Down & Outbound: The Hub

End of the Line

This is the final posting to the Down & Outbound blog.  For you few,  the very few subscriber/friends you won't notice much change in the volume of your inbox since I've only been averaging a posting a month (for over four years).  There are several reasons to end it permanently:

-- Because I haven't been working in Midtown Atlanta since the summer of 2019, I stopped riding public transportation in Atlanta. My two hour daily commute roundtrip consistently provided mass transit anecdotes mixed with grumblings about what it is like being a brave pedestrian in metro Atlanta. With all this grist and frustration being removed from my life, it left me with less to write/complain about.

-- Though I still believe in the importance of public transportation especially in the way it helps the environment, I think the Pandemic has pushed the public transportation issue down into the weeds for the foreseeable future. Ranting about scooters well, . . . seems kind of trivial at this point.

-- Overall, I am uninspired about metro Atlanta's future plans about transportation. Has even one additional mile of rail service anywhere been added in the decade while I was a commuter? In contrast, colossal interchanges, an express lane for automobiles on I-75 and more "studies" have dominated the budgets. 

Archive of Popular Posts

The site will stay up in case you want to order a Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire  book or the gorgeously printed  D & O Thanks for Not Running Me Over Poster. The book is still for sale at Amazon, Alibris and on my own virtual popup book shop Destination: Books   The site will also continue be the archive where you can also revisit some of its "more popular" postings, such as:

-- May 1, 2020.  "We've All Experienced This Look on the Subway." Why Dr. Deborah Birx's  reaction to Trump's suggestion that we should try injecting ourselves with bleach looks so familiar to commuters.

-- February 6, 2020. "Sixteen Metric Tons: A Climate Parody".  A song about air pollution.

-- October 30, 2019 and November 13, 2019. European Transportation Options Parts 1 and 2.  A pictorial account of public transportation in Venice, Berlin, Prague and Treviso Italy. 

-- The MARTA Book Club.  A series of postings on what people read while on Atlanta public transportation. These live on my companion blog about books (which still marches on.)

And thanks for reading the blog!

Train Logistics and Coincidences

By coincidence last week, I stumbled on to a movie and a book where trains play a prominent role in the storyline. They even share an educational component:

Wim Wenders, The American Friend.  Wenders directed this 1977 German-French film starring Dennis Hopper and a young Bruno Ganz the late, great actor who portrayed Adolf Hitler in “Downfall”, but is currently well known for all those Hitler memes.

"The American Friend" is set in Hamburg and Paris, and Ganz plays a dying man who is recruited indirectly by Hopper to be an assassin. Ganz carries out his first assignment in the Paris subway system and then with assistance from Hopper, he tosses a couple of men off the train while traveling from Munich to Hamburg. Later after the deed, Hopper poses a math problem to Ganz over beers, “If you throw a gangster out of train going eighty miles an hour, and then you throw a second one, (and you know the distance between the two discarded bodies), how much time passes between the two events if the train doesn’t change speeds?”

W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. The German-born Sebald (1994-2001) is one of my favorite writers over the past few years. Sebald often includes trains and train stations in his narratives. Black and white photographs – like they came out of an old family album – are always part of a Sebald book.  One of the chapters  entitled “Paul Bereyter” is about a retired schoolteacher who ends his life on a December night in 1984 by laying down on a curve of the railroad track. (Shown here)

The narrator is one of Bereyter’s students and he recalls how much “railways had always meant a great deal to him (Bereyter) – perhaps he felt they (railways) were headed for death. Timetables and directories, all the logistics of railways, had at times become an obsession with him…I thought of the stations, tracks, goods, depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often drawn on the blackboard and which we  had to copy into our exercise books as carefully as we could.”

Readers of Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire can appreciate how these two works might have appealed to me.  The main character of D & O works in “mass transit counter-intelligence” and writes in the form of a “personal journal of case narratives which he hopes to eventually turn into a television script.”  However, the similarities end there, as I am no Wim Wenders or W.G. Sebald. The last sentence sounds like a possible book blurb.

Remembering the Dream Team

Inspired by the recent ESPN series "The Last Dance" about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty, this posting is an excerpt from the 2016 book Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (available online only from Destination: Books or Amazon). The map shows the fictitious Atlantis City Transit System known as ALACARTA, which stands for the Always Lovely Atlantis City Area Rapid Transit Authority*.   

