sleep, railfans, and honest work
Now might be a good time to read The Canary: Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor. I’ve been obsessing over it for weeks, trying to figure out how to summarize why it feels so relevant to my work and my life.
There’s something here about the value of unglamorous work, about stubbornly solving the horrible things we’ve been tolerating because no one has pushed through the friction to think hard about them yet, and about brilliance not mattering unless you really do all the last mile work of getting it used broadly and correctly.
But if you do all that, oh, you might get to actually help someone in a real way.
all of which also makes me think of some of my brother’s projects, like the sheer effort he puts in towards making the city fill potholes and install stop signs.
“I really, really like reporting potholes. It’s an odd pastime, sure, but it turns out it’s really empowering and satisfying to be able to make a difference in the cityscape. There are so many maddening problems that seem unsolvable in a city this big — but somehow, miraculously, potholes are low-hanging fruit.” - Josh
Nerdsniped by guerilla civil service. Over decades. It gives me life, how he fucking keeps on at it
Probably I’m not the only one struggling to fall asleep lately?, so here’s how to get better at it. Pardon my [highly relevant] incoherence.
I rely on the trick where you pick a word, and then for each letter, one at a time pick 5 words starting with that letter and try to really truly visualize its referent as clearly as possible. I don’t get very far before this knocks me out. (Slightly more detailed explanation of this approach.)
Turns out this is classic self-directed serial diverse imagining - a form of the Cognitive Shuffle developed by Dr. Luc Beaudoin. The basic idea is that trying to think coherently interferes with falling asleep, while thinking incoherently actively helps with sleep, as does doing something mentally strenuous. So to fall asleep more easily, we should do some strenuous incoherent thinking!
“incoherent mentation is not only correlated with falling asleep, it is somnolent… Incoherent mentation is a signal to subcortical regions to continue the transition into sleep, i.e.,. that management processes are no longer managing concerns and making sense, they are in shutdown mode.” - Dr. Luc Beaudoin, "The possibility of super-somnolent mentation"
I go for OG cognitive shuffling myself, but here are some variations I’ve come across:
“The best one I've learned is called mental scrabble. For each letter of the alphabet pick 2 completely unrelated words. I never make it passed J before falling asleep” - poopycakes
“The way I do it is to listen for my heartbeat. I pick a letter of the alphabet, and every eight beats of my heart, I think of a word starting with that letter.” - MrVisible
“Go through the alphabet thinking of a one-syllable word beginning with each letter. Then do 2-syllable words, then 3-syllable words. You probably won't stay awake long enough to get to 4 syllables. It's okay to skip X.” - Redstart
This whole thread has a bunch of other soothing ideas, including:
for the railfans: “I imagine taking public transportation in a new city, and what stuff looks like or is made of… Do the stations have stairs, elevators, escalators (and what do they look like? are they working or non-working)? What is the seat arrangement in the train? Are the seats plastic or metal or...? Where are the poles/handrails located? Is the fare card a swipe card or proximity card? What's the currency look like and how do I buy one? How do the fare gates open and what do they look like? Do I need my card to get out at the end of the trip? Where is the map in the train car and what does it look like? Do the lines have names? colors? numbers? What's the flooring material of the station and train car? Are there dings or beeps to announce stations? What's the signage like? etc.” - NikitaNikita
“I imagine that I'm from an planet that is tidally locked to it's sun so that the sun never sets on the inhabited side. In order to sleep the citizens have come up with an elegant solution: beds are in fact a comfy, compact, hydrogen-fuelled spacecraft, with a glass roof, whisking them off to sleep.
The bedtime routine is as fixed as ours - there are tiny preparation rituals in the house, brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, nearly passing out drunk whatever, until you get into bed and pull up the covers. At that point the bed's glass roof descends gently down, effectively tucking in the sheets as the unit rises slowly. A hatch opens in the wall; smoothly, smoothly does it, and the bed capsule ('bedsule'?) is neatly ejected outwards, carrying me super fast and silent over to the dark side of the planet. It slows as the sun dips under the horizon, and moves in slow elegant circles for as long as I wish to sleep.
I imagine watching the sky darken as I'm warm and tucked up, looking through the glass at distant, gorgeous star clusters under increasingly heavy lids. Maybe other capsules are drifting dreamily by, and we're each rocked to sleep by the humming motion. I can slumber as long as I like because dawn won't be triggered til I start to stir - at which point I'll be zipped back home, to emerge fully refreshed. But for now there's just happy, sleepy me, safe and undisturbed in the enormous, silent cosmos.
Knocks me out every time.” - freya_lamb
Other sleep tricks I’m kinda into but less convinced by:
There’s the military sleep technique where you clear your mind and then imagine lying on your back floating in a canoe or something, but that one never worked for me. Probably because of step 1, for reasons that should be abundantly clear to you by now.
I know one 5yo who sometimes likes to fall asleep by talking to herself about the Ring of Fire, but it would blow my mind if that worked for anyone else.
And then there’s Joan Didion. Joan Didion is obsessed with waterways, and thinks about them to fall asleep:
“The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Gun Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand - the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before - and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.” - Joan Didion, Holy Water (from The White Album)
We should follow up on waterways sometime, there are so many interesting threads to pull on (streams to paddle down?) there
Speaking of railfans, the Ologies episode on Ferroequinology is a real banger.
“Virtual Railfan brings the trains to you from all over the globe. Our network offers over 100 cams so there’s always a train coming.” And “VRF.tv is a streaming platform for everything trains”!
RR is a railfan film (which I haven’t seen), but RRR is a really spectacular (albeit somewhat problematic) Tollywood political bromance that I absolutely loved
oh and Mussolini did not in fact make the trains run on time. But the absolutely fascinating Odd Lots episode on How Ukraine Delivers the Mail During Wartime discusses how Ukrposhta switched to getting mail out of the country via rail when there were no flights leaving Ukraine due to the war.
btw if you’re gonna be in town, the New York Transit Museum will be holding a Train Trivia event on December 12
This got too long, so you’re spared my latest collection of frog facts &c for now. There are so many things I want to tell you about so many things!