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When it comes to Honolulu rail, cost overruns create verbiage overruns. 

We need to liberate ourselves from all this rail talk. Enough already.

Rail talk threatens to be part of you for the rest of your life, like the still-throbbing toe you broke playing shirts versus skins basketball in 1979 or the bachelor brother who moved in “for just a couple of weeks.”

Rail verbiage is more than just annoying. It’s misleading. Too much little picture, too little big picture. Lots of details, too little context. Words matter, but they also confuse.

To liberate yourself from rail talk, you need to free yourself from rail. But to liberate ourselves from rail, you need to ride rail. But in a special way and for specific reasons. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Background: The Rail Chase

Projections, rejections, dejections and objections. Change orders and court orders. Eminent domain and eminent people complaining that rail will be too far from or too close to their own domain.

It would fill a stadium if we had one. It would fill our landfill if that wasn’t filled already.

Foreground: Rail Today, Or At Least Last Week

Last week was the train’s grand opening. The keynote speech should have been themed along the lines of lyrics from the John Prine and Iris DeMent song “:”

We pulled it off in spite of ourselves. That’s real for sure. It’s accurate and to the point about the ups as well as the downs. Proud yet humble. 

Best of all, though, the verse is short. Less than 20 words. Bim bam boom!

Instead, the public was treated to celebratory, half-time-pep-talk, bump-smoothing mush. Forget your troubles, come on get happy. 

And all of a sudden, the thousands of people who thought that puppy would never leave its Waipahu kennel are all happy and surprised.

In spite of ourselves.

Fighting Back: The Strategy

So, if you are so sick and tired of rail talk, why should you deal with this by riding the thing?

Because you can’t escape. You are not a celebrity. Celebrities escape the clamor in their lives by going off social media. Bad Bunny is off Instagram.

You have no social media presence to go off of. You’re still using AOL.com.

Harrison Ford has an even better strategy. Go somewhere else. Ford owns a Wyoming ranch where he can get away from Indiana Jones and concentrate on punchin’ cattle and taking potions and lotions that miraculously preserve his rugged handsomeness.

And owning a ranch. Good luck when you can’t even afford a condo.

Riding the train quietly with no purpose and no concern for all the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation verbiage you’ve had to listen to for over a decade is your own wind-breaking protest against all the pro and con rail windbags you’ve endured.

So, you can’t avoid rail talk by running away. Your only choice is to escape rail by embracing it. Make rail your own personal space.

Ride it but ride it alone. Spur of the moment. For no reason, no objective in mind. 

Maybe one time, maybe more. Who cares? You shouldn’t.

As The Buddha would say, live in the Skyline moment. 

Do nothing. Talk to no one. No “how do you like the ride?” For you it’s not really about the ride.

You are not the public. You are you.

Use your heart and head to create solitude. Solitary refinement, like fishing in darkness or bowling alone. It’s why a mother’s best vacation is staying home when the husband and kids go visit grandma and grandpa. “I’ll miss you all. Stay as long as you like.”

How seldom you get to be in your own world! Rail talk is about everyone’s world lumped together, as in “the public” and “ridership projections.” 

A Solitary Ride

Large numbers of people moving efficiently from place to place, getting there because they have to be there. They are on herd time. You are on me time.

Your everyday life is so much about places to be and people to see. Responsibilities, schedules, side jobs, coaching. “ Foodland, Zippys, Longs.”

A solitary, unplanned rail ride is a well-earned oasis from rationality and routine. It’s that Snickers bar that out of nowhere you drop into your family shopping cart and eat in the parking lot before you get home.

It’s also a way to rage against the machine.

In anthropology there’s a story about a peasant turning his back and passing gas as a royal procession goes by. The peasant is too powerless to confront the king directly but wants to show some kind of protest. 

Small-scale resistance, but resistance, nonetheless.

Riding the train quietly with no purpose and no concern for all the verbiage you’ve had to listen to for over a decade is your own wind-breaking protest against all the pro and con rail windbags you’ve endured.

Your un-rail rail ride is a way to peasant-like vent your rage against the machine: the political machine, the rail car machinery sitting idle all those years in their Waipahu quarters like long-term felons at the jail up the highway and the machinations of the planners, futurists, politicians and critics about pros and cons and long-term impacts.

Is this solitary but not lonely ride a temporary relief? Sure is, partner, but life is temporary reliefs. The solitary rail ride may not be a gift horse, but at least it’s not manure. You can’t make the world go away, but you can give it a kick in the pants for a while.

Advice to Harrison Ford: If it turns out that there will be yet another “Indiana Jones” movie, prepare by stunt-driving Dillingham Boulevard.

To get to a business near the Oahu Community Correctional Center a few weeks ago, I maneuvered through orange cone mazes that seemed like they were created by the same process that your server uses to create random passwords. Then I made an illegal turn past a stumpy, rusted temporary stanchion with a “no left turn” sign; parked illicitly in a wholesale grocery lot and walked a block dangerously close to moving cars to get to my destination, which was open though you would never know it unless you used a drone.

I just added to rail talk, didn’t I? Sorry.