Ambient Train Noises as a Writer Writes
Written May 23, 2025, from 8:45-9:00AM CT (give or take 18 seconds)
I am currently on a train to Kansas City right now. I am currently doing a weird exercise. I am taking a video of myself as I am typing for the next 15 minutes on this train. The train is in motion and is crowded, so I am not going to be able to speak and narrate like the other two videos that I have done for this channel. The audio is going to be weird train ambience noises. It’s not really lo-fi at this point, but what can you do.
I guess the reason I wanted to take a video as I write for fifteen minutes is because I am curious about the way my eyes move. How the pupils track the words. As I get distracted by things in physical space (several times already, I have had to look at my phone to make sure that my boarding pass is readily available on my phone). As I get distracted by thought. One of my… friends… I am getting distracted because I have tried to make it a point to start using names instead of places. But it feels to name folks. But we’ll work past that.
So Brooke, recurring mention of this newsletter, played this game with me once. She asked me to look her straight in the eyes and then proceeded to ask questions. I am not sure if you know this, but our eyes instinctively dart in a direction as we ask our brain to do certain things. I can’t tell which direction corresponds to which function. Part of the reason I am doing this exercise of recording myself while typing is to be cognizant of the way my eyes move. I can tell you by the five minutes of writing, at least I think it’s been about five minutes of writing, my recall is to the upper left. Any memory is to the upper left. I am thinking about computation processes (addition, subtraction), and it looks like that is the bottom right. Ironically, I think that is also the direction I get when thinking about the exact interpersonal dynamics between people.
However, this is not an exercise that you can exactly do by yourself. There is an inherent problem trying to observe yourself. Trying to be aware of yourself and document. The dual split experiment except directed inwards. The intrinsic bias of trying to record your own actions knowing that you are being recorded. It’s still worth the endeavor though. It’s interesting how I think in diagonals right now though. Up and left. Down and right. Never up and right. Never down and left.
I feel my neck twitching. The awareness of the body moving. I am aware of my body, specifically my hands, specifically the tactile sensation of touching. So. At least I am aware of my body. At least I have one and it is functioning and while there is a part of me that is playing an AJJ song that I will include in post, but right now I have five minutes to finish my writing exercise in the time allotted to myself.
Right around the end of undergrad, AmTrak announced a Writer Residency. They were going to pay an individual to basically live on a train for a while and write about the experience. It’s a very romantic notion. Being able to write full time while being on a train. Getting to see the continental US via locomotion. There is a part of me that wishes I had applied. I don’t think I was… I didn’t think I was a strong enough writer back then. I might have been. I never applied, so we can’t really say. But I can tell you that… I did love writing. I still love writing.
Hell, I love writing enough that I have invented a whole new reason to write each week because my usual workload wasn’t enough for me and I wanted to be better at it and there are two ways you get better at something. You do it constantly and you do it in ways you haven’t before.
Writing as a roguelike. Writing as bottling lightning. Writing as giving yourself stringent parameters and seeing what happens next. Writing like being next to a window and getting distracted by nature.
There is something romantic about writing. About trying to use an imprecise language to convey a meaning. There is a magic to it. There is something romantic about trains. The slow drawl of an engine going to a place.
So as you read this, I hope the ambient train noises suit the reading of this newsletter. Although you will almost certainly will finish it faster than the fifteen(ish) minutes it took me to write.