The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

I had my first seizure when I was 20.  I have hoped to have my last by the time I turn 30.  I’ve had them in wierd places, like the J-train, zazen practice at the Zen Center, or on the puke-green carpeted floor of a motel in Waynesville, Virginia while my bestfriend/husband, who was suffering from a 24-hour flu, threw up puffed-millet in the bathroom.

Amazingly, one place I’ve never had a seizure is while riding freight trains. The first time I rode a train, as we gained speed and the urban landscape melted into the distance, I felt a calm so intense I felt drugged.  Riding trains is a noisy endeavor, but one that shuns casual conversation or chattering analysis.  The roar of the engine, the rhythym of the rails, and the low whine of the passing crossing guard bells come together in a strange circus-like aura atmosphere. I’ve had auditory hallucinations on trains, of circus music, of speed metal, of electroclash bit data, and I’ve sat quietly listening to them as if I was being played a soundtrack from heaven.

Seizures are hard.   My holy body causing havoc from the overload of hypoglycemia, radio and television at a certain volume, high buzzing, flickering lights, fear. Epilepsy is a disorder of which specialists only understand a fraction.  Perhaps some nuerologists have researched and have theories and optimistic research underway (and I’d bet those neurologists have partners who have woken up seizuring in bed, or bitten their tongue during a pre-seizure aura, or endured hapless misunderstanding).   I’ve been told that the cause of my seizures may never be known, but knowing my triggers, I try to avoid them.

Which is why I originally worried about riding freight trains.  I thought that the stimulus, the temperature fluctuation and the noise might keep me awake and agitated, thus creating the perfect environs for seizures.  But a former lover who took me on my first long-distance trip told me that she would pull the e-brake on the train to stop it, and that we’d sleep as much as we could through all of the noise.  Though I’d been on short trips, I was slack-jawed with amazement at how good it felt to sit silently for hours on end, our legs hanging out of an open boxcar while grain fields and cattleland flashed past us.  A secret world of backyards, grain elevators, a french fry factory in which we woke up inside while huddled in the cubbyhole of a Canadian grainer.  With no possibility to exchange words with the person next to me, the externalities faded away, and we simply gazed at beauty before us.

Communication on trains is interesting. There are long periods of enforced non-talking in the roar of the train, where we communicate with gestures (placing a spoon near one’s mouth with a suggestive and questioning expression, or pointing at the landscape and then miming a book to tell someone that you want to read the railroad atlas). Sometimes urgent messages are scrawled on pages torn from Jeanette Winterson books ("Are we close to K-Falls?") and sometimes everyone starts laughing for no particular reason, and we roll around on the floor of the boxcar with blackened faces of joy.

But once the train reaches a siding, the engine powers down, and as the train comes to a stop, the brakes squeal and howl and then are finally quiet.  Sidings can be in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where train tracks bisect large tracts of land and one’s ears strain to hear anything else besides the wind rattling the opposing boxcar door.  Sometimes one hears crickets chirping, a rancher’s ATV in the distance,  the whistle of the opposing train flying down the tracks.  Admist this particularized silence, travelling companions share minute details of the past time period of silence. Thoughts, jokes, hypotheses on where the train is going, "did you see that billboard that said Marraige Before the Carraige?", analysis on how much time everyone has to hop off and take a shit before the train starts moving again.  Once the brakes air up again, the silence once again takes its holy mantle, and we are helpless to the pull of the rails.

The first long-distance trip I went on hooked me. I was certain I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the rails. I could just keep switching from train to train, yard to yard. I’d be brave and dangerous, I thought. But I knew even while I was thinking that that I wasn’t necessarily being brave. I was loathing going back to my life, going back to the endless questioning, the endless consensus process meetings, the endless nausea. I saw my life like it was an Orwellian dream-sequence that sets the stage for some Paris ‘68-style revolt — and I wanted out.

The silence was good. Clearing the chatter was good. I didn’t have any seizures the first long distance trip I went on. But upon return from that trip, I had almost daily seizures for about 3 weeks straight. Partly allergies, partly lack of sleep, yes. But partly a purgative? Partly my body’s cleansing out of all the garbage that had accumlated, that was deemed no longer necessary when I realized that I could sit in silence (that was at the same time very noisy) rather than fill the vaccuum with so much daily chatter and observational high-IQ non sequiturs?

I had failed at Zen meditation. I was better at yoga. I was excellent at sitting quietly while riding trains.   I still don’t know what relationship these things have with my seizures, and then how the idea of silence fits in with that. Sometimes the silence triggers the seizures, but often it repairs them.

So I am trying to countdown to 30. November 10 will be the 10-year anniversary of the first seizure. My 30th birthday is November 9.   I have done pretty well in the past few years, being quieter, knowing my own body more, avoiding triggers, being more sane.  But I’m mesmerized by the beauty I’ve seen from the innards of a freight train, and so I’m trying to cultivate this silence within the capacphony.  This will sustain me.