The North-South Dream Line

The stations on the north-south line (aka The Dream Line) had originally been named for the neighborhoods where they were located, but were renamed by the Atlantis City Council to honor the 1992 Olympic Dream Team that won the gold medal in basketball and restored pride to our hoops-loving nation. Led by the NBA stars Michael Jordan and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the team featured 11 players who would later become members of the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. It is no coincidence that the Stockton and Malone stations and the Pippin and Air Jordan stations are adjacent to each other, just as John Stockton and Karl Malone played side-by-side for the Utah Jazz and Scottie Pippen played with Jordan for years on the Chicago Bulls. The Dream Team re-established America's supremacy in basketball, which had previously suffered setbacks in international competition. Just outside the city’s perimeter (defined by the eight lanes of interstate that loop the city) there is Laettner station, a large bus stop disconnected from the rail line—named after Christian Laettner, the only college player on the Dream Team and the only team member not to be elected to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. To make the buses connecting the Dream Line stations easier to remember, the route numbers correspond to each player's uniform number.

The East-West Cross Line

The Stations of the Cross Line, or Cross Line for short, runs east to west. As if repenting for renaming city neighborhoods for basketball players, the Atlantis City Economic Task Force suggested capitalizing on the nation's growing interest in religion by creating a Christian-themed line to stimulate the city’s tourism industry. Unfortunately, neither this nor the additional activities devised to stir up interest, such as the creation of religious festivals, and press releases about miracles, brought tourism dollars to the city coffers. Maybe the names were too focused on Easter. Eventually, the lengthy names of the original stations such as Garden of Gethsemane or Pontius Pilate were simplified to address this issue. Besides who would want to live near Judas Station? Kiss & Ride was much more palatable to the locals.

 

*Any resemblance to Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority is mere coincidence. For more about the book, see the trailer video at http://bit.ly/2hgCOtO

 

MARTA Army

The MARTA Army is an independent grassroots action group, committed to enhancing the ridership experience on public transit in Metro Atlanta.  Since the MARTA Army recently solicited suggestions for their book club, may I recommend Down and Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire? 

Even though a satire based on the public transportation experience seems at odds with an organization that -- for the lack of a better word -- cheerleads public transportation in Atlanta, I disagree. The underlying nature of satire is optimism. Unlike comedy which accepts flaws, satire expects better or believes things could be better (optimism). Both MARTA Army and D & O share the same goal that better mass transit is vital for our community, but our approaches are different. The MARTA Army does good works like improving bus stops, D & O takes a more "See Something" and "Say Something" approach to identify problems.

In the likely event that you soldiers of the MARTA Army have arrived here looking for something to read, I hope you will proceed to the Down & Outbound Store. Never underestimate the power of unorthodox alliances.

 

 

 

My Last Month on MARTA: Inspiring Art

How do you factor inspiration's role when writing a blog, publishing a book, or posting little photo essays about a experience that is as ordinary as going to work each day? Over this past decade of commuting, these activities have been part of my Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) experience. Writing and creating has been a coping mechanism for the frustration of the experience, but it also has been a positive shared communal activity with many of my fellow Atlantans, unlike attending a stadium-sized sporting event (an artificial sense of community).

From those daily commutes, I did begin to appreciate that there are plots, characters and themes, and these snowballed into what became Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire. Once I finished writing the book, I had some closure, resigning myself that MARTA “is, what it is” and as the saying goes --- “it” usually isn’t very good. Satires really are the work of optimists as they point out the fallacies in hopes of things will be better. Imagine my disappointment.

Down & Outbound will be making one its rare public appearances at the Georgia Book and Paper Fair at the Decatur Book Festival. I will be working at the Destination Books pop-up book stall all day Saturday, August 31st and Sunday, September 1st. (Details here)  Stop by and we can discuss this further. Perhaps you can buy a book (any book), and may be you can apply to be the next president of the MARTA Book Club.

 

 

Down & Outbound at Book Festival

In  a rare public appearance, discounted copies of my book Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire will be available for perusing and sale at the Root City booth #528 at the Decatur Book Festival being held September 2nd and 3rd.  This is your opportunity to experience  a book about the absurdities of public transportation, which has been specifically designed for those who ride buses and subway trains. (You can read it with one hand. See video below.)  At the booth, which will also have cards, notebooks and other writerly accessories, you can experience how Down & Outbound's soft plastic comb massages the tender spot between your thumb and index finger while you read. This book tickles.

"Will the reclusive D & O author be available?" you ask.

Only late Sunday afternoon at the Baptist Church venue, but not as an author but as a Festival volunteer during the Ernie Johnson appearance. Maybe I can get the famed sportscaster to hold my book. Hmmm. Good idea.