vocabulary from Biblical apocalpyse themes + current events + runaway trains as the Rovers kept up. I did this freeform tune a few more times and it hit with people. So I took it to Tom Mallon’s recording studio in San Francisco (with the late Aaron Gregory at the board), cutting it live without a lyric sheet. I thrashed an acoustic guitar through a stack of Marshalls (ala The Alarm) with Bennett Green and John Stuart on drums (separate sessions), and Adam Savetsky on bass. Later I asked Michael Miller and Chris von Sneidern to add guitar touches in one take John Cage-style without letting them hear what the other guy was doing. Last I sweetened it with percussion (bottles & junk) and violin. On a cosmic jukebox it would play next to Neil Young & Crazy Horse at their most raucous. Download here: http://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/track/the-brakemans-dead-early-mix

Photo by Mark Llanuza

Brakeman signalling for a stop

Griffith, Indiana

March 1975