9:02 a.m. It’s Friday, October 18. I’m currently on an Amtrak train from 8:45 a.m. to 3:38 p.m. The train was 15 minutes late, so who really knows when we’ll come in. I’ve taken a lot of Amtrak trains in the three-and-a-quarter years that I’ve been in college, and this will be one of the last ones, and I think it’s good to write this article now rather than on the actual last train ride, lest I begin weeping all over my laptop on an Amtrak train.
Also, it’s my 21st birthday. I really like having birthdays. I don’t understand people that don’t. I think people should make the most of theirs. I think that if you can set up your birthday thus that you are not beholden to anybody, that’s the way to do it. I think people should just bend to your will on your birthday. You should start every conversation with a stranger on your birthday with “It’s my birthday” and then go from there. Could be fruitful.
Clearly I did not set up my birthday this year thus that I was not beholden to anybody. I was beholden to Amtrak today. I would have gone home many days earlier but I stayed on campus to work a day on the Netflix show that was filming on campus. This entailed yelling stuff like “we’re rolling!” and “cut!” to no one in particular on the perimeter of the set and then creeping ominously close to Steve Carrell when we weren’t filming. I got within five feet.
9:28 a.m. The kid that’s kitty-corner to me has the first paragraph of a college essay on the right side of his screen and ChatGPT on the left. The guy sitting next to me by the window looks like he could be my older brother. Whenever I pick a seat on an Amtrak train, I tend to pick someone who looks vaguely like me, like some sort of train alter ego, or, at minimum, I pick someone who is a thin man that’s leaving soon. I imagine people pick me for the same reasons.
Did you know Amtrak’s have seats facing rearward now? I foolishly planted myself in one of those seats. I don’t get much motion sickness at this point in my life, but riding in this seat just feels like being on that one part of a roller coaster ride where they try to get clever and send you backwards. For six hours. Picking a seat on an Amtrak train now is like picking between standard and shenanigans mode. On the Amtrak subreddit, all of the Amtrak enthusiasts are complaining about it. All 50,000 of them.
9:43 a.m. Every time I have ever been on an Amtrak train, they close the cafe cart at the worst possible time. Just as I’m feeling ready to get food, they’re just like, “Okay, smoke break. Find your own food, dawg.” A lot of times there’s no warning. It just closes and then I’m mad for an hour. This day was particularly tragic because I had just a single piece of sourdough bread for breakfast that I hastily shoved in my pocket that morning and then ate on the train platform.
I’ve had some weird meals on train days. The first Amtrak train I ever rode in, which was during COVID times, I was really confused about whether or not I was allowed to eat at my seat because of the whole mask thing, so I ended up just eating two burritos in the bathroom. Adequate lunch.
10:25 a.m. Amtrak’s kinda weird, huh? Did you know that all the passenger train companies in the 70s went bankrupt so the government had to create Amtrak? Amtrak is technically for-profit, by which I mean they lost 757 million dollars last year and 869 million dollars the year before that. They’re for-profit but it really seems like they are against-profit right now.
11:01 a.m. Alright, the cafe cart is back open. On my way back, I pass a couple that is wearing a couple’s hoodie with two arms and two neck holes. As I double-take, a woman sitting behind them loudly asks me, out of misplaced kindness, “DO YOU WANT TO SIT HERE?” and I said, “No, but thanks?” I never talk to anybody on an Amtrak train unless I have to, let alone offer someone a seat unprompted. Why would you ever do either of those things unless you were incredibly lonely? I felt sorry for that woman, I really did.
At the cafe cart I got my standard: A small bag of Doritos, a microwaved cheeseburger and a Sandy’s cookie. I always buy this specific cookie when I ride an Amtrak train. It’s 400 calories and I’ve only ever seen it on an Amtrak or at summer camp but it’s really good.
They have a lot of alcoholic drinks on the menu, which has always felt bizarre to me, some vestige of when riding a train could be considered a luxury. I mean, who would want to drink on an Amtrak? What sort of degenerate would wanna do that? Unless maybe the government had restricted them from buying alcohol for 21 years…
12:40 p.m. They closed the cafe again. I have no words.
2:30 p.m. I’m finally back at the cafe cart. Sat down in a booth, wistfully looking out the window at the passing terrain. I take a sip of my Woodford Reserve Bourbon Whiskey. The sun shines upon me. Real serendipitous and shit. Baller, even.
That’s not what really happened though. What really happened was that I went to the cafe cart, saw that everything was eight dollars and then went right back to my seat. It wouldn’t feel like such a hit if Grammarly hadn’t blindsided me for a year’s subscription that day. This is a reminder to cancel your free trials right now.
Still, I could’ve eaten eight dollars. It would have made for a good fun fact—I’m always looking for those. “I had my first legal drink on an Amtrak train.” Bam. What a vignette. I didn’t though. I just didn’t feel right, like my whole life was just set up for this moment for me to overpay for alcohol on an Amtrak, and everybody would point and laugh at me when I did it, like a big sting operation. So I sat back down. I imagine those big wigs at Amtrak were surely shaking their fists after that, another eight dollars further away from breaking even this year.