I see where Daily Post editor Bill Hudson has been ranting about Ballot Issue 1A lately.
Seems like, when our editor sinks his teeth into a favorite issue, like a bulldog with a piece of raw meat, the next thing we know, he’s writing “Part Nineteen”.
My dad used to refer to that kind of obsessive behavior as resulting from a “one-track mind”.
“A one-track mind”. I hadn’t really thought about that metaphor, and what it means. I was thinking about other things instead.
That’s a somewhat antiquated metaphor, because my dad wasn’t talking about the “tracks” we have nowadays.
As everyone knows, in the 21st century, a “track” is a particular song on a record album. A record album with “one track” would be ridiculous. It wouldn’t even be a record album. It might be, like, a free download… but it wouldn’t be an album. So obviously, my dad was talking about a different kind of ‘track’. An older type of ‘track’.
When he was young, my dad used to ride a train to and from work, so he understood a bit about train tracks.
This was before the invention of freeways, and the resulting slow demise of passenger trains. But back in my dad’s day, if the railroad had laid down only a single track — for example, from Denver to Castle Rock — then the train engineers had to be pretty careful, if one was going north and the other was going south on the same, one track. You wouldn’t want the train engineer to be distracted — say, downloading a track of music? — when he was supposed to be paying attention to the train track. Luckily, they didn’t have mobile phones back then, and my dad has lived to a ripe old age.
Freeways, on the other hand, don’t have ‘tracks’. And especially, they don’t have ‘one’ track. That doesn’t mean they are more efficient than the old style train tracks. All of the people, in the photo below photo, could have easily fit into a single passenger train, and we’d have a lot less pollution.
And laying down ‘one track’ for a commuter train would have been a fraction of the cost of this freeway.
But we still have the problem of trains crashing into each other, when there’s only ‘one track’.
Which is not to say a freeway is less dangerous than a one-track railroad. Not by a long shot. Last year, there were 893 people killed while riding in trains. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021, and they estimate that 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year.
I’m not trying to be maudlin, although I do find traffic deaths to be a fascinating topic. (Much to my editor’s dismay.) But it’s pretty clear to me that we made the wrong choice when we abandoned railroad tracks and picked freeways instead. (I’m using the term, “we made the wrong choice”, without implying that you, dear reader, were consulted regarding that choice. I wasn’t consulted either. The politicians are the ones to blame. As usual.)
But getting back to the ‘one-track mind’. As you can easily see, I don’t have one. My mind is more like the dangerously congested freeway shown in the photo above. During the few minutes I’ve spent writing this column, I’ve been thinking about a bunch of other things as well.
Did I forget to feed the cat? (He normally tells me.)
Will the Compute North bankruptcy affect the value of my Bitcoin? (No one will tell me.)
How long will Charles last as King? (We all have our suspicions.)
Does America need a King? (It’s not out of the question.)
Would I get more readers to my columns if I wrote more often about romantic situations? (That would be difficult, because romance is something that happens to other people, not me. Not that I’m complaining. Romance can be, technically, more difficult than a corporate bankruptcy. I’m perfectly happy with less romance, even if it means fewer readers.)
I know certain people (without naming any names) for whom “romance” is the “one track” for their minds. They need to watch out for the train heading south.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.