# Moving Stations _(Howell Creek Radio address for March 23, 2013 -- )_ Started my new job this week. Early in the mornings, after the coffee and granola were down the hatch, I went upstairs to kiss Trixie goodbye, pulled on a hoodie over my dress shirt, then my grey down jacket with four snapping front pockets. A red scarf, dark brown cap with ear flaps, and my brown leather shoes with no laces, and I stepped outside, where it was windy, and clear, and 3° F, and the sun had been up for just about an hour. I slung the strap of my brown leather bag over my shoulder and set out at a light trot down the avenue towards the bridge over the freeway. Starting Monday, that's my waking walking -- pounding the pavement at March o'clock in the morning, along the way giving gloved fist-bumps to the trees and brick walls: a nod across the outside school hall from one creature fixed in space to another fixed in time's race on a trail-run pace from eight to five through a tunnel, an iron grate, a crowded hive. You may imagine I wasn't running light and lithe, not with all the layers and the bag. Especially not with the bag. * * * What's in this bag anyway? It's heavy. I opened it up just now and looked inside. No laptops, no chargers. There are some pens and a few loose papers, but not too many, and my Kindle. It must be all those notebooks. I've got a brown hardcover blank book for writing ideas for my book. I've got a large graph paper notebook with a cardboard-cover that a lot of these podcasts go into, and another one just like it for work notes, and then there's a thin 5"x8" blank notebook with a red leather cover for free-form ideas and essays, a pocket-sized hardcover commonplace book a couple hundred pages thick, and finally there's also my AlphaSmart Neo, which is basically a keyboard with a small LCD screen, 512 kilobytes of memory and a USB port, which I got used on eBay. My typewriter is too big to fit, and I worry about not having it sometimes, even though I haven't used it in about a year. What if I need to write something that requires punchiness? Realistically, I won't touch a single one of these during the work day. My bag would be half as heavy without them. Perhaps, during my morning commute/run, my strides would look a little less heavy-hoofed and a bit more swift; less Gimli, more Legolas. But I can't leave them home. That would be the day I get stuck somewhere and have an hour to write, and I'll have to use napkins and receipts again. Over my coffee and granola one of these mornings, I read this quote jammed in the middle of a news article, just like I'm going to jam it in here. > "The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself." Chuck Close said that, and if I could have the liberty of rewriting it, I'd remove the definite articles at the end. All the best ideas come -- not out of "the" process or out of "the" work itself -- but out _of process_, out of _work itself_. We're like outboard motors, we need to be in the water spinning against something in order to get anywhere. * * * ## Prototype I'm inside the corner bakery as I write, looking out over a train station, which is descended in time from the train station where we met five years earlier. You never really visit the same place twice. A simple person would say the place has changed -- it hasn't, it is exactly the same, the difference is that you have moved. You are like an eagle who circles over the same place, and with each loop you get higher and further away, even though you're hovering above the same spot. The place hasn't changed; you're just further away from the place you remember. The train station moving before me now like a motion picture, is of course a very different one from the one where we met, but it still bears a family resemblance. This is how you know (even though you're still quite young) what it's like to meet the granddaughter of a friend who died long ago. You almost recognize the girl you knew, in the face, in the trick of speech -- it's like meeting someone who's grown older, only in reverse; perhaps your old friend is in fact hiding behind that face, smiling at you and waiting for you to get the joke. It isn't until your reason reasserts itself, and recalls the facts, that you decide: it cannot be the same person. But you still hope that perhaps this child will at least extend you a friendship by default in honor of the one you shared with her ancestor. So it is with the train station when you go back five years later. The place itself owes you _something_. This is easier to believe the more the current scene resembles the old one. Do you know why we feel at rest in nature -- in forests, on mountains, at sea? Because we feel we have done the impossible, that we have descended back down through the clouds and reached the ground again, that the scene around us is the original, the clean base from which all else developed. "Before they built West Broadway and the gas station and the mini mall, this is what it looked like." Someday our descendants will sit in the only remaining gas station, operated by a historical society and staffed with period actors, and feel as though they have got to the bottom of things, back when there were still gas stations. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek radio. I'm Joel Dueck. The last section of this week's address is one of the newly-released chapters, titled "Prototype", from my book _Noise of Creation_. Download it for your Kindle or Nook, or as a printable PDF, at leanpub.com/noiseofcreation (there'll be a link on the website as well). The latest release of the book, which came out last Sunday, has a very attractive and meaningful new cover, which I absolutely am not relying solely upon to inspire me through the rest of the book's one thousand short chapters. There are notes for this episode on the website at , including links to the art of Chuck Close, which you will likely recognize, information on my Alphasmart Neo writing gizmo, and music for this episode. You'll notice our website and cover art is still a winter-themed picture; the snow has yet to melt where I live, so until it does, the winter cover art stays. If you're getting tired of looking at it -- well, now you know what March is like in Minnesota. If you're an iTunes listener, _be sure_ to leave a review or a rating in the iTunes store, and the gods will smile on you. The text of this podcast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Synopsis ------------ Radio address for March 23, 2013. Running to work in the morning with a heavy bag on your shoulder, and stopping by the train station. The ending section is one of the new chapters from the third and latest release of my book [_Noise of Creation_][nocb], which came out last Sunday. You can also [read the notes for this release](http://jdueck.net/article/notes-to-the-third-release) on my website, or in the appendix at the back of the book itself. Mention is made of [Chuck Close](http://www.pacegallery.com/artists/80/chuck-close), who is known for his large-scale portraits. Mention is also made of my [Alphasmart Neo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart) writing machine. I like writing by hand, but the only weakness is that you have to re-type it into a computer if you're ever going to use it. I thought about buying an iPad for focused writing, but finally found that a used Alphasmart would do everything I needed it to at a much lower price, and offer fewer distractions. They have a few on Amazon, but [eBay][eban] seems to have better selection and prices at this time. Music for this episode is [_Empty_][erm] by Ray LaMontagne, [_Thursgood_][tgai] from _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_, and [_Cold Out There_][cotjh] by Jon Hopkins. [nocb]: http://leanpub.com/noiseofcreation [eban]: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Typewriters-Word-Processors-/25326/i.html?_pppn=r1&_dcat=25326&Brand=Alphasmart&Product%2520Type=Word%2520Processors "Alphasmart word processors on eBay" [erm]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00137OI34/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00137OI34&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [cotjh]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003O6S53Q/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003O6S53Q&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [tgai]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005ZBY8NE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005ZBY8NE&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20