Fort Worth Stories No. 1

(Image from Google Maps.)

Honestly I have no idea if anyone who reads this blog cares about where the host of Self Help Radio lives or what he does or anything about his life - hell, even about the show! - but in case someone does, here's the first of some stories about living in the city known as "Cowtown" & also "Dallas' Sullen Younger Brother."

My family is living in a small house in a cool section of town that, I discovered as movers were carrying boxes of our things into the house the evening we arrived, is near a massive railyard.  It is in fact the Union Pacific Davidson Yard, & it's just south of us.  You can see it on the map above, where an inch is about a thousand feet (once you click on the image).  Not only that!  Look!  Someone filmed it for YouTube!



While you can hear a lot of noises in that video - including air on the microphone, train bells, & someone making a farty sound - one thing you can't hear is the one sound I hear all the damn time.  It is the sound of trains braking.  It's a constant sound - I can hear it in the quiet of this house as I am typing this - a constant, eerie noise that would give Brian Eno an erection & would make John Carpenter incorporate it into one of his soundtracks.

Everyone tells me that, living here, one learns to ignore it - it becomes the background to one's life here - but every new train braking - would someone give them some oil or something to maybe make their stoppings smoother? - is like a new slow scratch down the chalkboard of this environment.  It's not in itself unpleasant - it's just a more drawn-out sound than the shorter, more immediate sound of a car screeching to a halt - but it is uncommonly creepy in its unpredictable length, in the volume one whine differs from another.  Were Franz Kafka renting a room around here, he would have written a story that began, "Josef K woke that morning, as usual, to the sound of trains slowing on their tracks with a ghostlike cry.  But today was the day he truly listened to it."

In the right conditions, that uncanny scraping sound could be the background music to an unsettling David Lynch scene.  & oh shit!  It's the sort of thing that sets off the presumed normal Stephen King character!  Eventually no one hears it - but the protagonist.  Does it turn her into a killer, or is it affecting everyone else subconsciously?  I don't know!

We've lived here almost three weeks now & that noise sings slow, monotonous lullabies to me as I fall asleep, & that noise occasionally wakes me in the middle of the night.  Worse, that noise follows me into my dreams - recently I dreamt there was a person learning how to play a weird pipe-like instrument, & the noise coming out was...  Trains squealing to a halt just a few hundred yards away from me.

But don't worry!  I am not tortured by it.  I am just aware of the possibility of being tortured by it.  I am sufficiently convinced that I'm not trapped in a Stephen King story or a David Lynch film.  & we are looking for homes in other neighborhoods than this.

However.  The longer I live here...  Who knows when I will start hearing voices in that ubiquitous disquiet?