I moved to the cafe car for a little elbow room. The cafe closes in twenty minutes. The only other person here is an old schizophrenic man who loops through the same dialogue of proposing marriage to a woman who isn't here. After a few moments of silence, he pulls up Carly Rae Jensen videos on his phone so he can sing along, happily. Is he really happy? The conductor is kind to him.
It doesn't sound that bad, his scratchy warbling hitting almost the right rhythms, mixing with the music in my own headphones, plus the ever-present lurching of the train. There's no beer worth buying on board.
The network on this train won't issue an IP address to my laptop, so I'm taking a few hours to slam out some shitty Python. We're rolling through Rochester, and I haven't bothered running the numbers on my current progress. Other wireless networks drift by while we pass behind houses and businesses: "Fluffernutter2.4", "big game hunter", "HP-Print-17-Office-Jet Pro 8600"